The dreams of reason produces monsters
John Bergin, University of Wolverhampton
“When the brain is hurt by an accident, or the mind disordered by dreams or sickness, the fancy is overrun with wild dismal ideas, and terrified with a thousand hideous monsters of its own framing.” This passage from Joseph Addison’s Pleasures of Imagination, published in The Spectator in 1712, may have inspired Goya’s (Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes 1746-1828) etching, Capricho 43, The sleep of reason produces monsters (also known as The dream of reason produces monsters). Goya might have felt at home among SCOS delegates who are celebrating the 25th anniversary of our still standing standing conference when he wrote “(t)he author has not followed the precedents of another artist, nor has he been able to copy Nature herself … He who departs entirely from Nature will surely merit high esteem, since he has to put before the eyes of the public forms and poses which have existed previously in the darkness and confusion of an irrational mind, or one which is beset by uncontrolled passion.” While Goya appears to have had faith in reason, he would doubtless be shocked should he return today to observe mankind’s inhumanity, as he observed it in his own time. Monsters of the dream of reason, the belief in deliverance, unreason being the surrogate for reason, are the focus of this paper which argues that bureaucratic administration and its manifestation in managerial practices are “fancy overrun with dismal ideas”.