ABSTRACT
The ism-ideologies' single-minded recipes for social and economic change either are in fact irrelevant to these areas of contemporary revolutionary unrest or they are positively contributive to the problems. This chapter summarizes a number of characteristics of an alternative theory of social and economic change. The dynamic element which continuously operates to erode confidence in existing structures is the human being's capacity to think reflectively and critically, to perceive means-consequence connections, and to formulate theories incorporating such reflections. The expanding fund of knowledge is both a product of such reflection and a source feeding such reflection. People's proclivities, innate or acquired, to retain habits of mind and habits of behavior which confer status, permit retention of power, provide self-identity and the like, operate to arrest change. The chapter explains that an evolving, functional economy must be discretionary; it proposes to place that discretion ultimately with the community at large.
