Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

28 How It Worksunilateral and hierarchical. Nor, considering their own favoredpositions in society, would they regard that as an attractivepossibility. I suggest that, as a consequence, thestudy of order or coordination became in large part a studyof how elites could unilaterally keep the masses under controland of how they could justify their doing so. Take as anexample from the first days of political philosophy Plato’sRepublic, which, despite its monumental merits, makes asuspect case for the justice of hierarchical or unilateral eliterule over mass. Aristotle’s very notion of order was hierarchical.How severely philosophy and theology may have misperceivedthe problem of order or coordination is revealedin the history of disorder. The greatest disturbers of socialorder have not been peasants, though they occasionallyhave tried to revolt, but the holders of unilateral authority—thewould-be central coordinators: among them, Alexander,the marauding Roman emperors, Genghis Khan, therapacious quarreling lords of medieval and Renaissance Europe,Napoleon, Lenin, and Hitler.A few figures in the history of thought have found significantplace for mutual adjustment. Not surprisingly,they have given more thought to how a society can act intelligentlythan to how it can be made obedient. In the secondcentury b.c., the historian Polybius claimed that themerits of early Roman institutions were not attributable todesign from the top but to a continuing set of political interactionsconstituting successful trial and error. In 1748,we find a fuller but still embryonic appreciation of mutualadjustment in Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. In the almosttwo thousand years that separate these two, others oflike mind must lie buried in the history of philosophy, and