Hirschman's three arguments

Rereading The Rhetoric of Reaction and struck again by how cleanly the taxonomy holds up. Hirschman claims that arguments against reform almost always take one of three forms:

• Perversity — the reform will produce the opposite of what it intends.
• Futility — the reform will change nothing, because the underlying structure is untouched.
• Jeopardy — the reform endangers some earlier achievement worth more.

What makes it useful isn't that these arguments are bad. Each one is sometimes correct, and Hirschman is careful about saying so. What's useful is that they're available — they can be produced for any proposal whatsoever, without knowing anything about it. That's the tell. An argument you could have made before hearing the proposal isn't evidence about the proposal.

He wrote a companion list of the progressive equivalents late in life, which is less quoted and, I think, sharper about his own side.