The Rhetorical Patterns in Paradigmatic Policy Change

Abstract

In his book The Rhetoric of Reaction, Albert Hirschman (1991) argues that each major advance in the development of citizenship in Western democracies — from civil to political to socio-economic citizenship — has provoked a strong reaction in which the opponents of reform have ‘unfailingly’ advanced a few common or typical arguments. Hirschman denotes these three lines of argument as ‘the perversity thesis’, the ‘futility thesis’, and the ‘jeopardy thesis’. Although he relates these theses to the question of the development of citizenship, he makes it clear that they can apply to any reform that constitutes a radical change (or paradigm shift) rather than an incremental adjustment to the previous policy configuration.