Some people treat political disagreement as error to be corrected by better argument, and others as opposed interests to be settled by winning, and the two cannot debate.
Alexander's distinction explains a recurring failure of political conversation: the mistake theorist offers evidence and the conflict theorist reads the offer as a manoeuvre, since on their account the other side's position follows from their interests rather than from their information. Each then treats the other's mode as bad faith, and neither is behaving inconsistently.
In practice
- A colleague answering a costed proposal by asking who commissioned it is not failing to engage.
- A negotiation where one side arrives with evidence and the other with leverage produces two accounts of what went wrong.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works