Suchergebnisse

Bien que relevant de la philosophie politique et morale, il est bien connu que Théorie de la justice a également eu un grand impact sur les économistes. À ce titre, Rawls a beaucoup insisté sur sa volonté de combiner économie et philosophie, en particulier via la théorie du choix rationnel, affirmant notamment que « la théorie de la justice est une partie, peut-être même la plus importante, de la théorie du choix rationnel » (Rawls [1971]). Après la publication de Théorie de la justice, certains aspects de celle-ci ont fait l'objet de critiques – souvent très véhémentes – de la part d'économistes tels que Arrow [1973], Musgrave [1974], Harsanyi [1975] et plus tard Sen [1980]. Les réponses immédiates de Rawls ([1974a], [1974b] en particulier) indiquent qu'il a tout d'abord souhaité maintenir un dialogue avec les économistes, mais les évolutions ultérieures de ses travaux ([1993], [2001]) ont clairement démontré qu'il s'était éloigné de la théorie économique, revenant à la philosophie afin de surmonter les incohérences internes de sa théorie. Dans cet article, en me concentrant principalement sur les échanges épistolaires entre Rawls et les économistes avant et après la publication de Théorie de la justice, je tente de mettre en lumière d'autres éléments (complémentaires) qui peuvent expliquer le retrait de Rawls vis-à-vis de l'économie, et son désenchantement progressif quant à la possibilité d'un dialogue sur un pied d'égalité entre économistes et philosophes. JEL Codes: B21, B31, D63.

The death of welfare economics has been declared several times. One of the reasons cited for these plural obituaries is that Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem, as set out in his pathbreaking Social Choice and Individual Values in 1951, has shown that the social welfare function—one of the main concepts of the new welfare economics as defined by Abram Bergson (Burk) in 1938 and clarified by Paul Samuelson in the Foundations of Economic Analysis—does not exist under reasonable conditions. Indeed, from the very start, Arrow kept asserting that his famous impossibility result has direct and devastating consequences for the Berg-son-Samuelson social welfare function, though he seemed to soften his position in the early eighties. On his side, especially from the seventies on, Samuelson remained active on this issue and continued to defend the concept he had devised with Bergson, tooth and nail, against Arrow's attacks. The aim of this article is precisely to examine this rather strange controversy, which is almost unknown in the scientific community, even though it lasted more than fifty years and involved a conflict between two economic giants, Arrow and Samuelson, and, behind them, two distinct communities—welfare economics, which was on the wane, against the emerging social choice theory—representing two conflicting ways of dealing with mathematical tools in welfare economics and two different conceptions of social welfare.

L'objectif de cet article est d'étudier les concepts de liberté mis en œuvre par John Rawls et Amartya Sen à la lumière de deux couples bien connus de liberté : le couple liberté des Anciens/liberté des Modernes défini par Constant et le couple liberté négative/liberté positive défini par Berlin. Après un rappel des textes fondateurs de ces couples, nous montrerons que bien que principalement fondée sur le couple liberté des Anciens/liberté des Modernes, la théorie de la justice comme équité de Rawls s'intéresse également à l'effectivité des libertés de base et donc au couple liberté négative/liberté positive. De même, axée d'emblée sur le couple liberté négative/liberté positive, l'œuvre de Sen – notamment ses derniers travaux mettant en avant l'importance de la démocratie – entretient des relations privilégiées avec le couple liberté des Anciens/liberté des Modernes. Cette analyse nous permettra en dernière instance de questionner le clivage récemment introduit par Sen entre approches transcendantale et comparative. JEL classification : B21, B4, D63

The aim of this article is to take stock of the Sen liberal paradox debate so as to identify a number of approaches to a credible resolution. We demonstrate that, when authors propose solutions to the Pareto-liberal conflict, they ultimately show a marked conceptual preference for one or another condition that in the end weakens the competing condition. We argue that these attempts, none of which is truly satisfactory, reveal the independence effects at the root of the paradox. Explicitly detailed by some, intuited by others, these effects are rarely taken into account globally, for if they were we would then be led to reconsider formalism as a whole, and not merely one condition or another. After Arrow's, the Pareto-liberal paradox can thus be regarded as a second impossibility theorem, once more affirming the failure of the new welfare economics.

The Philosophy of Economics primarily considers the economic agent as a moral subject. Economics, however, has long overlooked the agent's moral - that is to say, reasonable -dimension, to focus instead on the strictly rational. This volume seeks to address this neglected topic through exploring the Individual and the Other.The economic agent refers to "himself" (herself) in terms of his desire and passions, yet also refers to others besides himself. For the rational economic agent, what is the nature of this relationship with the Other? Should it not be understood as undergoing a transformation once we come to consider the economic agent as a reasonable being? Through what process does the Other pass from being an instrument at the disposal of a rational agent to being an end in itself for a moral subject? In other words, how does another become "an Other"? These questions are behind the re-examination of certain fundamental notions which takes place in this book, an examination which involves a re-reading of certain great authors. With contributions from authors around the world, this work is divided into three main parts. The first deals with individuals from the history of economic thought such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt; this is then followed by a thematic section in which the concepts of recognition and subjectivity are questioned in a market context. Finally, the third part offers an analysis of the issue of "the Individual and the Other" in different fields of the recent economic analysis including game theory, decision theory or social choice.The Individual and the Other in Economic Thought aims to help the reader better understand how the relationship between the Individual and the Other has been conceived, conceptualized and framed in economic analysis. It will be of great use to graduate students, scholars and any reader interested in this crucial issue.

Starting from a distinction made by the American philosopher, John Rawls, in 2000 between two kinds of liberalism, "liberalism of freedom" and "liberalism of happiness", this book presents a range of articles by economists and philosophers debating the most fundamental aspects of the subject. These include the exact significance of Rawls' distinction and how it can be related to European political philosophy on the one hand and to utilitarianism on the other hand; the various definitions of happiness and freedom and their implications and the informational basis of individual preferences.