Five - Self-Education as the End of Economic Life

Summary

takes up the issue of human ‘self-education’ first raised in the Preface. The Marxist theory of self-education is compared with the approach of utilitarians/consequentialists to human agency that underpins (at least to some extent) much of the recent work in the field of economic psychology. It is argued that these two approaches are not as incompatible as is often assumed. More broadly, the author engages with recent work in the psychology of cooperation, which intersects in important ways with both Marxist and consequentialist approaches.