研究報告書

Strategy and Community : Critical Notes on the Post-Walrasian Microeconomics

eng

67

1

92

1998-07-24

Version of Record

The most fundamental assumption of the contract paradigm and game theory is the primacy of strategic rationality over other modes of social interactions. Under this assumption, human actions are taken as strategies, communication as information transmission, the subjectivity of an individual as incentive, and social institutions as strategic interactions. The social institution of contract cannot be, however, reduced to strategic interactions. Contract presupposes, and is embedded within, community, i.e. a certain context of common understandings and shared values which cannot be manipulated by strategic actions. On the other hand, community should be understood as an analytical concept, not simply as a normative one; community should be viewed as a basic technique of organizing society. Exclusion of the outsiders and suppression of the insiders are both negative aspects of community. In an attempt to explain social interactions in terms of individual strategic rationality, game theory pursues its logical implications. The attempt is, however, doomed to failure, since community is constitutive of the self. One of the symptoms of the failure is the Nash program which aims at reducing every moment of community to strategic rationality. Another is the notion that the thinking processes of human beings, once axiomatized or formulated as an algorithm, may be crucial to an understanding of social interactions. ln this sense, game theory is in itself a reductio ad adsurdum on a grand scale. Market economy can be captured neither by the Walrasian picture nor by the contract paradigm cum game theory. It is inherently related to money and capital which have their own modi operandi, on the one hand, and is embedded within life world (i.e. the most basic level of community), on the other.

Working Paper