MICHAEL McPHERSON
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be a favor to disabuse a newly recovered alcoholic of his carefully
cultivated belief that the first drink will kill him?
If one were to presume to draw a methodological moral from
Schelling's story (something he himself is careful not to do), it might
be this: Neoclassical theory, if it recognized these conflicts at all,
could do so only to disapprove; such conflicts mark an imperfection,
alailure
of rationality which, if anything, the hapless drunk might be
urged to overcome. Schelling, however, presents such conflict as
more basic and enduring in all our lives, something we'd better get
used to and learn to live with. Instead of disapproval, Schelling of–
fers sympathetic understanding (many of his examples are drawn
from his own wayward life) and a friendly desire to help.
Albert Hirschman is more explicit about adopting an under–
standing attitude toward the characters in his recent book,
Shifting
Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action.
Hirschman sets out to ex–
plain why individuals and whole societies seem to oscillate between
periods of intense involvement with politics, and periods of preoc–
cupation with private affairs. Were life all a matter of getting the
most of our "one, all-purpose preference system," then we might ex–
pect individuals and societies to exhibit rather a static inclination to
politics: in or out for a lifetime depending on their preferences. At
most, we would expect people to adjust smoothly and gradually "on
the margin" to shifts in the perceived costs and benefits of political in–
volvement. But instead, shifts in involvement do occur, for in–
dividuals and whole societies; and such shifts tend to be abrupt and
substantial, not smooth and marginal (as the paroxysm of the 1960s
reminds us).
Why so? The answer derives in part from Hirschman's em–
phasis on an aspect of the inner life that is left aside in Schelling's
picture of "warring selves." (Trilling himself, interestingly enough,
was not entirely happy with his Victorian friend's portrayal of
Austen's view of the moral life as one of "warring selves." What was
missing was precisely that element of reflection, that aspiration for
conformity to an ideal, that Hirschman develops.) That aspect we
might call "reflectiveness": our capacity, indeed our compulsion, to
stand in judgment of our own preferences. One way that compulsion
expresses itself is in the need we feel to find some ideological
justification for the patterns of our lives. Thus, the political activist
finds pleasure, often, in the intense pace of his efforts, in the at–
tachments he forms, perhaps in the attention he gets - but all this is
