In a manner similar to the way in which the assumptions made about women
in the bar-scene from A Beautiful Mind are simplistic and reductive, these
premises require numerous critical remarks. They are presuppositions asserted
at the outset of theorizing; they are not proven or derived out of empirical
study of social action. And yet, these assumptions subtly outline a very pre-
cise theory of human nature and rationality, which are based, as we shall see,
on a not-so-subtle economic ideology.
The first premise reduces rationality to the calculation of costs and benefits.
Thinking, in this view, is limited to what Max Horkheimer and Theodor
Adorno call “instrumental reasoning,” and it is this reductive understanding
of reason that they criticize positivism for fostering. Drawing on Max Weber ’s
distinction between value and purposive social action, their work sought to
defend a broader and more nuanced understanding of rationality. As Hork-
heimer wrote, “When the idea of reason was conceived, it was intended to
achieve more than the mere regulation of the relation between means and
ends; it was regarded as the instrument for understanding the ends, for deter-
mining them” (1974:10).^6 In the presuppositions of rational choice theory,
there is no place for the determination of ends; reason’s sole purpose is to
employ the means at hand to achieve whatever particular end is desired. Like
Marx before them, the two Frankfurt School theorists consider such a divorce
of thought from practice and context to be an abstract form of unthinking
irrationality, which leaves the human subject vulnerable to the manipulations
of ideology and impulse: “It is as if thinking itself had been reduced to the
level of industrial process, subject to a close schedule – in short, made part
and parcel of production” (1974:21). By confining what is taken to be ratio-
nal thought to the task of purposive calculation, without submitting existing
presuppositions or desired ends to self-examination, Adorno and Horkheimer
argue that “instrumental thinking” becomes ideological and blind to unrec-
ognized (and quite possibly erroneous) assumptions.
The extent to which rational choice theory reduces rationality to means-
ends instrumental thinking is striking. In Foundations of Social Theory(1990),
for example, James S. Coleman goes so far as to claim that Max Weber suggests
that human beings “act purposively towards a goal, with the goal (and thus
the actions) shaped by values or preferences” (p. 13). In Coleman’s method-
ology, “nothing more than this commonsense notion of purposive action is
From A Beautiful Mindto the Beautiful Soul • 157(^6) Here the influence of Kant’s distinction between Vernunft(Reason) and Verstand
(Understanding) is in evidence.