The Rise of Progressive Authoritarianism

If something doesn’t exist in theory, can it exist in practice? It’s fairly clear that the answer to this question has to be yes, if only because one can’t theorise about nothing at all (though quantum physics sometimes seems to be doing just that). In social theory, however, there has to be a basic minimum of fact or reality on the table for the theoretician to discuss what it’s for, how it impacts people, whether it could be improved, and much else.

It’s also true, however, that without theory the facts are dumb. If we don’t have a sense that some social tendency exists, then we won’t look for its effects. Worse, when we see its effects, we’ll attribute them wrongly to other causes. Phlogiston, for instance, was an erroneous scientific theory about an element in all combustible bodies that was released by burning. In reality it didn’t exist, and when the theory of it was refuted, that opened the way to the discovery of oxygen.

Until quite recently, political…