DANIELA PIANA

Azioni individuali e valori collettivi. 

Hayek e Boudon fra razionalità e libertà

N. 183

Summary — This article provides an analysis of the prescriptive consequences of approaches adopted in social theory for the explanation of individual and collective behaviour. In particular, a comparison of the explanatory paradigms of Friedrich von Hayek and Raymond Boudon shows that the micro-inductionist framework, which is present in both paradigms, tends not only to explain social facts in terms of the aggregation of individual actions over time, but has a number of important consequences concerning the knowledge and action that can legitimately be realized in a collectivity. This brings out the role of the notion of individual rationality, the different meaning of which in the two methodological perspectives is what differentiates their cognitive and applicationary ranges. Nevertheless, the perspectives seem to converge on a common thesis: on the one hand, given that human rationality is fallible and at the same time intrinsically intentional, the two theories affirm the irreducibility of choice and thus of individual freedom of action; on the other hand, given the epistemic limits of any explicative model of social order, both authors come to see as epistemologically unfounded, and therefore illegitimate, any program for the control of social order or for its construction in line with conventionally established principles.