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The neoclassical thought constitute the base of the most dominant school in the discipline of economics, and economic rationality of an individual agent is the principal postulate of such a thought associated with neoclassical economics. The postulate of rationality has been questioned over the years. There have always been doubts expressed against such a conception of the individual human actor transacting business in a market. The theoretical postulate has often been pitched against not only the alternative theoretical frameworks but also the empirical judgments arrived at in the background of a broader canvas of the actual social economy.
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Jon Elster has made important contributions to several fields, including rational choice theory, political science, and philosophy. The breadth and depth of his writings are striking in a time of high specialisation; he is read and discussed by political scientists, economists, and philosophers. His work is difficult to summarise in a slogan, but virtually all of it has to do with problems of rational choice explanation in social science, much of it as a methodological dimension, and it is generally informed by a broad and deep acquaintance with relevant literatures in economics, political science, history, philosophy, and psychology. In what follows I will discuss Elster's contribu-tions to a series of problem areas: the foundations of the theory of rationality, social welfare theory, philosophy of social science, and analytical Marxism. It is impossible to touch on every point of interest, or even a representative sampling; instead I will single out several important areas of...
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The closing decades of the twentieth century saw a dramatic increase in interest in the role of philosophical ideas in economics. The period also saw a significant expansion in scholarly investigation into the different connections between economics and philosophy, as seen in the emergence of new journals, professional associations, conferences, seminar series, websites, research networks, teaching methods, and interdisciplinary collaboration. One of the results of this set of developments has been a remarkable distillation in thinking about philosophy and economics around a number of key subjects and themes. The goal of this Companion to Economics and Philosophy is to exhibit and explore a number of these areas of convergence. The volume is accordingly divided into three parts, each of which highlights a leading area of scholarly concern. They are: political economy conceived as political philosophy, the methodology and epistemology of economics, and social ontology and the ontology of economics. The authors of the chapters in the volume were chosen on the basis of their having made distinctive and innovative contributions to their respective areas of expertise. In addition, authors were asked to not only survey the state of the field as they saw it, but also provide statements of their own positions and their perspectives on the field in question and its possible direction of development in the future. We thus hope this volume will serve not only as an introduction to the field, but also stimulate further work and thinking concerning the questions it investigates. Political economy conceived as political philosophy The essays in the first part of this Companion investigate the idea of economics or political economy as political philosophy. This last term should not to be understood in the pejoratively restrictive sense of Rosenberg's (1992) definition of economics as mathematical political science. Rather, it should be taken to refer to the use of specific (namely economic) tools to understand the conditions of social order. This perspective harks back to the founders of economics and their conception of the discipline. Of course some would argue that more than two hundred years of scientific research have carried the discipline away from this conception. In fact, however, and as the issues discussed in the chapters in this section show, the distance that separates political economy in its recent developments from its origins is not that large.
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The mainstream conception of economic action as rational maximizing has been under attack at least since Veblen. What has been lacking, however, is an alternative-or at least partly alternative-account that remedies many of the faults to which critics point without at the same time obliterating the many tangible benefits of the mainstream approach. This essay argues that a new model of action may be emerging that qualifies as such a (partial) alternative. In what follows, I examine both the strong and weak forms of the rational-behavior model as well as several recent competitors. THE RATIONALITY PRINCIPLE As a point of orientation, I will begin with Karl Popper's well-known rationality principle. This will provide a framework and a language with which to discuss both rationality and the methodology of economics. Popper's principle will also prove • In writing this paper, I benefited from the comments ofChrysostomos Mantzavinos as well as of the participants in the conference on "Abandoning the Hypothesis of Omniscience in Economics: What are the Implications?" January