SOME REFLECTIONS ON RATIONALITY

Our previous discussion of rationality ended in a polarization of

opinion between Tom, who argued that most social action can be

understood in terms of rational behavior, as an expression of

rationality broadly defined as adequacy of means to ends, and

others who argued that most people behaved in non-rational ways,

meaning that most social action did not reflect a process of

selection of adequate means, but ideologies, norms, tradition,

and/ or psychological factors. A different criticism had to do

with the proper object of sociology as a discipline which is

qualitatively different from economics; economics studies the

rational optimizing, calculating behavior of individuals, while

sociology is the study of the unanticipated consequences of

behavior.

Today I would like to present some reflections about these

issues, about the difference between sociology and economics,

about rational and normative behavior, and about the contribution

of historical materialism to the understanding of the place of

rationality in social theory and research. The substance of what

I intend to say can be stated as follows:

Economics is all about how people make choices.

Sociology is all about why they don't have any choices

to make. Historical materialism is all about how and why

people make historically specific choices.

To illustrate my points, I will use a concrete example: the

analysis of fertility behavior:

The Economic Theory of Fertility:

Children are viewed as consumer durables or as household produced

goods. Households (like firms) behave rationally, maximizing their

utility in a context of scarcity. If children are consumer goods

in competition with other goods, the determinants of fertility are

households' taste (which are taken as given), and income and price

constraints. If children are household produced goods, as they

are labor intensive goods, fertility will be a function of taste,

income, prices, and time constraints or opportunity costs.

A key aspect of this perspective is the importance given to house-

hold choice. Households rationally choose, among various bundles

of children and commodities, that which maximizes their utility.

The sociological criticism

Sociologically, people make their rational and voluntary repro-

ductive choices in an institutional context that constrains them

not to choose non-marriage, not to choose childlessness, not to

choose only one child, and even not to limit themselves to two

children. Parents cannot freely choose the quality and quantity of

children. Quantity interacts with quality (only children have

problems). Parents are not free to choose between possible

combinations of high and low quality of children and must comply

with socially established minimum standards of child quality.

Unlike consumer durables, children cannot be returned if they do

not conform to expectations and society intervenes when, in

extreme cases, parents make socially unacceptable choices (such as

asking doctors not to feed babies with certain physical defects).

Fertility does not reflect households or individuals' taste for

children, but social norms about desired family size.

In my view, it is as misleading and one sided to see social action

simply as rational action, as it is to reject rationality and

adopt an oversocialized model of social actors. Rational choice

theory asks us not to reduce individuals to black boxes that

connect structures, while sociologists reminds us that individuals

always act in a pre-given, pre-existent social context. Each

perspective rests upon the radical separation between individuals

and society; from the standpoint of historical materialism, that

separation can be overcome through the realization that each

discipline deals with different levels of reality or patterns of

determination (ideology, and the market) which, dialectically, are

parts of a greater totality that includes a mode production and

corresponding class relations.

Historical materialism deals with the connections between the

capitalist mode of production and class relations, market level

relations between individuals, and their political, ideological

and legal conditions of reproduction through time.

From this standpoint, formal rationality (the adequacy of

means to ends) in isolation from its historical context, is

insufficient to explain behavior. For example, formally rational

behavior can result in families of different sizes but to know

whether any given size is rational or not, one has to go outside

the behavior itself. Having only one child would go against the

dominant norms in most Third World countries whereas having large

families is irrational in the context of developed countries. To

know whether an action is rational or not one needs to know more

than whether the means were adequate to the ends. Sociologically

the something more has to do with norms, values or ideologies. For

historical materialism the something more has to do with the kinds

of opportunity structures open to different classes and sectors of

classes and the relationschip between those differentiated options

and the overall logic of the mode of production as a whole.

There are three ways of conceptualizing rationality:

The general principle of rationality (all behavior is

rational behavior and rational behavior, whatever its goal, is

optimizing or, more modestly, satisficing behavior) reflects a

universal feature of human nature. The classical economists

deduced the capitalist system of free competition from human

nature: i.e., from the rational behavior of individuals who, in

pursuit of their selfish goals, create a system that benefits the

collectivity. This is an ideal pseudoorigin of capitalism, the

classical apologia for the system.

Rationality is a product of capitalist development. Before

capitalism, people behaved in traditional ways. The notion of a

modernization process, the transition from traditional society

and a traditional, natural economy, to modern society, ruled by

reason and characterized by an economy based on rational

individual behavior. The rationality principle appears with the

development of money, commodity production and generalized

exchange, which made it necessary to seek maximum profits, keep

books, and engage in optimizing calculations. The spread of eco-

nomic rationality or, in Max Weber's terms, the process of

rationalization of the world follows.

Rationality is is always historical; i.e., a behavior is

considered rational only within the context of its conditions of

possibility which establish both the means and the ends of social

action. There is a connection between the rationality of

individuals and the rationality of the social system in which they

live and make choices. Under capitalist conditions, individuals

make choices in the context of class, race and sexual relations

characterized by exploitation and inequality. Voluntary rational

social actions rest upon unfree, coerced and narrow options. The

level of analysis of market and social relations is the sphere of

Freedom, Equality and Property and Bentham; buyers and sellers of

commodities and people making choices and entering in relations

with others are constrained only by their free will. At the level

of class, race and gender relations there is neither freedom nor

equality and the rationality of those who are absolutely or

relatively powerless is subordinate to the rationality of the

dominant classes. Rational behavior among workers, non-whites and

women is rational in so far as it fits within the logic of class

domination, profit maximization, and racial and gender domination.

For example, the U.S. capitalist class celebrates the struggles of

solidarity in Poland while at the same time doing its best to

do away with unions in the U.S. Today only 15% of the labor force

is unionized; workers rationally and freely chose to give up gains

obtained through long struggles.

Max Weber aware - quotes - value and means - Marx brings

those together.

Reliance on a general principle of rationality assumes that

teaching people to behave rationally will somehow change their

behavior. Concretely, the teaching of family planning and making

contraceptives available is unlikely to lead to changes in family

size, in the absence of concomitant changes in the opportunity

structure of men and women and in the power relations between the

sexes. Family planningi