The Social Predicament

Abstract

The critical historical method, to remind, begins with a set of facts to be explained, for which explanation is then provided. The third dimension of this method is to demonstrate the significance of the foregoing by examination of social problems or issues that stem from the explanation given. The useful economist will see that commercial, industrial society embodies core tendencies that chronically undermine the quality of human life and threaten to acutely diminish it in a flash of military or ecological bedlam. These untoward tendencies comprise the social predicament of the New Industrial State and the road to the future lies in the responses chosen in the effort to subordinate them to the quality of human life.