Introduction

Abstract

Individuals make choices, reveal preferences and perform actions. Their subjectivity may be purposively self-interested and calculatively rational, but their calculus is still constrained and their freedom the plaything of others. From the past comes the multi-period constitutional conservatism of roles and rules, conventions and habits, the moral consensus and the traditional standard which stultify innovativeness even as they cocoon the socialised actor in an external web that is an ongoing culture. In the present there is the problem of interdependence of preferences and their consequences for, just as Robinson Crusoe and Friday cannot both win the race for relative standing purchased via conspicuous consumption of acknowledged status symbols, so Sir Robinson, immobilised in a monumental traffic-jam despite the fact that he himself is driving but one car, is bound to recall with some nostalgia the halcyon days alone on his island when his discrete and unique actions were not served up polluted with the actions of others. With respect to the future, finally, there is the uncertainty and unknowledge that is the inevitable concomitant of decisions made in advance of outcomes being known, both in the case of the isolated individual (as where the rational consumer must estimate the utility to him of the apple in advance of having established whether or not its taste actually satisfies his expectations) and a fortiori in the case of the individual who knows he is not alone (as where the rational oligopolist must decide whether to cut his price while dwelling behind a veil of ignorance so thick that he hasn’t a clue as to how his cut-throat competitors will subsequently react).