Anyone who would aim straight at a cure and would reflect on it before taking any action, would be likely to cool off about setting his hand to it. Pacuvius Calavius corrected the error of this procedure by a signal example. His fellow citizens were in revolt against their magistrates. He, a person of great authority in the city of Capua, one day found means to lock up the Senate in the palace, and, calling the people together in the market place, told them that the day had come when in full liberty they could take vengeance on the tyrants who had so long oppressed them, and whom he held alone and disarmed at his mercy. He advised them that these men should be brought out one by one, by lot, and that they should decide about each one individually, and have their sentence executed on the spot; with this provision also, that at the same time they should decide to appoint some honorable man in the place of the condemned man, so that the office should not remain vacant. They had no sooner heard the name of one senator than there arose a cry of general dissatisfaction against him. “I see very well,” said Pacuvius, “that we must dismiss this one; he is a wicked man; let us have a good one in exchange.” There was a prompt silence, everyone being much at a loss whom to choose. The first man bold enough to name his choice met a still greater unanimity of voices to refuse him, citing a hundred imperfections and just causes for rejecting him. These contradictory humors having grown heated, it fared still worse with the second senator, and the third: as much disagreement about election as agreement about dismissal. Having tired themselves out uselessly in this dispute, they began bit by bit, one this way, one that, to steal away from the assembly, each one bearing away this conclusion in his mind, that the oldest and best-known evil is always more bearable than an evil that is new and untried. (Montaigne, Essays, III, 9)

Another source of mistakes in belief formation is selection bias. Patients in dialysis centers are often surprisingly reluctant to be on the waiting list for a kidney transplantation. One reason is that all the transplanted patients they ever see are those for whom the operation failed so that they had to go back on dialysis. Montaigne was citing a bias of this kind when he referred to Diagoras as being “shown many vows and votive portraits from those who have survived shipwrecks and… then asked, ‘You, there, who think that the gods are indifferent to human affairs, what have you to say about so many men saved by their grace?’ — ‘It is like this,’ he replied, ‘there are no portraits here of those who stayed and drowned — and they are more numerous!'” Similarly, a psychiatrist who claims that “no child abusers ever stop on their own” neglects the fact that if any does he is unlikely to have met them. (Jon Elster, Explaining Social Behavior)

“…the thought occurs that if fairness to all divisions of humanity requires their separate mention when referred to in the mass, then the listing must not read simply ‘men and women’, it must include teenagers. They have played a large role in the world and they are not clearly distinguished in the phrase ‘men and women.’ Reflection further shows that mention should be given to yet another group: children. The child prodigy in music is a small category. But one must not forget the far larger group of 8-, 10-, and 12-year olds: boys (and sometimes girls in disguise) who in the armies and navies of the West have served in fife-and-drum corps or as cabin boys. Columbus’s ships had a large contingent; all the great explorers of the New World relied on sizable teams of these hard-worked crew members.” (Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence)

Most social scientists conceive it as their exclusive task to discover and stress regularities, stable relationships, and uniform sequences. This is obviously an essential search, one in which no thinking person can refrain from participating. But in the social sciences there is a special room for the opposite type of endeavor: to underline the multiplicity and creative disorder of the human adventure, to bring out the uniqueness of a certain occurrence, and to perceive an entirely new way of turning a historical corner.

The coexistence as equals of the two types of activities just outlined is characteristic of the social sciences. In the natural sciences the unexplained phenomenon and alertness to it are also of the greatest importance, but only as a means to an end, as the beginning of a new search for an improved general theory which would subsume the odd fact, thus overcoming its recalcitrance and destroying it in its uniqueness. In the social sciences, on the other hand, it is not at all clear which is means and which is end: true, most social scientists behave in this respect as if they were natural scientists; but they would be more surprised than the latter and, above all, considerably distraught if their search for general laws were crowned with total success. Quite possibly, then, all the successive theories and models in the social sciences, and the immense efforts that go into them, are motivated by the noble, if unconscious, desire to demonstrate the irreducibility of the social world to general laws! In no other way would it have been possible to affirm so conclusively the social world as the realm of freedom and creativity. But by now there surely is something to be said for pursuing this theme in a less roundabout fashion.

