How Can Social Reform be Critical?

How Can Social Reform be Critical? Social reform should come as a natural consequence of good social scientific theories. Holist theorists have sought to improve society by building utopian models for the reconstruction of society. Individualist theorists have sought to counter the emphasis of holism on the well-being or well-functioning of the whole, by stressing that the aim social reform has to be the satisfaction of the needs and/or aims of individuals. Neither of these theories of how social reform is possible can be maintained today, although they both still dominate the thinking of reformers. Popper has convincingly argued that no utopian social engineering is possible: we can never know enough to reconstruct the whole of society according to some utopian plan. We will always discover unintended consequences which may very well turn utopia into hell, as we have seen in communist and fascist varieties. He recommends piecemeal social engineering. But it has been difficult to dispense with holism altogether, because of difficulties in constructing an individualist theory of social reform. Individualist theorists want to achieve a state which furthers the well-being of each individual or at least limits the harm that is done to them. But, without a good theory of institutions, it is hard to know how to follow Popper’s advice. Popper warns us about the unintended consequences of social reform. But he has no theory of it, beyond saying that it has to be piecemeal. The difficulties faced by both holist and individualist theories of social reform have led to one dominant theoretical model for social reform today. This is a view I call piecemeal utopian social engineering and is a mixture of the two forms which Popper distinguished, that is, utopian social engineering and piecemeal social engineering. On this view a model of some utopian state of affairs is constructed, one contrasts existing society with the utopian state of affairs, and tries to move the existing society, for the most part in small steps, to a closer approximation to the ideal. Holists use this model, because they cannot make a revolution such as that which has been sought by socialist utopias, communists, fascists, leaders such as Pol Pot or Islamic fundamentalists; they have no choice but to proceed piecemeal. Individualists fall back into this model when, for example, they construct models of economic society, deeming the uncontrolled marketplace to be an ideal which all social reform has to strive for. And, since this reform project has only to do with economics, other holistic views, mainly from religion, may be used to fill the gap. They are thought to be, however, quite distinct from the economic project and to offer no interference to it; religion is private and should remain so. Thinkers such as Rawls and Nozick try to construct their own utopian models as a basis for critical social analysis. There seems no other path to a good society.