ABSTRACT
The last chapter concluded that the human individual drops out of orthodox economics with the emergence of the abstract individual conception of mainstream economics which does not and cannot distinguish between many-person and singleperson types of “individuals.” This outcome, I argued, came about in an unintended way when a succession of efforts in the twentieth century to escape the problematic foundations of Locke’s subjectivist conception of the individual, adopted by neoclassical theory, left economics without any understanding of the individual. Having hitched its cart to subjectivism, once it abandoned that, neoclassicism left economics with a void where the individual had been. Of course, those who sought to minimize the subjectivist elements in the neoclassical conception believed that the main problem with utility theory, either in cardinal or ordinal forms, was that it was unscientific and lacking in rigor. However, this view, I believe, was largely beside the point, since there were deeper, unappreciated difficulties in the neoclassical conception that were ontological in nature, and that implied at bottom that the neoclassical view of the individual was indefensible in both its basic and more sophisticated
forms. To make this argument, I examine two versions of the later ordinalist neoclassical conception of the individual, taken here as representing the fullest development of the subjectivist view of the individual in economics prior to its wholesale abandonment (at least in new research and theory) in favor of the abstract conception of the individual of contemporary mainstream economics. The two versions are: (a) the standard “pure” preferences view and (b) the development and modification of that view in the Chicago School time allocation model which supplements preferences with embodied human capital to refashion the explanation of human subjectivity. My argument in this chapter is that the failure of these later neoclassical attempts to explain individuals subjectively signals the end-of-the-road for subjectivism in economics.1
