The Postulate of a Rational Actor in Social Sciences and Humanities: A Persistent Half-Truth
The postulate of an individual who acts rationally, autonomously, consciously, intentionally and in his own best interest has been denounced repeatedly, in particular by relational approaches. Critics have underlined the importance of the subconscious and that of emotions in the human psyche, as well as the impossibility to understand human action without taking into consideration social structures and the illegitimacy of a subjectivity deliberating in a monadic way. In and of themselves, these critics should have eliminated the rationalizing axiom. Yet, this axiom has lost nothing of its force; it continues to dominate modelizations in human studies. The question thus arises as to how or rather why it persists. Its duration cannot be unjustified. We have identified seven ways by which specialists in human studies manage to legitimate this axiom, which constitutes, at best, a half-truth. We enumerate and describe each of these justifications and explain why neither one really represents an answer to the critics raised by relational or relational-type approaches.