ABSTRACT
Gintis wants to remedy the lack of effort to “repair this condition” (ibid.: 1) since the times of sociologist Talcott Parsons’s (1937) attempt to provide a “formal modelling of modern societies” (Gintis and Helbing 2015: 2) through the AGIL model (Parsons’s famous scheme of the four essential functions of a social system – adaptation, goal attainment, integration and latency). Parsons later proposed in 1951 with Edward Shils and Neil Smelser (Parson, Shils and Smelser 1965) and other scholars the road Toward a General Theory of Action. Gintis comments on the generally negative reception of this latter by pointing at the lack of both analytical decision theory and of “an appreciation for general equilibrium theory” à la Arrow-Debreu” (Gintis and Helbing 2015: 2). Moreover, Gintis stresses that Parsons’s “forceful attack on utilitarian social thought” (Smelser and Swedberg 2005: 14) – wrongly, if Parsons had the ambition to construct a “general model of rational choice and social action” (Gintis and Helbing
2015: 2) – shared with Pareto the idea that preferences over economic values should be kept separate from those over socio-political and moral values.
