Survey & Range

260917: Revolt Against Reason

The late 19th and 20th centuries are host to a series of revolts against Reason (wheretofore, the dominant modernizing & reorganizational strategy of Western life).

Can we name them?

  1. Jane Jacobs' critique of modern urban planning.
  2. James C. Scott's critique of high modernism.
  3. Hayek's critique of centralized economics, and his defense of ecological and decentralized computation.
  4. Wittgenstein's internal demolition of philosophical positivism.
  5. American pragmatists' revolt against Platonism and formalism.
  6. The sociology of science; Thomas Kuhn's paradigm; the messy monkey-means of truth-making.
  7. Social construction and social reality; the self-fulfilling quality of abstraction.
  8. Chesterton's fence, articulating the risks of rationally reforming complex systems.
  9. Complexity science broadly, as established at the Santa Fe Institute.

...And many more, including feminist and post-colonial theory, indigenous ways of knowing, tacit knowledge studies and ethnomethodology, 21st C meta-rationalism...

#friedrich hayek #gk chesterton #james c scott #jane jacobs #ludwig wittgenstein #modernity #pragmatism #reason #reasoning #thomas kuhn