The Unreasonable Society: Foster and the Limits of Instrumental Valuation

摘要

J. Fagg Foster and Marc R. Tool (Foster's student) are the only institutional economists who have systematically explored the unreasonable society (Tool 1985) In particular, they are the only institutional economists to focus on valuation in non-rational societies. They are also among the few institutional economists to have written anything on fascist societies. (Karl Polanyi (1935] and Phillip Anthony O'Hara [2000] have both written on fascism; O'Hara's work explicitly addresses social valuation.) This is not unique to institutional economics. Since fascism is irrational and the western intellectual tradition is largely rationalist in character, there seems to be a tendency to dismiss fascism as an aberration, a divergence, a manifestation of evil, anything but a product of that same intellectual tradition. By focusing on social judgments, social value theory, and the relationship between individual, group, and societal valuational processes, one can see that the root of fascism - power as a criterion of judgment - is no less part of the valuational portfolio than other theories of value, and as much part of traditional culture as good parenting.