Today the New York Times ran a good opinion piece by John McCumber, a UCLA professor, questioning rational choice theory and mentioning (!) Hegel and Marx. It's encouraging to see this kind of stuff in a big newspaper, mostly because there are a lot of strong ideas out there that are routinely excluded from acceptable public discourse. Professor McCumber even falls into some of this, restating the usual platitudes about American reasons for war:
Today, governments and businesses across the globe simply assume that social reality is merely a set of individuals freely making rational choices. Wars have been and are still being fought to bring such freedom to Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Grenadans, and now Libyans, with more nations surely to come. Especially in the cases of Iraq and Vietnam, this is hard stuff to believe simply because there is so little evidence of goodwill other than the statements of leaders (and it's hard stuff to hear from someone who knows a lot about Hegel and Marx). Even so, I'm happy to hear a smart guy lay out some issues with basic assumptions we make about choices. I paused after reading the sentence "Today’s most zealous advocates of individualism, be they on Wall Street or at Tea Parties, invariably forget their origins in a long ago program of government propaganda." I sat thinking for several moments in the way that good writing impels you to. I'm hoping that this kind of opinion piece becomes more common (like it on Facebook and reTweet it if you're so inclined).

"Individual freedom is of value only when communally guided," Professor McCumber concludes. He hits the nail on the head in saying that the sums of individual choices do not always add up to sensible aggregate action. It's nice to hear (in the NYT, no less) a voice offering calm, rational challenges to notions that underlie the common (but academically controversial) conceptions of freedom and human behavior.