MICHAEL McPHERSON
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influential book,
The Logic of Collective Action,
which demonstrated
the impossibility of large scale political action just before the upris–
ing against the war in Vietnam broke out.
Hirschman views the disabilities of his disappointment-prone
and self-judgmental actors as valuable not only for the descriptive
merits of his theory, but for the richness of their lives as well. As
Hirschman says, "They are superior to the 'rational actor' inasmuch
as they can conceive of
various
states of happiness, are able to trans–
cend one in order to achieve the other, and thus escape from the
boredom of permanently operating on the basis of a single, stable set
of preferences . Quite likely, these nobler and richer qualities of our
actors are closely related to their bungling and blundering ways."
Both Schelling and Hirschman like to stay close to the ground
of example and historical narrative: they yield up theoretical gen–
eralizations and especially moral implications only reluctantly and
with considerable circumspection. In some respects Amartya Sen
stands at an opposite extreme. There are few economists in the world
with a comparable flair for abstract analysis, and fewer with a com–
parable penchant for explicit moral theorizing. And yet the results of
Sen's investigations in the fields of welfare economics and social
choice theory - the economists' label for the systematic formal study
of the ethical implications of economic arrangements- bear a con–
siderable kinship with the work of Hirschman and Schelling. For
Sen's persistent point has been that it is crucial not to give up the
moral essentials of the problems of social choice in the attempt to
make them analytically tractable. His gift as a theorist has been to
find ways to give formal expression to those features of personal and
social valuation that slip through the cracks of standard neoclassical
formulations. And some of these features are the same ones that
Hirschman and Schelling have been concerned with.
A good example is the "metapreference" notion, developed in–
dependently by Sen and the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, and bor–
rowed by Hirschman for his analysis of ideology. In the usual neo–
classical formulation, a person is simply a bundle of preferences, and
his moral ideals, if they enter the analysis at all, enter simply as
some among his preferences - his taste for honesty being on a par
with his taste for peanut butter. The difficulties with such a formula–
tion are several. First , it leaves no room for the commonsense idea
that a person may live up to his moral ideals at the expense of satisfy–
ing his preferences. We need not endorse a particular person's con-
