The Search for Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding

This chapter examines the kind of cognitive style that hinders, or promotes, understanding. The topic is introduced with a critical look at two books that exemplify opposite styles—one a study of the Mexican revolution by Hirschman's young colleague at Harvard, John Womack, and the other a study of violence in Colombia by the political scientist James L. Payne. Hirschman has little sympathy for the latter and reserves some unflattering words for what he had seen as a disease in the social sciences—the search for models and paradigms that aim to prove theories rather than understand realities; among other things, the tendency had collapsed into old failurist nostrums Hirschman was combating in Latin America, and that were now infecting North American social science.