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.

The author emphasizes strategic problems, however, in part because stochastic problems in contexts of collective choice often arise due to possible outcomes that are produced by strategic interactions. Here, individual choosers select strategies to advance their interests, and outcomes depend on what all involved in the interaction choose to do; but what all will choose to do is contingent and cannot usually be known, and so outcomes are unpredictable and strategies indeterminate. Supposing that iterated prisoner's dilemma “is a good model of much of the life of exchange and cooperation” (p. 6), Hardin argues in Chapter 2 that in fixed number iterated play, rational strategies cannot be theoretically specified. Demanding, as some rational choice theorists do, that there be some determinate rational strategy (such as always-defect on the basis of the well-known backward-induction argument) “is not sensible, which means that there is no best strategy” (p. 21).

Hardin's central thesis, that indeterminacy is unavoidable and pervasive for these reasons, is correct, and he contends that this is a truth too often ignored or denied. Although the contention is exaggerated, it is not without merit. Since indeterminacy is extensive, our desire for determinate social theories and for social and political mastery should be restrained, but this is a prescription often resisted. Hence, part of Hardin's effort is spent criticizing those thinkers and schools of thought, in economics, law, and political, social, and moral theory, who have mistakenly developed or defended determinate responses to problems of indeterminacy. Included are game theorists and economists who suppose that choice theory is determinate (e.g., Harsanyi in game theory), theorists who assume that welfare can be cardinalized (e.g., Bentham's utilitarianism), and theorists who assume that unconditional rules of conduct can be justified (e.g., Kant's deontological ethics).

The author also discusses thinkers who have dealt with indeterminacy more or less successfully, either by adopting what he terms “pragmatic responses” and “tricks,” or “by making indeterminacy an assumption or conclusion of the analysis, as in Arrow's theorem” (p. 6). Pragmatic responses are helpful, though limited and possibly misleading; making indeterminacy a fundamental assumption is not misleading but it is often limited. Hobbes's solution to the problem of social order is exemplary. He justified the necessity of government, primarily, by adopting the principle of mutual advantage ex ante, a normative principle championed by Hardin throughout the text. The principle asserts that we should adopt a collective choice or policy when, ex ante, it serves the interests of each and all. Hobbes contended that social order, and therefore government, does precisely this. But while this is motivating insofar as we all do share an interest in order, we also have other divergent and conflicting interests, and these may well lead us to disagree about the sort of government we think best. This indeterminacy Hobbes avoids by adopting the “trick” of contending that “we know too little about the effectiveness of various forms of government to be very confident of the superiority (for our own interest) of any one form over any other” (p. 43). He invokes, in other words, the principle of insufficient reason in order to secure the conclusion that, given our indeterminate circumstances, we should accept government—any government.

The principles of mutual advantage and insufficient reason are often employed by Hardin to describe ways of dealing with problems of indeterminacy. Stochastic policy and institutional choices, for example, may serve shared interests, and sometimes, the risks they carry are known in the aggregate but are unknown at the individual level (e.g., vaccination policies, creating a criminal justice system). Then mutual advantage ex ante can be motivational and ignorance functional; when individuals know or suspect they will be harmed, institutional and policy proposals are likely to be opposed and may be stymied. On the other hand, many concrete policies are not obviously advantageous to all, and that knowledge may justify pragmatic responses, such as sanctioning the theoretically suspect move of making interpersonal comparisons of utility at the policy level, when doing so secures broad, mutually advantageous, institutional goals.

In the last of the eight chapters in his text, Hardin again observes that institutions, such as a criminal justice system, can often be justified ex ante “as mutually advantageous in our expectations (although the choice between alternative institutions [e.g., what kind of criminal justice system] may not be),” and that specific policies often cannot be justified in this manner (p. 125). This leads him to argue for a “two-stage theory” of government, in which institutions and broad policy goals come first, implementation and more concrete decisions second. He thinks this means that those who administer institutions and implement policies that serve mutual advantage should be compelled to perform their roles and tasks, rather than be granted discretion to serve the larger purposes of the institution (pp. 126–27). More plausibly, it leads him to the related conclusion that if we accept what are always imperfect institutions on the grounds of mutual advantage, we must “to some extent” permit mutual advantage considerations to trump specific considerations of justice (e.g., as accepting a criminal justice system means knowingly allowing some miscarriages of justice) (p. 129). It also leads Hardin to again defend pragmatically accepting the making of interpersonal comparisons of welfare in some policy contexts.

Indeterminacy thus makes of Hardin a consequentialist in moral and social theory, where consequences are, in general, judged in terms of welfare construed ordinally, rather than cardinally. And it makes him a political institutionalist who believes that indeterminacy is often resolved “mechanically” or pragmatically, as opposed to theoretically. Institutions resolve our collective problems “mechanically” when the principle of mutual advantage leads us to select this or that specific institution, even though that principle is not likely to entail the specific choice made. And institutions may “even impose [determinate] theory on us,” as they do when they force us to accept injustice in a mutually advantageous institution like a criminal justice system, and when they force us to accept interpersonal comparisons of cardinal utility to implement institutional goals (p. 121).

Space considerations require ignoring in this review other arguments and themes canvassed in Hardin's text, including his mostly appreciative discussion of Coase's theorem in Chapter 5 and mostly critical assessment of John Rawls in Chapter 7. Overall, I found some of the arguments repetitive and not always well organized, and should note that much of what is on offer here has been presented by Hardin elsewhere, not just in various articles but in his earlier books, particularly Collective Action (1982) and Morality Within the Limits of Reason (1988). But like those earlier efforts, this text makes worthwhile and provocative contributions to rational choice theory in particular, and to social and political theory more generally.