Political beliefs cannot be reduced to material interests or formal schemes

Evidence

Few would contest that the conservative movement was infl ected by social and racial anxieties, supported by many who were unlikely to benefi t from its economic proposals, and characterized by the simultaneous advocacy of contradictory views. These interpretive models, however, shroud important aspects of the movement behind an analytic veil. A social philosophy is rarely comprehended by reducing its arguments to social or material interests, or by distilling its tenets into rigidly formalized schemes. The homo economicus is useful only as a formal abstraction, and few of us would withstand an interpretive procedure that ceased with the judgment that there were points of apparent confl ict among aspects of our stated worldview. Our experience of the social environment is relentlessly complex, and our po liti cal perspectives are formed through a dynamic and everchanging interaction among abstract idealism, purposive strategy, emotive inclination, and intuitive response. They are provisional responses to an alwaysincomprehensible world. Understanding why individuals believe what they do and evaluating the comparative validity of their beliefs require a mode of analysis that acknowledges the entangled nature of the problems it attempts to address. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 24

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A methodological credo arguing that political worldviews are entangled, provisional responses to an incomprehensible world — resistant to interest-reduction. Worth sitting with as an interpretive stance.
• XREF: Speaks to the standard critique of homo economicus in behavioral economics and to the rational-choice literature this chapter references. — connects to: Material interests and ideologies cannot by themselves shape imagined communities — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 242; Political beliefs resist reduction to stated interests or formal consistency. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 24; Abstract liberal theory cannot substitute for confronting economic realities — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 342

Broader Connections

• Material interests and ideologies cannot by themselves shape imagined communities #corroborates (0.82) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 242