L’Italian Association for the History of Economic Thought (AISPE) a décerné son prix du meilleur article 2023 à Herrade Igersheim, directrice de recherche CNRS et chercheuse au BETA, pour son article “Rawls and the economists: The (im)possible dialogue”, publié dans le numéro spécial de la Revue économique (novembre 2022), en mémoire de Philippe Mongin (1950-2020).
Résumé de l’article :
Although falling within the scope of political and moral philosophy, it is well known that A Theory of Justice has also had a great impact on economists. As such, Rawls put great emphasis on his desire to combine economics and philoso phy, and particularly to deal with rational choice theory, notably claiming that “the theory of justice is a part, perhaps the most significant part, of the theory of rational choice” (Rawls [1971]). After the publication of A Theory of Justice, aspects of it came in for criticism—often very vehement—by economists such as Arrow [1973], Musgrave [1974], Harsanyi [1975] and later by Sen [1980]. Rawls’s immediate an swers ([1974a], [1974b] in particular) showed that he first wanted to maintain a dialogue with the economists, but the later evolutions of his works ([1993], [2001]) clearly demonstrated that he had removed himself from the economic realm, re turning to his initial philosophical territory in order to overcome the internal incon sistencies of A Theory of Justice. In this paper, by focusing extensively on the letter exchanges between Rawls and the economists before and after the publication of A Theory of Justice, I attempt to shed light on other (complementary) elements which can explain Rawls’s retreat from the realm of economics, and his progressive disenchantment regarding the possibility of a dialogue on equal footing between economists and philosophers.
