Okay, I'm going to try and make a very complicated point here and I may be hard to follow. I want to draw something about Cowen's idea of a mess out and I want to do it by comparing him to someone else who has an approach similar to his. The point of the comparison, though, is to highlight something unique to Tyler Cowen and not what he has in common with this other guy.
The other guy is an intellectual historian and philosopher, now dead, named Michael Oakeshott. Oakeshott came from a school of historians who distrusted stories. They did so specifically because they distrusted a specific type of story called Whig history. What exactly that is doesn't really matter here. The thing that matters is that he doesn't like stories.
And he has a metaphor too. I'm going from memory so this won't be verbatim but Oakeshott says that history is increasingly a place where we exercise our opinions like we exercise whippets in the park on a Sunday afternoon.
Whippets are very lean, fast dogs sort of like greyhounds only smaller. Imagine you are looking down on a park from an upper story and every once in a while one of these dogs flits across the park, tracing a line, running very quickly—and then its gone.
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