he idea of people as rational agents - autonomous pursuers of idiosyncratic, personal values by the best available means - is often sufficient. It may provide all the explanation we need to understand why an individual or group is behaving in a particular way.
Yet there are times when this interpretation proves inadequate, and times when it breaks down completely. Both as individuals and in political communities, people often commit themselves and even stake their lives on policies manifestly in conflict with what any third party would judge to be their own best interests.
Our sense is not that individuals are pursuing authentically-held values by rational means, nor even that they are discharging the requirements of rationally accepted duties and roles, but rather they are propelled by impulses or gusts of emotion from beyond their rational selves. Sometimes they are manipulated quite cynically for the gain of others, by magicians who can raise such gusts. Effects of this kind, as much as (and sometimes more than) those of rational interest, are the stuff of politics.
We need a language embracing both types of motive - the rational ones of cost/benefit, along with the seductive ones of emotion and expression. As psychologists have taught us, the craziest-seeming drives and impulses have a logic of their own.
The Attachment Theory of John Bowlby provides a way to catch both aspects of motivation in the same conceptual net. Developed originally to explain why adopted children may fail to bond successfully with their foster parents, it can be extended to deal with adult behaviour which is partly rationally self-interested but partly self-defeating as well.
By focussing on how the individual has learned to anchor in the world in order to get his or her needs met, it shows how seemingly irrational choices can be entirely rational, given the constraints under which they are made. Both political and economic theory are thereby enriched, provided only that we revise our self-congratulatory assumption that we are fully autonomous, "rational" agents.
It is as if each individual were equipped with a kind of umbilical cord, often compared to the diver's air hose, connecting him to the world and to life. This metaphorical life line is partly constituted by properties of the body itself. It includes a language, a culture, a life history of education and experience. It includes the patterns of livelihood, and friendship and sexual gratification, and all the other strategic alliances of a life. It includes the strategies learned in childhood for relating to other people and, earlier still, for obtaining attention and care from their providers.
Accordingly, the individual is not a self-contained packet of inexplicable capabilities and predilections, endowed with reason as the slave of his arbitrary passions (as classical liberal psychology and some brands of existentialist philosophy still tend to see him). Rather, he is an anchored or embedded being, linked to existence first of all by his occupation of a human body and then by much else.
Far from being completely free as some existentialist philosophers have insisted, the human creature cannot survive without a vital attachment system or "lifeline" to the world providing him or her with the material and psychic nutrients of a human existence. He cannot help feeling anxious, panicked, when this lifeline is threatened; and it is only to be expected that he will acquire a highly individual repertoire of attachment maintenance behaviours aimed at sustaining the flow of satisfactions.
We might conjecture that all political and economic behaviour is organized around the enhancement and defense of this psychic umbilical cord. We commit ourselves to projects aimed at augmenting the flow of satisfactions through this lifeline (as we understand it), or at rendering this flow more secure. We ally ourselves with others to gain support for our projects, or to allay resistance to them. Both economics and politics, in fact, may be said to begin with the infant's effort to extort, coax, bargain or enjoy by free gift the desired (and needed) maternal care. The political characters of nations are formed by the attachment issues of childhood.