Rationality and the Janus-faced character of human reason

.

Chapter 4 in Rethinking Economics as Social Theory, 2022, pp 59-73 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Janus was a Roman god who typically was portrayed as facing in opposing directions. Reason is a human capacity that, through its reduction to an ideology, enables a theorist to point in opposing directions. While reason is a universal human quality, it resembles Janus in its ability to face different directions. What enables this two-facedness is the ideology of rationality. The substantive content of rationality can face in opposing directions due to recognition that data can never speak for themselves because they require a theorist to speak for them. Rationality comes in many forms, which renders its Janus-faced quality inescapable. For instance, a theory of public goods can be used to characterize market systems as riven with failure. All the same, a theory of public goods can also be used to explain how people continually develop new institutional arrangements through which they govern their activities.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Politics and Public Policy Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/9781802204766.00008.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:21161_4

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().