It is all too easy for us to become uncritical salespeople for our favored theories and approaches, marketing them as cure-alls with no problematic side effects. As Socrates commented in Plato's Protagoras, ‘those who take their teachings from town to town and sell them wholesale or retail to anybody who wants them recommend all their products, but I wouldn't be surprised, my friend, if some of these people did not know which of their products are beneficial and which detrimental’ (¶313d).This can in part reflect a phenomenon often observed in intellectual life: people become slaves to their own ideas. This may be entirely natural. Nevertheless, an egoistic attachment to our most cherished remedies, and the consequent obliviousness to their limits and defects, are irresponsible when we move into the world of action. Here, anyone who introduces a new approach to politics or policy has a responsibility to consider not only how it will play out when all goes as expected, but also how it might go wrong.

Part III will consider two dangers of the approach advocated in this work: the magnification of expert power, and an exaggerated optimism concerning the power of dialogue. But of course not all dangers can be anticipated, least of all by an individual author. Others may well be glaringly obvious to certain readers, while still others may emerge only over time. Part III, then, is but a ‘down-payment’ on the task of self-critical thought.