This lack of synchronization between analytical rigour about
your own society and romanticism about elsewhere is a familiar
human and political failing, but the 'Beware the Greeks' mentality
has some rather special and strange consequences when contemplating
certain social-control reforms. For the bearers of the
gifts were not always 'them' (the reformers, managers, professionals
and politicians who used the destrllcturing rhetoric). They
were often 'us' - the same radicals whose intellectual work fed
this rhetoric.
We can respond in three ways to this poignant problem of failure
(more or less mimicking those different theoretical models I
described).