MARCUS RASKIN
391
When such planning becomes a prelude to action, it is policy making.
For policy, broadly speaking, is a body of principles to guide action."
It is a calculated choice intended
to
(1)
clarify goals; (2) develop means
to
choose between "options"; (3) estimate in some quantitative way the
probable consequences of alternative directions; and (4) determine the
"optimum means for carrying out the action decided upon ." This
mode of thought spoke to a whole generation of technocrats who lived
in one reality and spent their days planning another one-either for
themselves or for others. They believed in problem-solving, which
came to mean the application of instrumental rationality
to
particular
situations; and these particular situations which totalized people's
lives, so that there was finally no escape from large processes thought
to be under rational control.
Max Horkheimer maintained:
Just as all life tends today increasingly
to
be subjected
to
rationaliza–
tion and planning, so the life of each individual including his most
hidden impulses, which formerly constituted his private domain,
must now take the demands of rationalization and planning into
account: the individual's self-preservation presupposes his adjust–
ment
to
the requirements for the preservation of the system. And just
as the process of rationalization is no longer the result of the
anonymous forces of the market, but is decided in the consciousness
of a planning minority, so the mass of subjects must deliberately
adjust themselves. The subject must, so to speak, devote all his
energies to being 'in and of the movement of things.'
The historical precursors of the policy planners and futurologists
were gentle and serious men . They were not
danse macabrists
like
Herman Kahn who enjoyed titillating audiences by telling them about
the need for nuclear weapons and then clucking about the horrible
consequences of such weapons. Indeed , social science meant something
quite different to earlier pragmatists who, as children of the Enlighten–
ment, believed that the control of nature through knowledge was an
effective means of achieving human sa lvation. Unfortunately, very few
such thinkers understood that the domination of nature-as an ideol–
ogy and practice-would also have to mean the domination of man.
The slow, the " primitive, " the communal and tactile, those popula–
tions which saw their culture as part of nature would have to give up
their animism in favor of the totemic rationality of the modern world.
*'
·One group, the Thomists, saw the question in a different light: they argued that it
was a mistake to see man and nature as infinitely pliable and manipulable, as most
Marxists have done. Believing in natural law, they sough t
to
determine the essence of
