Michael McPherson
ON SCHELLING, HIRSCHMAN, AND SEN:
REVISING THE CONCEPTION OF THE SELF
A common theme in the recent work of Amartya Sen,
Albert Hirschman, and Thomas Schelling is that the peculiarly
resilient but abstract conception of "economic man" that continues to
underlie most economic analysis has come to be an impediment to
the deeper understanding of some important features of social real–
ity. It is offurther interest that all three thinkers, while starting from
a concern to make economics more intellectually coherent and con–
vincing, wind up by making it morally deeper as well .
One must revert to the "turn" that modern economics took two
hundred years ago to appreciate the significance of this new direc–
tion. The economics of Francis Hutcheson, the teacher of Adam
Smith, was embedded in the conceptions of moral obligations and
duties, and the social unit was the household. Starting with Adam
Smith, economics began to detach itself from institutions-from
moral economy and even political economy - and in the end to con–
cern itself only with a single activity,
economizing.
To do so, it made a
number of crucial, simplifying assumptions. It took the individual as
the actor; it assumed he could and would act rationally and that he
would seek to maximize his gains and minimize his losses. When one
added a metric to these ideas, one could quantify the amounts of
supply and demand (as reflected in monetary units) and set up
elegant equations to chart the interactions of these variables. Some
writers, notably Thorstein Veblen, C. E. Ayres, and John Kenneth
Galbraith, questioned the absence of their institutional settings, but
cogent as these challenges were, they themselves could only be his–
torical or descriptive, not analytical. What Schelling, Hirschman,
and Sen are doing is questioning, from within, the conception of the
"rational actor" seeking only to advance his gain, and showing how
attention to the complexities of human motivation can enrich eco–
nomic analysis. More technically, they are questioning the utilitari–
anism which underlies neoclassical economic theory.
It
is a matter of taste or definition whether or not to label the
economic man who populates most economic theory "selfish." A
number of the particular results of familiar economic models - in-
