Homo economicus, moral sentiments, and the challenges of individualism

Despite continuing global crisis and relentless criticism from sources as diverse as heterodox economists and religious leaders, homo economicus remains apparently unassailable as a fundamental concept of orthodox economics teaching, research, and policy formation. This concept of the self-interested, goal-oriented, utility-maximizing individual is subjected to painstaking analysis, from differing directions, in each of these three books. Together, they provide a valuable set of resources for developing a more complex, socially and biologically grounded basis for explaining human behavior – principally cooperation, altruism, and morality – that defies the narrow, albeit obdurate, precepts of homo economicus. A particularly important aspect of the two books by first Hodgson, and second Bowles and Gintis, is that they emphasize how moral patterns, practices, and expectations (moral sentiments) have evolved historically, both biologically and socially, through human relations, institutions, and actions, while O’Flynn lays bare the inadequacies of individualism as expressed by a series of theorists stretching back to the seventeenth century.