One prominent component of America’s basic vocabulary is ”individualism.” Our society accords unique rights and freedoms to individuals, and we are so proud of these that we recurrently seek to install them in other countries. But individualism, the desire to control one’s own life, has many variants. Tocqueville viewed it as selfishness and suspected it, while Emerson and Whitman viewed it as the moment-by-moment expression of one’s unique self and loved it.
After World War II, a third variant gained momentum in America. It defined individualism as the making of choices so as to maximize one’s preferences. This differed from “selfish individualism” in that the preferences were not specified: they could be altruistic as well as selfish. It differed from “expressive individualism” in having general algorithms by which choices were made. These made it rational.
This form of individualism did not arise by chance. Alex Abella’s “Soldiers of Reason” (2008) and S. M. Amadae’s “Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy” (2003) trace it to the RAND Corporation, the hyperinfluential Santa Monica, Calif., think tank, where it was born in 1951 as “rational choice theory.” Rational choice theory’s mathematical account of individual choice, originally formulated in terms of voting behavior, made it a point-for-point antidote to the collectivist dialectics of Marxism; and since, in the view of many cold warriors, Marxism was philosophically ascendant worldwide, such an antidote was sorely needed. Functionaries at RAND quickly expanded the theory from a tool of social analysis into a set of universal doctrines that we may call “rational choice philosophy.” Governmental seminars and fellowships spread it to universities across the country, aided by the fact that any alternative to it would by definition be collectivist. During the early Cold War, that was not exactly a good thing to be.
Leif Parsons
The overall operation was wildly successful. Once established in universities, rational choice philosophy moved smoothly on the backs of their pupils into the “real world” of business and government (aided in the crossing, to be sure, by the novels of another Rand—Ayn). Today, governments and businesses across the globe simply assume that social reality is merely a set of individuals freely making rational choices. Wars have been and are still being fought to bring such freedom to Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Grenadans, and now Libyans, with more nations surely to come.
At home, anti-regulation policies are crafted to appeal to the view that government must in no way interfere with Americans’ freedom of choice. Even religions compete in the marketplace of salvation, eager to be chosen by those who, understandably, prefer heaven to hell. Today’s most zealous advocates of individualism, be they on Wall Street or at Tea Parties, invariably forget their origins in a long ago program of government propaganda.
Rational choice philosophy, to its credit, made clear and distinct claims in philosophy’s three main areas. Ontologically, its emphasis on individual choice required that reality present a set of discrete alternatives among which one could choose: linear “causal chains” which intersected either minimally, trivially, or not at all. Epistemologically, that same emphasis on choice required that at least the early stages of such chains be knowable with something akin to certainty, for if our choice is to be rational we need to know what we are choosing. Knowledge thus became foundationalistic and incremental.
But the real significance of rational choice philosophy lay in ethics. Rational choice theory, being a branch of economics, does not question people’s preferences; it simply studies how they seek to maximize them. Rational choice philosophy seems to maintain this ethical neutrality (see Hans Reichenbach’s 1951 “The Rise of Scientific Philosophy,” an unwitting masterpiece of the genre); but it does not. Whatever my preferences are, I have a better chance of realizing them if I possess wealth and power. Rational choice philosophy thus promulgates a clear and compelling moral imperative: increase your wealth and power!
Today, institutions which help individuals do that (corporations, lobbyists) are flourishing; the others (public hospitals, schools) are basically left to rot. Business and law schools prosper; philosophy departments are threatened with closure.
Rational choice theory came under fire after the economic crisis of 2008, but remains central to economic analysis. Rational choice philosophy, by contrast, was always implausible. Hegel, for one, had denied all three of its central claims in his “Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences” over a century before. In that work, as elsewhere in his writings, nature is not neatly causal, but shot through with randomness. Because of this chaos, we cannot know the significance of what we have done until our community tells us; and ethical life correspondingly consists, not in pursuing wealth and power, but in integrating ourselves into the right kinds of community.
