A new era of scholarly discourse is coming into being. A new phase in the history of political and social science. The statements below by Erich Fromm, Lee Harris and Nancy Kobrin set the stage: begin to define this new era.

I feel sorry for Professors of Political Science. Their textbooks assume that policy is set based on rational discourse. it's obvious now that this is not the case. This was never the case. But based on what is occurring in our contemporary world, this has become abundantly clear. Our cultural and political world does not consist, fundamentally, of factual statements. Oh, of course, there is still physics and chemistry and biology: these disciplines do not lose their validity.

However, we see now that much of the world of culture and politics is based on delusion, or fantasy. As Fromm says, the fact that a majority of people share certain ideas says nothing about the validity of these ideas. Lee Harris poses the question: "What happens when it is not an individual who is caught up in a fantasy world, but an entire group." Much of history. he says, consists of the "enactment of large scale collective fantasies." And Nancy Korbin notes that just as there may be a folie a deux, so there is a "folie a millions."  The fact that millions of people share the same idea "does not make this idea true."

We begin to see that entire societies live within the framework of delusions or fantasies.

This is the starting point for research in political and social science...from this moment forward. This does not imply pessimism. It simply means that we abandon once and for all the notion that our cultural and political worlds are shaped primarily by rationality and rational thought.

Of course, given the bizarre, grotesque, tragic history of the Twentieth Century, we should have recognized this long ago. But it's never too late. Once we abandon this deepest Western fantasy--the fantasy that human thought and behavior is grounded in rationality--we can analyze or deconstruct the nature of the fantasies and delusions that shape our world--and minds.

Richard Koenigsberg