Gary Becker, Democracy, and the Rationality of the Marketplace

We are zeroing in on the core of the course. If our social actions are entirely mediated by the marketplace, then it stands to reason that these actions will lend themselves to the kinds of analysis practiced by the most rigorous price theorists at Chicago. And it also stands to reason that any and all outside interference in the marketplace will not only introduce elements into stochastic multivariate regression tables that make it impossible to draw accurate inferences, but precisely because they make rational inferences less likely they play havoc on a social formation shaped entirely (or mostly) by market forces.

This, of course, is a social tautology (or nearly such). But it is also what social scientists sometimes call a “real abstraction” in the sense that it is not a fiction, but actually has come to express itself in the ways that individuals and communities are constituted and social relations are mediated. However, even in its reality it remains an abstraction insofar as the interpretive categories by which it is grasped fit into a rational whole that remains self-referential by design and not by accident.

At the end of next week, the floor will drop out of the bottom of this self-referential system when Allen Bloom faults the victims of this closed system for their own increasing incapacity to think outside of it. In this way, the social and historical will be increasingly attenuated from two sides; from the side of economic neoclassical thought, on the one hand, and from the side of post-democratic political theory on the other.

Think of the largest roller coaster you have ever been on. You are plummeting to its trough. But now you are jolted from the side as well. Wow!