DISQUS

Luka · 4 years ago

Will,

Can you (roughly) state what the test for a theory being utopian in the pejorative sense is? How can we most easily tell if our theory has that property?

Just curious.

Will Wilkinson · 4 years ago

The test is whether your best descriptive theories of human nature and social order rule it out as a possibility. For instance, large-scale communism is pejoratively utopian because of both the calculation problem, and the incentive problem. Our best theories tell us that a large society without a price system, and which relies primarily on other-regarding motivation, will not be stable. So the way to tell is just to read social science and psychology.

Luka · 4 years ago

Right. That sounds reasonable. Thanks!

Matt · 4 years ago

Hi Will,

As far as I can tell (from looking in the _Collected Papers_ Rawls first used the term "veil of ignorance" in his paper "The sense of justice", which was published in '63 (so of course written earlier) but the basic idea (though in a more primitive form) is pretty clearly there in "Justice as Fairness", published in '58. Rawls was usually pretty careful about citing people he was influenced by, so I'd guess he started thinking about the issue (or was heavily influenced on it- I don't know what his disertation was like) by Harsany and the the Buchanan & Tullock similarity is just one of those interesting coincidence. This is all to say nothing, of course about the relative merits- I don't know Buchanan's work in this area well enough to have an opinion.