Indeterminacy and Society

Extract

Indeterminacy and Society. By Russell Hardin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 192p. $39.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.

Russell Hardin aims in this wide-ranging text to explain the sources of indeterminacy in social life, its implications for theory, and its consequences for practice. Indeterminacy marks circumstances in which individual and collective actors cannot determine the results or outcomes of their choices, not so much because of lack of power or causal ignorance (which might be remedied) but because the social world characteristically presents them with stochastic and strategic problems, and therefore forces on them stochastic and strategic choices. The two problems are distinct but often related. Stochastic problems arise whenever choice carries with it the possibility of harm; in many social and political contexts, the possibilities and the identities of those harmed may or may not be known, and these factors matter in ways Hardin discusses.