Problem with Big Thinkers

Samuel Huntington and the Positivity of Power Thinking - NYTimes.com

The adaptation of theory to reality is the essence of the power thinker's métier.

To them, no single historical event mattered more than any other. All unfolded within endlessly recurring cycles dominated by the deep currents of human nature.

This Enlightenment belief in human perfectibility is, among other things, a great illusion-producing machine.

Francis Fukuyama, a former student of Mr. Huntington's and a consequential big-idea man in his own right, observed that the Soviet system was by no means the effective government Mr. Huntington claimed it had been.

"Perhaps," as Mr. Fukuyama wrote, "all grand theories are ultimately doomed to failure."

The very seductiveness of power thinking — its promise that everything fits together or can be made to seem so — is also the source of its danger. It offers something irresistible, the possibility that we can change, or at least control, our lives by means of ideas, even though those ideas are themselves abstract inventions.