There is a form of rationality behind the exercise of power, and when that form of rationality is undermined, power loses its foundations.
Nietzsche posed an Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy, the former representing form and rationality and the latter drunkenness and ecstasy.
As it happens, Shulsky himself explored that question in a 1999 essay, written with Gary Schmitt, entitled "Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)" — in Greek philosophy the term nous denotes the highest form of rationality.
The concept of efficiency expresses a specific form of rationality, used in attempts to control a changing situation by bringing it into conformity with a vision of how the world works.
The politicians might have been wise to heed Einstein: "We cannot solve problems using the same mindset that created them". It is time that the real economists are recognised: those who know what their values are and put them forward for public debate, not those who pretend to a value-free science and wrap their values in the cloak of a strangely limited form of rationality.
In the modern era, this form of rationality has widely been viewed as the single unproblematic requirement of practical reason.
The assumption, one arguably bequeathed to the Western philosophical tradition through Latin Medieval school forms, is that "straightforward argument" is not itself a style, rhetoric, and/or genre but the pure form of rationality and, hence, philosophy.
In Italy and elsewhere this form of rationality has been a very strong foundation of the heroic era of planning, until the early 1970s, and was perfectly compatible with the architectural roots of urban planning.
Ambassador John Limbert, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Iran during my time at the State Department, used to (half) joke about doing whatever it took to keep some form of rationality in our Iran policy.
