Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T10:05:20.216Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Rationality and Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Nancy Holmstrom
Nancy Holmstrom*
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, Newark
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The question of an action's rationality has two aspects: 1) the ‘appropriateness’ of the action given the beliefs held and 2) the ‘reasonableness’ of the beliefs themselves or of holding those beliefs. The former involves questions of motivation, the latter epistemology. This paper will concentrate on the former aspect of the question.

One way of understanding rational motivation is so widely accepted as to seem incontrovertible to many of its proponents. This is the sense of rationality as maximization of utility. Although individual action is motivated by many things, the claim is that when behavior is rational it can be understood as an attempt to maximize utility. Rationality in this view has solely to do with means, not ends. The only restriction on an agent's ends is that they form a coherent set and whatever the content of the utility at which the agent aims, it is presumed to be open-ended. The theory is descriptive in that it says that (normal) people act this way most of the time and also normative in that behavior which does not fit the model is Judged irrational.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , September 1983 , pp. 305 - 325
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1983

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This paper was written while on leave supported by the Rutgers University Faculty Academic Study Program. An earlier draft was presented at the Morris Raphael Cohen Centenary Conference Rationality in Thought and Action at the City College of the City University of New York, October 1980. I would like to thank Andrew Levine and Richard Anthony Smith for helpful discussion and comments.

References

1 Rawls, John A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1971)Google Scholar section 25, pp. 60-68. For criticisms of Rawls’ use of the concept of rationality, see Gibson, Mary ‘Rationality,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs, 6 (1976–7)Google Scholar; Schwartz, Adina ‘Moral Autonomy and Primary Goods,’ Ethics 83 (1973–4)Google Scholar. See also Braithwaite, R.B. Theory of Games as a Tool of the Moral Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1955,)Google Scholar. For criticism of Braithwaite's approach, see Lucas, J.R. ‘Moralists and Gamesmen,’ Philosophy, 34 (1959)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sen, A.K. Collective Choice and Social Welfare (San Francisco: Holden-Day 1970)Google Scholar.

2 In my opinion, egoism as a general theory of human motivation was long ago shown to be either false or tautological. The locus classicus of this critique is Butler, J. Five Sermons (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1950)Google Scholar, especially Sermons IV and V. A contemporary philosophical discussion is Nagel, T. The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1970)Google Scholar. Whether egoism is even true as a theory of economic behavior is also questionable. Cf. Sen, A.K. ‘Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioural Foundations of Economic Theory,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs, 6 (1976-7)Google Scholar; Hollis, M. and Nell, E.J. Rational Economic Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Luce, R.D. and Raiffa, H. the authors of Games and Decisions (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1975)Google Scholar grant that the assumption of rationality is a tautology but hold that it is a useful one in their abstract theory.

3 Olson, Mancur The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1965)Google Scholar

4 Buchanan, Allen ‘Revolutionary Motivation and Morality,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs, 9 (1979-80) 65Google Scholar; Olson, p. 64. Buchanan's, article is chapter 5 of his very interesting book Marx and Justice (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield 1982)Google Scholar.

5 Selective incentives are benefits and costs that affect individuals selectively according to whether or not they participate. For example, Olson explains the development of large scale union organization in the United States as primarily due to their success in winning the closed shop, which gives workers the choice of Joining the union or losing their Job. This is disputed by, among others, Douglas Booth in ‘Collective Action, Marx's, Class Theory and the Union Movement,’ Journal of Economic Issues, 12 (1978)Google Scholar.

6 Olson, 108-9

7 Buchanan seems to assume that this is required: see p. 72.

8 Luxemburg, Rosa The Mass Strike (London: Merlin Press 1925), 35Google Scholar. The recent events in Poland provide a clear example of this in that struggles in 1956, 1970 and 1976 were crucial to the successes in 1980-1. The current defeat will nevertheless provide lessons for the future.

9 Anatol Rapoport and Chamman, Albert M. Prisoner's Dilemma: A Study in Conflict and Cooperation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1964)Google Scholar; Rapoport, A. ‘Prisoner's Dilemma — Recollections and Observations,’ in Rapoport, A. ed., Game Theory as a Theory of Conflict Resolution (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co. 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Mathew Edel uses these results to explain how working class actions can be individually rational in ‘A Note on Collective Action, Maximization, and the Prisoner's Dilemma,’ Journal of Economic Issues, 13 (1979).

10 The Los Angeles Times, August 30, 1980, p. 18

11 See Edel, 755.

12 See Frederic Schick, ‘Rationality and Sociality,’ Rutgers University, unpublished.

13 Actually it is questionable whether utility theory can explain even this. See Sen, Collective Choice and Social Welfare, 195.

14 Engaging in collective action out of moral conviction could be understood as individualistically rational if the person's feeling of self-satisfaction for so acting and guilt at not acting provide sufficient selective incentives. However, if we interpret ‘selective incentives’ so broadly, the theory explains everything and hence nothing. For this reason Olson does not include such factors as selective incentives. See 61, fn 17. So actions taken because of moral convictions do not fit the model of action motivated along individualistically rational lines.