The importance of granting equal rights of citizenship in social science to the search for general laws and to the search for uniqueness appears particularly in the analysis of social change. One way of dealing with this phenomenon is to look for “laws of change” on the basis of our understanding of past historical sequences. But the possibility of encountering genuine novelty can never be ruled out — this is indeed one of the principal lessons of the past itself. And there is a special justification for the direct search for novelty, creativity, and uniqueness: without these attributes change, at least large-scale social change, may not be possible at all. For, in the first place, the powerful social forces opposed to change will be quite proficient at blocking off those paths of change that have already been trod. Secondly, revolutionaries or radical reformers are unlikely to generate the extraordinary social energy they need to achieve change unless they are exhilaratingly conscious of writing an entirely new page of human history.

I have of course not been disinterested in claiming equal rights for an approach to the social world that would stress the unique rather than the general, the unexpected rather than the expected, and the possible rather than the probable. For the fundamental bent of my writings has been to widen the limits of what is or is perceived to be possible, be it at the cost of lowering our ability, real or imaginary, to discern the probable. (Hirschman, 1971, A Bias for Hope)

A Catalog of Montaigne’s Beam Inscriptions.

Arthur Krystal on Jacques Barzun.

Theodore Dalrymple Montaigne’s Humanity.

“I was reminded just a few days ago when Lord Lindsay died, of an address that he gave at Columbia shortly after he had become master of Balliol College. He began his remarks by saying, “Gentlemen, I should tell you that I am a liberal, a conservative, and a socialist.” Some of the audience were naturally bewildered, but Lord Lindsay went on to explain that he meant something which should by now be perfectly obvious, something which is implicit in what I have been saying about liberalism, conservatism, and materialism. He meant that as a free man endowed with independence and originality — gifts of nature — he wanted a liberal regime; as a propertied man, a student of history, and a political philosopher, he wanted to conserve some of the great institutions and great traditions that his own country and Western culture generally put at his disposal; while as a man of the twentieth century he recognized the needs created by technology and the rise everywhere of popular states, of universal democracy. He knew that new institutions — whether called socialist or democratic or anything else — must arise to meet the demands of community life. The occasion for them may be public hygiene or flood control or the regulation of the airways: one need not specify here (nor be systematic anywhere) as regards the purview of the new collective institutions. The important thing is rather to recognize that the three traditions of the Western world can no longer be taken as mutually exclusive choices. The problem is not whether to stay a liberal and fight the conservatives, or else join hands between liberals and conservatives to fight the socialists. The problem is to find a way of compounding what is livable in all three so that a stupid, doctrinaire socialism will not down the liberal individual; so that a stupid, doctrinaire liberalism will not let the nation and the economy fritter itself away; and so that a stupid, doctrinaire conservatism will not sulk and dream, and resist the forward-moving reality.” (Jacques Barzun, 1952, “Beliefs for Sale: 1900 — 1950”)

“To me the worst kind of disillusionment was that connected with universities and historians. Hardly a voice was raised from those places and persons to maintain the light of truth. Like the rest, moved by passion, by fear, by the need to be in the swim, those who should have been the leaders followed the crowd down a steep place. In a moment, as it were, I found myself isolated among my own people. When I say isolated, I do not mean in any sense persecuted. I suffered nothing in Cambridge except a complete want of sympathy. But I learned once for all that students, those whose business it would seem to be to keep the light of truth burning in a storm, are like other men, blindly patriotic, savagely vigilant, cowardly or false when public opinion once begins to run strong. The younger dons and even the older ones disappeared into war work. All discussion, all pursuit of of truth ceased as in a moment. To win the war or to hide safely among the winners became the only preoccupation. Abroad was heard only the sound of guns, at home only the ceaseless patter of a propaganda utterly indifferent to truth.” (G. Lowes Dickinson, Recollections)

“Whether we examine our political or our business methods, our press, our theatre, or our social life, we find the same giddiness and superficiality, — a sort of supernormal love of the excitements of the moment. The proofs of our strangely depleted mental condition and of its cause lie on all sides, and every road leads to them. To-day we in America are passing through an access, a tornado, a frenzy of prosperity. Can we survive it? Shall we be rescued by some timely difficulties that create a wholesome moral pressure; or shall we lose all the strong, manly qualities that blessed our origins, and go under, as so many nations have done, through the influence of pride, luxury, and comfort? The danger that faces the Republic arises, as we all know, from the destructive power of wealth. Almost all the degradations that we see in the United States can be traced to the influence of prosperity.” (John Jay Chapman, 1926, The New Dawn in Education)