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)

“If there be such a thing as “treating” a whole nation at once for the “fear complex”, that is what we need in America to-day. All our business men need the treatment, all our politicians, all our writers, editors, and publishers, the children in our schools, and their mothers and fathers in their homes. The man in the street needs it, the preacher in the pulpit, the philanthropist in his sanctuary, the clerk at his desk. Every educational, political, or industrial danger that faces us is due to the prevalence of the fear complex. A general diminution of fear, though it were but relieving to a very small extent the secret timidities of each individual, would set every one of our problems on the road to a happy solution.” (John Jay Chapman, 1925, America’s Fear Complex)

Joseph Brodsky on W. H. Auden: “I saw him last in July 1973, at a supper at Stephen Spender’s place in London. Wystan was sitting there at the table, a cigarette in his right hand, a goblet in his left, holding forth on the subject of cold salmon. The chair being too low, two disheveled volumes of the OED were put under him by the mistress of the house. I thought then that I was seeing the only man who had the right to use those volumes as his seat.” (Brodsky, 1983, To Please a Shadow, in More Than One)