15 On the importance of this factor, see Moore, Barrington Jr. Injustice — The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains, NY: M.E. Sharpe Inc. 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially Chapter 14. One might question how one could say that they wanted it if they did not know that they wanted it, but their response when they Judge it to be at hand shows that they had wanted it all along. See Brandt, Richard B. and Kim, Jaegwon ‘Wants as Explanations of Actions,’ Journal of Philosophy, 60 (1969)Google Scholar.

16 For example, the initial demand of the Polish strikers in August 1980 was to lower the price of meat and ended in demands that amounted to fundamental restructuring of the society. In Russia in 1917 and in France in 1968, protesters began with economic demands and within a week were calling for the overthrow of the government and for socialism.

17 One problem with the arguments of Olson and Buchanan is that they seem to assume that Marx must have a single factor theory.

18 Luxemburg, 51

19 Luce and Raiffa, 112. For discussion of the Prisoner's Dilemma as an example showing the non-optimality of individual utility maximization, see pp. 94-102.

20 Luce and Raiffa, 115

21 Gauthier, David ‘Reason and Maximization,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 4 (1974-75)Google Scholar

22 Some of these points are specifically Marxist; others would be more widely accepted.

23 Capital, Vol. I (New York: International Publishers 1967), 177

24 ‘… even the most abstract categories, despite their validity — precisely because of their abstractness — for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of this abstraction, themselves a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations.’ Grundrisse, 105. One problem with Buchanan's discussion of the historicist reply is that he imagines it as only directed against the concept rationality and argues correctly that the problem of explaining revolutionary activity remains. However, the historicist critique also applies to the descriptive theory.

25 Gauthier agrees that this conception of rationality emerged in the modern period but it is not clear what he think accounts for the historical change: see 43.

26 Olson, 108; Buchanan, 74

27 Buchanan also argues that if Marxists wish to give some role to moral principles in their account of revolutionary motivation, they ‘must produce an adequate moral principle or set of principles’ (81). This is mistaken. The question we have been addressing in this paper is whether the motivation of revolutionaries in Marx's sense is rational, (a question of rational agency). The question of the rationality of Marxist beliefs is a distinct though related question. For a challenge to the usual counterposition of rational and moral considerations in the acceptance of hypotheses, see James Gaa, ‘Moral Autonomy and the Rationality of Science,’ Philosophy of Science, 44.

28 Gauthier, 412.

29 See, for example, Grundrisse, 84; The German Ideology, in Tucker, Robert ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, (New York: Norton and Company 1978), 150Google Scholar, 157; Capital l, xix, 177.

30 Grundrisse, 83

31 Generality could be achieved simply by requiring that rationality be evaluated in terms of rules rather than acts. Though this would be more consistent with Marxism with respect to generality, it would not be any consistent in other respects.

32 U.S. Steel recently demonstrated this point when they used the money they had gotten from concessions granted by U.S. steelworkers to save their Jobs to buy Marathon Oil Company.

33 Adina Schwartz argues this last point against Rawls. See G.A. Cohen's critique of Max Weber's making of capitalism's preference for output into a canon of rationality. Marx's, Karl Theory of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978), 320Google Scholar.

34 See Sen, ‘Rational Fools …’ and Gauthier.

35 On the Marxist view consciousness has its origins in the social forms of production; when the latter is under conscious collective control, so to that extent will the former. This is developed in my ‘Free Will and a Marxist Concept of Natural Wants,’ Philosophical Forum, 6.4.

36 Though this is a point well worth developing, I have nothing particular to say here about the method of determining social preferences in socialism/communism except that 1) the Marxist view is that social choice is connected to individual preferences, (though exactly how is complicated); 2) Marxists’ critique of what they call ‘bourgeois democracy’ is not so much a critique of its formal system of collective choice — majority rule, (though there might be better mechanisms), as a charge that the issues decided by voting, how the voting is organized, and of course, the power relations make the system de facto one of minority rule. For Marx's view of ‘rights’ (restrictions on majority rule), see The Critique of the Gotha Program in Tucker.

37 Capital, II, 315, 75

38 Capital, I, 542

39 See Gerald A. Cohen's ‘The Withering Away of Social Science,’ Appendix in Karl Marx's Theory of History. For a fascinating discussion of the relationship between forms of consciousness and modes of production, see Sohn-Rethel, Alfred Intellectual and Manual Labor (London: MacMillan and Co. 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Gibson, 213 ff.

41 Gibson, 217. This critique is developed in the context of discussing Rawls’ use of the (supposedly) ‘value-neutral’ utility maximization conception of rationality.

42 Whether some non-individualist but still utility maximizing approach would be sufficient to solve this is a further question.