Abstract

Rationality is the attempt to cope with human fallibility. It presupposes individual freedom and responsibility where responsibility includes suffering from one’s errors. If humans are fallible, then one of the most important characteristics of a social order is whether or not it provides mechanisms for eliminating and correcting errors. It is easiest to institutionalize rationality in an economy. Contestable markets, competition and the threat of bankruptcy suffice. Within academia or science, rationality requires humans to give up the utopian quest for certainty, but nevertheless to continue to rely on logic and experience to make theories ever more consistent as well as compatible with observable facts. It is most difficult to achieve a minimum of rationality in the field of politics. In politics one always suffers from the errors of others rather than from one’s own errors.