CONCEPT
The Rhetoric of Reaction
Hirschman's 1991 anatomy of the three rhetorical strategies — perversity, futility, and jeopardy — deployed with remarkable consistency across two centuries to dismiss voices calling for reform.
In The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991), Hirschman identified three rhetorical strategies that have been deployed against every major progressive reform from the French Revolution to contemporary policy debates. The perversity thesis argues that the proposed reform will produce the opposite of its intended effect. The futility thesis argues that the reform will make no difference. The jeopardy thesis argues that the reform will endanger some previous, precious accomplishment. What makes these strategies analytically interesting is not that they are always wrong — sometimes reforms do backfire, fail, or damage valuable accomplishments — but that they are deployed with such consistency and structural similarity across unrelated policy domains that their rhetorical function is clearly independent of their factual accuracy in any given case.
In The You On AI Field Guide
All three theses are audible in the AI discourse with remarkable clarity. The perversity thesis: 'If you slow down AI development, you will simply push it to jurisdictions with fewer safeguards, making outcomes