ABSTRACT
But we recognized planning as a very special way of dealing with the agenda of politics. In this sense, planning and politics may be contrasted as modes of pursuing human purposes.
Planning tries to achieve purposes by rationalizing them. The planner uses devices like cost-benefit analysis to provide what at least seems to be reasonable justification for pursuing the purpose; he goes on to show feasibility and encourage action by presenting a program and scheduling of the activities and resources required to get from here to there. (This, too, may be something less than perfectly realistic, but as Albert O. Hirschman points out in his hilarious essay on "the Hiding Hand,"1 the kind of map which makes us think, however falsely, we have no major obstacle in the way, is often necessary to give us the confidence to commit resources and begin). The planning document should have a few paragraphs of gung-ho-ism, but it convinces by its tone of dispassionateness, its columns of figures, and its graphics, so nicely executed, that they were obviously done by a steady hand backed by ample resources-in brief, reasonable people.
