Reviews for Indeterminacy and society

The average rating for Indeterminacy and society based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-01-31 00:00:00 Chaz Rodgers Russell Hardin was one of the most underrated political philosophers of the 20th century. He was underrated probably because he didn't fit neatly into disciplinary silos--too empirical and concerned with feasibility for the direction political philosophy took after Rawls, and too normative for positive economics. Nevertheless, Hardin sees himself as continuing a line of utilitarian thinkers including Hume, Smith, Bentham, Mill and Sidgwick who were all explicitly concerned with both positive social science and normative inquiry. This tradition fell apart during the turn of the century as positive economics and moral philosophy diverged, with moral philosophers turning to questions about the nature of moral concepts (for example GE Moore) and positive economics toward the specific frameworks of general and partial-equilibrium analysis (Walras, Marshall). Hardin sees this divergence between economics and political philosophy as a tragedy, and his life's corpus beginning with /Morality within the Limits of Reason/ and continuing through /Indeterminacy and Society/ can be understood as an effort to bring the developments of 20th century economics (particularly game theory) to bear on utilitarian moral philosophy. /Indeterminacy and Society/ is organized around the core idea that social life is inherently strategic, and hence indeterminate. Social interaction means that unintended consequences of individual's action are everywhere, and the outcomes of interaction are unpredictable. Hardin draws out the implications of this core idea in a variety of areas. The first chapter on the iterated prisoner's dilemma (PD) is terrific and worth the price of the book on its own. Here Hardin argues against various arguments for determinate equilibria (such as backward induction) in the iterated PD. Hardin's argument cautions against simplistic interpretations or applications of game theory in social science/normative theory in favor of a more contextual and empirical approach. The other chapters either criticize various moral and political theories for ignoring indeterminacy, or identify various principles for managing indeterminacy. One comes away from this book with a renewed appreciation in light of indeterminacy, for example, Hobbes' argument for the state and the Coase theorem, but also a healthy sense of humility about the limits of moral and political argument. Hardin is in no sense a conservative or reactionary political thinker--he rather thinks that improvement requires awareness of what principles our best social science truly supports and the diversity of social institutions in the world. Political philosophy has too few thinkers like Hardin, which makes his recent passing all the more tragic.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-04-15 00:00:00 Lawren Perry Gotta read it for a political theory class. Only read chapter one. It was OK.