Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site gargoyle.UUCP
Path: utzoo!lsuc!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes
From: carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: A Tale of Lenin and the Tsar
Message-ID: <265@gargoyle.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 4-Dec-85 18:00:21 EST
Article-I.D.: gargoyle.265
Posted: Wed Dec  4 18:00:21 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 6-Dec-85 20:34:12 EST
Reply-To: carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Organization: U. of Chicago, Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 54
Summary: Rationalizing revolutionary ideology

I want to take a break from the controversies currently raging in
this newsgroup and post something which I think will be of general
interest.  The following is an excerpt from an unpublished lecture by
John E. Roemer, an economist at UC Davis.  A mathematically rigorous
version of the argument is published in *Econometrica* 53 (1985).
_______________

1.  INTRODUCTION.  Revolutions have been thought of by social
scientists, for the most part, as inexplicable or irrational events,
events exogenous to the jurisdiction of the models we build to
explain economic and social behavior.  (Historians, being less
enamored of models, have placed revolutions more centrally in the
purview of their discipline.)  The hurdle for economists and
political scientists in explaining revolutions is the collective
action problem:  why should any individual join a revolutionary
movement, when the costs to him of participation are potentially very
high, and the benefits, if the revolution succeeds, will be enjoyed
by him even without his participation?  Rosa Luxembourg was not
unaware of the problem of explaining mass action (she wrote on the
psychology of the mass strike); I suppose, in our modern jargon, she
could be translated as saying that in certain situations, the
preference structure of the Prisoner's Dilemma game does not
characterize how people think about participating or not
participating in the mass movement; they have, instead, what are
called Assurance Game preferences, in which each person derives more
utility from participating if others do than from defecting or
scabbing if others participate.  Saying this doesn't make it so, of
course, and the hyperrationality which characterizes economic theory
today pushes us to ask:  what, then, explains the switch in
preferences from those which characterize the "individualistic"
Prisoner's Dilemma, to those of the "cooperative" Assurance Game,
facilitating possibility of mass action?

In this talk, I sidestep this central question.  Too often, I think,
in economics, we fail to study phenomena because they don't make
sense given our way of thinking about things.  Or, worse, we deny a
phenomenon exists because we can't explain it.  The attitude of many
economists towards mass unemployment is an example of this last
casualty of our scientific method.  And while no one, so far as I
know, denies the existence of revolutions, they tend not to be
studied, not because of their unimportance, but because our present
models of individual behavior do not enable us to get to first base
in explaining them.  It is not a big step to conclude, as a
consequence of this failure of theory, that revolutions are
aberrations, or exogenous like earthquakes.  I have avoided calling
upon the *deus ex machina* of "paradigm myopia" to explain the
non-study of revolutions, because I do not wish to suggest that the
"other" so-called paradigm, Marxism, has all the answers regarding
them.  Certainly for Marxism revolution occupies a central place, but
I do not think Marxists have answered very well questions of
collective action and revolutionary dynamics.  [John Roemer]
[to be continued]
-- 
Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes