Speakeasy Book Club

I just started re-reading a classic: Policy Paradox by Deborah Stone. Policy Paradox is the single most influential book (to me) I read as an undergraduate. At the time I was asked to read it, I was restructuring my understanding of the political and policy spheres and struggling to grasp the nature of their intersection. Having stumbled over to policy from physics, I initially brought the eye of the scientist: a single problem will more likely than not have a single solution, a correct answer that can be devised by the clever policy scientist. This viewpoint isn't far from what I called the Utopian perspective in an old post.

At the time Policy Paradox came into the picture, I was beginning to move beyond that mode of thinking and to see more shades of gray. This book was immeasurably helpful in moving me along that path. To give you a feel for the way this book approaches public policy (and the impact it had on me), here's a sample from the introduction:

This book has two aims. First, I argue that the rationality project [a "mission of rescuing public policy from the irrationalities and indignities of politics, hoping to make policy instead with rational, analytical, and scientific methods"] misses the point of politics. Moreover, it is an impossible dream. From inside the rationality project, politics looks messy, foolish, erratic, and inexplicable. Events, actions, and ideas in the political world seem to leap outside the categories that logic and rationality offer. In the rationality project, the categories of analysis are somehow above politics or outside it. Rationality purports to offer a correct vantage point, from which we can judge the goodness of the real world.

I argue, instead, that the very categories of thought underlying rational analysis are themselves a kind of paradox, defined in political struggle. They do not exist before or without politics, and because they are necessarily abstract (they are categories of thought, after all), they can have multiple meanings. Thus, analysis is itself a creature of politics; it is a strategically crafted argument, designed to create ambiguities and paradoxes and to resolve them in a particular direction. (This much is certainly awfully abstract for now, but each of the subsequent chapters is designed to show very concretely how one analytic category of politics and policy is a constantly evolving political creation).

Beyond demonstrating this central misconception of the rationality project, my second aim is to derive a kind of political analysis that makes sense of policy paradoxes such as the ones depicted above. I seek to create a framework in which such phenomena, the ordinary situations of politics, do not have to be explained away as extraordinary, written off as irrational, dismissed as folly, or disparaged as "pure politics." Unfortunately, much of the literature about public policy proceeds form the idea that policy making in practice deviates from such hypothetical standards of good policy making, and that there is thus something fundamentally wrong with politics. In creating an alternative mode of political analysis, I start from the belief that politics is a creative and valuable feature of social existence.

I also started re-reading my BA the other day (the paper they made me write to graduate); it's on the policy making process and the influence of Policy Paradox is clear. I'm kicking around the idea of putting up a post a week or so reacting to each of the chapters. But we'll see.

Meanwhile, if anyone else is interested in reading it, I highly recommend it: Policy Paradox.

You guys reading anything I should be reading?