A Dancing Star: Arguments From Imagination

Abstract

A dancing should shake off traditional practice and theory. It's comfortable to delude ourselves that the practice-of-governance-and bureaucracy-we-need, even in the longer run, should be an incremental change over the practice we already have. Same for theorizing! agree it's comfy for many; disagree it's desirable for any. favor euthanasia for the traditions we have, and for organizations that nourish such tradi tions. As Nietzsche's Zarathustra exclaims, I tell you: one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star (Nietzsche, 1958, p. 46). discuss aspects of Arguments from Imagination for dancing-star practice and theorizing. One such argument appeals to a contradiction between (a) the need for radical imagination in governance and (b) the hostility to radical imagination in traditional practice. More precisely, should say rather than contradiction. Another such argu ment appeals to a contrary between (a) the need for radical imagination in practice and (b) the unlikelihood of helpful wisdom being available from traditional theorizing. These arguments could be filled out in a variety of ways. There could be a barnburner discussion, for instance, about traditional theory's subservience to tinkering excessively with the machinery of government, to tinkering with micro concerns, to having so little to show for its history of tinkering, and more. The discussion could talk about (again) the excessive catering to the needs of the mid level manager, and the reluctance to fly higher than the limits of what counts as common sense. The claim in the Arguments from Imagination is not that traditional practice and theory could vanish (see the quote from Daniel Martin, above); it is that the traditional should pass away. Neither traditional practice nor theorizing can give us what we need; it's time to move on. Such arguments are of the following form. First, X