"He Says That's Not What He Meant": Not a Knock-down Argument
Many people have claimed that Hayek's The Road to Serfdom states that a single step towards the welfare state will initiate a near-inevitable slide into full-blown socialism. Others have argued that Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions makes the case for total relativism amongst scientific theories. (These are just two examples that happened to pop into my mind this morning; I'm sure you can come up with others.) In response, people -- and I confess I have been one of those people! -- often trot out what they feel to be a crushing reply: but later, Hayek / Kuhn himself very explicitly declares that that is not what he meant! After all, who should know better than the author himself what a book means? But this is not the decisive blow people who use it think it is. Why? Well, the text is an historical act, and determining its meaning is an act of historical understanding. In such work, we do not simply take an actor's word for what he/she did or ...