ABSTRACT
The laissez faire position constructed by the social Darwinists and the classical economist’s effectively stifled reform for decades. One of the important reasons for the power of the ideology of limited government was the fact that its proponents possessed conceptual explanations encompassing most social activities. The reformers could make government completely dependent on social interests because they assumed the existence of a basic social harmony and, in fact, social cooperation, not competition, was an important part of their rhetoric. Government operating from an instrumentalist perspective would approach problems in an experimental fashion and evaluate the solutions attempted in terms of the effects that they had for individuals. The interaction of individual minds with their environments produced a variety of experiences leading to differing beliefs, a result that merely reflected the pluralistic nature of the universe.
