Author： Allen Barry
Publisher： Rodopi
ISSN： 1572-3429
Source： Contemporary Pragmatism, Vol.9, Iss.2, 2012-12, pp. : 75-92
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Abstract
I take a skeptical view of the experimentalism Dorf and Sabel advocate. I discuss doubts of three kinds: Doubt about the idea of “best practices; doubt about their understanding of scientific experimentation; and doubt about the value of the Constitutional reform they envision. Their program reduces democracy to competitive rituals and managerial predation. The imperative of comparison threatens practices with destruction. “Benchmarking is a machine to destroy divergence. To compel such comparison with the force of law would be a catastrophe for the ecology of human practices, an enforced monoculturalism that would make democracy infinitely easier to manage at the price of making it infinitely less democratic.
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