OK, I’ll give it a shot. The book was published in 1998, but I think the deep structure is still right although the issues of the day have shifted. It’s full of examples both historical and contemporary and quotes its targets and sources liberally and explicitly. Not a lot of “some say” or “it is often argued” in it.
The main organizing principle of the book is that dynamism versus stasis is a fundamental division in how people think about the social, economic, and political world. This division concerns both normative and descriptive issues, and it cuts orthogonally across the traditional right/left polarity. The motivating observation at the time was a large number of critical issues in which right/left coalitions had formed on each side–free trade, immigration, genetic engineering, the Internet, big-box discount retailing, protection of cultural “diversity,” environmental policies, financial innovation, and in general the process of evolution and creative destruction in the economy.
Dynamism is a worldview that favors decentralized, evolutionary social systems in which structures emerge without anyone necessarily scripting specific outcomes. Stasists prefer some form of global control or restriction on the specific outcomes that arise. The issue is not favoring or opposing change per se. Stasists often favor massive changes while dynamists often feel that existing patterns that have survived competition are the best that can be done. Rather, the dispute is about how we know what is actually a desirable change, how such changes occur, and who should have a say about what aspects of change.
Stasists come in two broad flavors, reactionary and technocratic. (The two often cooperate politically but have different ultimate visions.) Reactionary stasists wish to move society in a radical fashion to a “steady-state” often drawn from some imagined past. Many agrarians and greens fall into this camp, ranging from E.F. Schumacher to Kirkpatrick Sale to Wendell Berry. The U.S. has also had some industrial reactionaries who wanted to reproduce and freeze the social and economic conditions of the 1950s/1960s. Technocratic stasists, by contrast, are looking for “kinetic change made stable,” a plan for moving society forward on a collective, planned basis under the control of bureaucratic and technical experts. “Got a problem, get a program” was an often-useful operational description of technocratic thinking.
Both flavors of stasists have a repugnance for the emergent innovations thrown up by markets and culture, resulting in a constant stream of moral panics generated by our chattering classes, who mostly hew to the stasist persuasion. Dynamists, on the other hand, treat what I will here call the “expected unexpected” with delight or equanimity. It is precisely these kinds of unblessed innovations, ranging from contact lenses to hydraulic fracturing to cohabitation before marriage to punk rock, that provide the mainspring of social progress (Chapter 3), in the dynamist view.
Dynamists prefer a system in which, to the extent possible, rules of interaction are generic and neutral with respect to the specific aims and statuses of the agents involved. Chapter 5 of the book describes the main general properties such rules must possess, including the kind of feedback to individuals they should provide. Dynamists believe that knowledge (Chapter 4) is widely distributed, specialized, and often impacted and hard to communicate, so that requiring people to articulate or give a good reason in advance for what they want to do is often oppressive and contrary to progress. They recognize that nature (Chapter 6) is neither necessary nor sufficient as a guide to what is desirable, and that the dichotomy of humanity and nature is largely illusory. They are sympathetic to the role of play (Chapter 7) in generating progress and enabling us to enjoy our lives. All of these commitments are contested or opposed by stasists.
That’s four paragraphs so I’ll stop now.
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