Reader’s Report on “The Many Faces of Rational Choice Theory”
This manuscript is an unrevised version of a doctoral dissertation. Rather than going through
the manuscript chapter by chapter, it is more important I believe to step back from it and discuss a
number of issues that emerge when one reads it in its present form.
The author’s overall conception of the book as it appears in the manuscript is to set in motion
the discussion of the nature and meaning of rational choice theory and the various kinds of objections to
one or another view of rationality as it appears in the economics literature. These critiques, not all the
same, are both philosophical and methodological and as well as within economic analysis itself. The
book begins by framing this kind of general discussion and then it moves into an extensive narrative
history of the role of rationality in the history of economics or the history of economic analysis from
Aristotle to the present day.
The author’s intent is to suggest that these versions of rational choice theory are in many ways
incommensurable one with another and that the concept itself has taken on many different meanings
for many different purposes in many different contexts. This leads the author toward a conclusion that
the use of rational choice theory, and the distinction between it and behavioral economics, have
legitimate bases both philosophically and methodologically. The different faces of the theory reflect the
complexity of the phenomena economists wish to study and the insufficiency of any simplified view of
rationality to suffice for that analysis.
The book is extremely ambitious. For this reader, the primary concern for turning the
dissertation into a monograph concerns the audience the author wishes to address. The obvious
audience for the manuscript was the author’s doctoral dissertation committee consisting of
philosophers, methodologists, and economists I assume. It is as most doctoral dissertations an exercise
in convincing a committee that the candidate knows the field. For a book, such considerations do not
matter. The author needs to take seriously the notion of her “ideal reader”. Just who is the reader of
this book? Is there a particular economist, a philosopher, an undergraduate, a methodologist she has in
mind? What training will that person have had? Will it be in psychology, philosophy, economics, or the
history of economics? Depending on the answer to these kinds of questions the author should be able to
come up with a particular person whom the author can consider sitting over her left shoulder and asking
periodically “Have you explained this to my satisfaction?”
As it stands, the comprehensiveness of the book, the long slog from Aristotle onwards, seems
not to lead anywhere. As the author’s overall conceptual frameworks suggests that she does not believe
that there is any single overarching and Whiggish successful outcome, the reader is left with a long
narrative of possibly special cases. Certainly the objectives of those committing economic analysis
changed over the millennium if not centuries and decades. The contexts for the writings changed as
societies themselves changed and as ways of talking about these societies changed. The author is superb
in spelling out these kinds of differences and in showing how conceptions of rationality emerged and
were used in these multi first contexts. But one continuously loses sight of what the author is doing.
There needs to be almost continuous signposting of what the argument is and where it stands at any
particular moment in the text.
Turning to the author’s “possible routes for further revising…” we have some possible solutions
to the questions just posed. The main conclusions need to be addressed at the very beginning as the
author seems to recognize. The set of claims that will support this main contribution need to be set out
early, and need to be developed explicitly from the kind of arguments the author will be making. These
matters need to be addressed frequently throughout the manuscript so that the reader has some sense
of where the argument stands at that point, and where the argument needs to go to be more fully
developed.
The author says that there needs to be more use of the secondary literature. While I agree that
this should be the case, and that the primary materials be rather more condensed, it must not
eventuate in the author’s taking up every argument that has ever been made about Rational Choice
Theory and all the secondary literatures. That way lies madness. The book is already long. What I hope
will emerge is a more focused set of cases in the manner as the author tells us, of Morgan’s The World in
the Model book. Fewer cases, less embedded in a lengthy and magisterial overview of the history of
ideas, should be the goal. Do we really need all of the 19th century figures to be dragged across the
pages? Will not a couple of them suffice?
Finally, the prose is not up to the task. The language constructions are, in large measure,
tedious to wade through. That the author’s primary language is not English should not be a barrier to
the clarity of simpler grammatical constructions. Accuracy is not sacrificed if clarity is the goal.
Consequently, the nearly 600 footnotes should be reduced by about 5/6ths.
Lest these comments be read as negative, let me point out that this has the makings of an
award-winning monograph. The author’s comprehensive and fair reading is quite remarkable. Her
primary thesis, which is non-reductionist, is admirable. That the book will have readers if only the
manuscript takes care to locate them should be obvious. It appears that this is a first book by this
author and as such Oxford University Press should take some editorial care in helping the author find
her audience. A good and wise editorial hand will make, for Oxford, a successful and possibly prize
winning author. I urge you to take the trouble to do this since the project is unlike any other so far as I
am aware. The author has shown in some of her other works that she can write scholarly pieces at a
very high level. To sustain that level of competence in a book is difficult – a dissertation does not count
– but it should be the Press’s objective.