It’s taken someone pointing this out to me (thanks Bruce Durling) to see how really important are the things he’s saying.
Maybe that’s why doing this kind of thinking is so much easier if you have a common room to loaf around in, drinking tea in the afternoon.
It also reminds me, rather worryingly of my first encounters with Wittgenstein. You read “The meaning of a concept is its use” and you think “Huh? What the hell does that mean?
And then maybe a year later, you’re you find yourself saying to other people “But don’t you see? The meaning of a concept is its use.”
Flyvbjerg has a lot to say in this area and I should try to make more of an effort to read his stuff. But I’m not impressed by him not being impressed by Hirschman. He wouldn’t be so doubtful about the hiding hand if he’d ever tried to provide “realistic” predicitions of when a project is going to deliver.