Brunner’s REMM model seeded the MPS’s institution-design agenda across all social science.

Evidence

Another influential initiative that Brunner spearheaded in the 1970s was the annual interdisciplinary series called the Interlaken Seminar on Analysis and Ideology (later renamed the Karl Brunner Symposium). The Interlaken Seminar, which continued throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, provided a forum for participants to explore wide-ranging methodological and epistemological questions across different disciplinary and policy domains. Brunner himself held strong views on such issues. He advocated that all endeavors of social science broadly conceived, not just economics, should accept the postulate of a “resourceful, evaluating, maximizing man”—a slightly modified version of Homo economicus to be contrasted with a sociological view of the subject. Once man’s nature is understood as essential and invariant, the challenge for social scientists becomes clear: to design whatever institutional framework “offers the best chance, never an absolute guarantee, that this self-interested behavior will be channeled into socially productive directions beneficial to members of society” (Brunner cited in Laidler 1991, 637). — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1764

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Brunner’s ‘resourceful, evaluating, maximizing man’ postulate - a key MPS modification of Homo economicus.
• XREF: Connects to rational-choice theory’s expansion into sociology (Coleman’s social capital work) and to the broader MPS institutional-design agenda.