| This dissertation is concerned with the relationship between political knowledge and political action. More specifically, it tries to answer the question, Can political change occur in hierarchical organizations in an experimental fashion such that the demands of science are satisfied along with the desires of a people for freedom, community, and justice? If not, what kind of politics can allow for the greatest use of reason, debate, and evidence in restructuring a context of political and economic life that appears to be doing damage to the people it affects? Since it would be an enormous undertaking to answer these questions in relation to all the contexts of life that somehow are unsatisfactory to us, the dissertation focuses on strategies of change in relation to problems of work.;The core of the dissertation is concerned with the strengths and weaknesses of the political theory of social engineering as it is found in the writings of Karl Popper and John Dewey. As a way of approaching this theory, I first introduce the theme of the entire dissertation, then undertake a definition of the political space. In so doing, I follow Carole Pateman, Peter Bachrach, and others, and expand the notion of the political to include the place of work. This definition of the political involves a critique of the Arendtian/Aristotelian argument that the political is that which is concerned only with action in a certain space of society dedicated to questions of the whole. In chapter 3, I evaluate projects in work reform that have been undertaken in Yugoslavia and Scandinavia. These projects, while provocative, have nevertheless failed to establish the kinds of nonhierarchical organizations that they had seemed to promise, and the reasons for these failures need to be carefully examined. That chapter provides an empirical base for my discussion of Popper and Dewey, which forms chapter 4. While Popper and Dewey argue that social experimentation cannot only reform and strengthen established institutions but also fundamentally transform them, I argue that they nevertheless fail to show how such a transformation could occur. Like the projects discussed in chapter 3, their theories of reform seem bound to the maintenance of the existing context. Chapter 5 then evaluates certain Marxist critiques of liberal reform (focusing specifically on Andre Gorz's political theory), and concludes that despite the appeal of Gorz's "non-reformist reforms," there remains in his work a fundamental contradiction between the desire to decentralize power and to strengthen democratic control in society and the need to conquer state power. Finally, in the concluding chapter, I look at the viability of the political theory of anarchism. I argue that despite certain weaknesses in anarchist political theory, it nevertheless continues to provide a serious alternative worthy of study to both liberalism and Marxism. It is in this chapter that I attempt a resolution to some of the problems and contradictions which appear in the previous chapters. |
