Institutionalization of Common Normative Values and Economics of Limited Cognition in Search for a Middle Ground between Economics and Sociology: Theories of Veblen, Adam Smith, Bourdieu, and Parsons 1) ― The Multidisciplinary Decision Science Symposium Paper ―

ion in socialized man, the status-seeker of our contemporary sociologists. (OS, p. 190) Rather than suggesting that we return to the older dualistic view of a human nature divided between a “social man” and a “natural man”, Wrong stresses the need for a more dialectical view of the human nature along a social-psychological Freudian view of man. Socialization consists in the transmission of culture and in the process of becoming human, but men are not completely molded by social norms and cultural values. Yet, men cannot exist without culture and outside of society (OS, p. 192). “When our sociological theory over-stresses the stability and integration of society we will end up imagining that man is the disembodied, conscience-driven, status-seeking phantom of current theory. We must do better if we really wish to win credit outside of our ranks for special understanding of man, that plausible creature whose wagging tongue so often hides the despair and darkness in his heart” (OS 193). Thus, Wrong cautions that while excessive psychologism is not productive in sociology, we should work toward making assumptions about human nature explicit and that such assumptions should not be simple-minded, over-abstracted views of man; only by doing so can we avoid falling into the trap of over-socialized views of man and over-integrated views of society. Another flag of caution was raised by Kaye (1991), who, in his paper “A False Convergence: Freud and the Hobbesian Problem of Order” published in Sociological Theory (1991) (hereafter FC) argues that placing Freud’s social theor y within the Hobbesian problem of order is a false convergence. While this theory is understood/ interpreted as saying primarily that asocial human nature is transformed into a social one and that individual personality is integrated with the social order by internalizing social and cultural forces into the superego (or that psychology is integrated with sociology by the process of internalization), such an understanding obscures Freud’s theory based on “the notion of unconscious mental processes governed by fundamentally ambivalent desires and watched over by the defensive forces of ‘repression’ ” (FC, p. 89); “such a sociologized Freud is reduced to yet another observer of the struggles between nature and culture, passion and reason, individual and society, offers little of value” (FC, p. 89). Examining Kalakowski’s critique of Freud, Kaye points out that Kalakowski fails “to see what Freud regards as the fundamental real i ty of human ambivalence, namely the simultaneous presence of conflicting desires in the human psyche—love and hate, aggression and submission, individuation and union, attraction and repulsion” and that Kalakowski “attributes to logical contradictions what Freud considers to be the contradictory aspects of our nature” (FC, p. 91). The civilizing effects of love that makes the human nature both social and asocial; the feelings of hostility and fear from which are born a creative sense of guilt, fraternal feeling, religion, and morality; the immortal id which contains “the experiences and residues of countless historical egos, resurrected in the individual psyche in the formation of the superego”; the historical nature of instinct which is not separate from the human nature that includes cultural acquisitions and transformations; culture which is not simply antiinstinctual (of external necessity of conformity) and is engaged in both the compensation and the constraint of wishes; the simultaneous satisfaction of individual desires (id) and cultural demands (superego), et cetera are, according to Kaye, examples of the complex aspects of human nature and culture which cannot be reduced to or dismissed as a contradiction (FC, p. 91). It is equally false to identify Freud’s repression with suppression, which results in confusing the former with the externally imposed coercive force that suppresses the expression of desires of individuals; Freud regards culture as “a complex and delicately balanced array of forces, meanings, and images that attempt to rule nature, to regulate human relations, to master our ambivalent desires,