The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy

Why this matters here

Hirschman’s The Rhetoric of Reaction catalogs recurring arguments against reform—perversity, futility, and jeopardy—that cast change as doomed or dangerous regardless of case. When Authority Outlives Accountability places those argument forms beside how publics read outcomes: visible harm as failure, delayed or diluted harm as inevitability. Hirschman studies reactionary rhetoric; the book asks how moral judgment that relies on cleaned-up outcomes erases the conditions under which leaders chose.