ABSTRACT
How would an economy inhabited by critically rational agents work? How
would ‘‘spontaneously conscious’’ (adaptive) and ‘‘consciously sponta-
neous’’ (reflexive) actions coexist in their interactions? In this chapter and
the next, I want to broaden the foundations of rational-choice theory sufficiently
so that the challenge to mainstream economics developed in Chapters 2 and
3 can be made sense of on the background of the Frankfurt-Vienna part-
nership set out in Chapter 6. In other words, I want to embed the agents’
critically rational action within a conceptual framework in which Hayekian and Horkheimerian perspectives can coexist.
