S. M. Amadae
"The Rationalizing of Capitalist Democracy: Cold War Rationality at a Crossroads with Deliberative Democracy? "

Thursday, October 26 Time:TBA
Location:TBA

Sponsored by The Humanities Center.

Abstract:

"Rational choice theory (RCT) has come to dominate many discussions of political economy from bargaining and jurisprudence, to democratic voting.   As a prominent social scientific method, typically RCT is thought to be value-free, and to have transcultural and transhistorical validity; it is thought by many researchers to be a universally applicable theory of human interactions.   Any attempt to locate the origins of RCT in the Cold War American struggle against communism is taken to resemble a ludicrous assertion of the social construction of scientific knowledge, or to hearken back to Marxist dialectical materialism.   In this paper I will bring these opposed approaches of context-dependent historicism and value-free univeralism to a focus by asking whether RCT undermines a communicative approach to democracy by either presupposed assumption, or research-driven conclusion.   It is well-known that the RCT approach to deliberative democracy treats communication simply as a means to acquire true beliefs in order to pursue self-interest, and not as a means to achieve normative consensus."

Profile:

Professor Amadae (Ohio State University) has research and teaching interests in political theory. She is author of Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago, 2003). She has written articles for Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, Economics and Philosophy, and the American Journal of Economics and Sociology. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Let Freedom Reign: Clarifying Liberty from the Time of the Enlightenment.