Intellectual Obsolescence and Intellectual Makeovers: Reflections on the Tools of Government after Two Decades

This article reflects on the mixture of ideology, technological change, and interests that have made government instrumentalities central to the analysis of public policy over the two decades since the publication of the author’s Tools of Government in 1983, and distinguishes three main strains of analysis of policy instruments: analytic approaches that count forms of institutions as tools, analytic approaches that focus on the politics of tool selection, and generic approaches that aim to be institution‐ and technology‐free. The article argues first that the three main strains differ over the questions they ask rather than comprising different ways of answering the same question (though it distinguishes competing forms of generic approach); second, that beneath surface obsolescence, the generic policy tools analysis has not become fundamentally outdated over two decades; and third, that changes in technology makes technology‐free analysis all the more necessary as a tool of comparison.