Does America have an official philosophy? How absurd. When the Soviet Union had an official philosophy, Marxism, everybody was required to pretend they believed it. Nobody has to do that here. The Catholic Church has an official theologian, Thomas Aquinas, but Catholics are not required to be Thomists; Aquinas’ position is, at bottom, an honorific. Philosophers get no honors in the United States, so America doesn’t have that kind of official philosophy either.
Yet two fairly recent books have argued that there is, if not a publicly official philosophy in the United States, a state-supported one—and explain why this fact is so little recognized.
One of the books is Alex Abella’s Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire (New York: Harcourt 2008); the other is S. M. Amadae’s Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: the Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (University of Chicago Press, 2003). The story that they tell is that during the first phase of the Cold War, American ruling circles decided that they needed a philosophy which could compete with Marxism. Apparently the two schools then dominant in philosophy departments, Idealism and Pragmatism were not up to this; but a young analyst at RAND, Kenneth Arrow, developed the “Arrow Theorem,” which became the foundations of rational choice theory.
Rational choice theory was then marketed in government-sponsored seminars and journals and eventually became identified as a quintessentially American world view. (There is also evidence that having worked at RAND protected you from the political pressures of the McCarthy Era). The American state philosophy thus comes out of economics departments, not philosophy departments; that is why more people don’t know it’s there.
Rational choice theory does not look like a philosophy, but it has an epistemology, an ethics, and a social ontology. Roughly, knowledge consists in being able to make decision according to universal (indeed, mathematizable) principles of maximizing interest; its ethics consists in (a) not judging the interests, or ends, people choose to maximize, while (b) encouraging them to gain as much of the means to maximization—wealth and power—as possible; and its social ontology suggests that the only thing that exists in the human world is individuals making up their minds. Large historical trends, like revolutions and social classes, aren’t really there.
This all makes rational choice theory an excellent tool of economics. But it doesn’t make the idea that human individuals are rational enough to maximize their interests philosophically or psychologically plausible. Both Abella and Amadae trace its influence, which grew with that of RAND; Abella credits rational choice theory, for example, with the US policy of “escalation” in Vietnam, according to which the Viet Cong would eventually decide, quite rationally, that continuing the war was too painful to be in their interest. (They didn’t.) Amadae has a very detailed chapter on Rawls, who accepted basic principles of rational choice theory but rejected (a) above, arguing that there are moral constraints on rational choices.
My question (as an Ivory Tower Hegel scholar) is: if rational choice theory has important philosophical implications, have philosophers paid much attention to it? Is there a philosophical literature devoted to uncovering and evaluating the philosophical doctrines associated with rational choice theory?
Recent Comments