Role of Rationality in Forming Political and Economical Institutions - Essay Example

Discussion Polanyi holds that the economic rationality concept is an extremely crucial historical concept that applies to the market form that people participate in the modern era. Market behavior dominates all other motivation forms in the European society and people mainly act based on self-interest circulation. Similarly, Polanyi suggests that such behavior forms, like the market economic institution within which it developed, is increasingly unique to a certain place and period. Instead of economic rationality and market strategies offering the foundation for premarket economy institutions, Polanyi suggests that organizational patterns are reflected in various traditional societies, (Miller 25).

Polanyi also highlights the similar aspects of materialist rationality that are popular amidst Marxism and political economic thinkers. Polanyi asserts that Marx describes the historical strategy based on people self-interests, attained because of material power. Although, economic aspects mainly dominate human societies, individuals’ motives are exclusively influenced by the requirements of material desire satisfaction. Marx focus on class politics – the accomplishment or failure of the organizational attempts of the working class, the existence of collective effort to defend interests of class, the logic of electoral politics of the working class and the revolution evidence.

Marx’s ideas single out to three crucial aspects including individual means-end or rationality theory, ideology theory and class-consciousness theory. There are some commonalities between Marx’s ideologies and the rational-choice idea of political attributes. The rational-choice ideology suggests that person’s political attributes is an estimated effort to enhance a certain set of personal interests – status, revenue or office. Marxism ideology is undeniably bourgeois, based on the materialistic egoism attributes of market community.

Similarly, economists suggest that Marxism idea of political attribute, like his capitalist economic attribute ideology, is, therefore, anchored in an individual rationality approach. Additionally, Marx’s fundamentals suggest of political scrutiny that agents as class affiliates conduct themselves in ways estimated to enhance their potential material motives. Such motives are viewed as class desires (for instance, shared interests between class members). Organization of class and class-consciousness characteristics allows the class to solve crucial interest conflicts among private ad class interests.

Similarly, Marx’s political behavior ideas entail the ideology concept. Ideologies (false conscious) are forms of ideas that influence the political attributes of workers by motivating false beliefs and oppressive values in people. Rational people, functioning under an ideological grip, will pursue activities that are opposite to their primary material motives, but are extensively rations based on false beliefs they maintain concerning the social environment, they occupy, and their misplaced assumptions concerning their true motives and values.

An ideology is a crucial strategy, therefore, in forming political and economic behavior among a system of class. Ideology induces oppressed class