Rational conflict

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Rational conflict

Yanis Varoufakis

Basil Blackwell, 1991

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Includes bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

The study of economic rationality is attracting increasing attention from other disciplines as well as continuing to be the subject of debate within economics. At its heart is the notion that, in a situation of choice or confrontation, knowledge of an individual's desires and beliefs will allow their actions to be predicted. Yanis Varoufakis argues that this is an ideal abstraction which is both inapplicable and ineffective. Using examples from industrial relations, diplomacy, hostage crises and the law, he shows that it is impossible to quantify the aspirations of individuals in these conflicts, and that traditional theory ignores both the wider context and the history of similar cases.

Table of Contents

  • Part 1 Preliminary perspectives: reason and war. Part 2 Game theory - concepts and critique: foundations of equilibrium conflict - the Leviathan trap, deliverance, equilibrium reluctance
  • war and peace as games - inescapable carnage, logic's backward march
  • conflict by agreement - conditions for communication, informational equity and consensus, information inequity, a chance for conflict?
  • conflict beyond equilibrium - the illusive paradox, counterfactuals and conditional probabilities, mixed feelings, mixed strategies, backward versus forward induction, the cunning of reason, rationalizable conflict. Part 3 Reason, conflict and emancipation: praxis and the self - the consequences of indeterminancy, dualism contra dialectics, praxis and Sartre's theatre, the struggle for self-realization, erasure versus synthesis, the post-modern challenge
  • social conflict and liberty - beyond the cave, the origins of solidarity, fighting for freedom.

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