1
1
Abstract
Rational choice as process: the uses of formal theory for
historical sociology
The major drawback of rational choice theory is not its
individualistic approach, on the contrary it is well suited to
explain aggregate outcomes; rather it is its essentially
static, or at best cyclical, character which prevents it from
coming to terms with social processes in which not only
variables, but in the course of time also parameters and even
'constants' must be considered as changing entities. But this
is incompatible with the requirements of formal
conceptualization and statistical testing procedures.
Nevertheless, in decisive episodes, human beings tend to be
'alert' and 'scheming': the key notions of rational choice
theory are too productive to be ignored by historical
sociologists who do well to incorporate them as intellectual
concepts in a pragmatic manner.
Abram de Swaan
Amsterdam School of Social Research
Rational Choice as Process
The Uses of Formal Theory for Historical Sociology1
'La structure, c'est les autres'2
Sociology studies people in the relational networks they
constitute. This constellation of interrelated human beings is
both structured and changing: it is a structured process.3
Clearly, within sociology tensions exist between an
approach that starts out from individuals and one that takes
its point of departure in the constellation they constitute
together; and, equally, there are strains between a viewpoint
Thanks are due to Nico Wilterdink and Johan Heilbron, to
Wouter Gomperts and other members of the 'psycho- and
sociogenesis club', and to the many colleagues who participated
in discussions of earlier versions in various seminars. A
different version of this paper appeared earlier with
contributions by Siegwart Lindenberg and Johan Goudsblom and a
rejoinder by this author in Dutch in Amsterdams Sociologisch
Tijdschrift 22.4, March 1996, and in English in The Netherlands
Journal of Social Sciences 32.1, November 1996.
1
Structure is the others; after Jean-Paul Sartre on hell:
'l'Enfer, c'est le autres' (Huis Clos).
2
These formulas correspond closely to the concept of
'figuration' in the sociology of Norbert Elias; cf. What Is
Sociology?. London : Hutchinson, 1978.
3
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that highlights a state of affairs and, on the other hand. a
perspective that focuses on change. Indeed, these are the two
dimensions that constitute the cross on which sociology
suffers its major dilemmas. The various schools in sociology
may be situated along these axes.
Rational choice theory unambiguously belongs in one
quadrant of this cross: it opts for an individualist, even a
reductionist strategy, and a static, at best a cyclical
1
FIGURE I
dynamic
│
│
..................│..historical
neo-evolutionist │
sociology
theory
│
: figurational
│
: sociology
psychoanalysis
│
:
│
:
│
:
│
:
─────────────────────┼─────────────────────
individualist
│
:
structuralist
│
:
│
│
rational
│
network
choice
│
theory
theory
│
│
│
│
static
approach.4 Historical sociologists, on the other hand, may at
times take a static view of the past and concentrate on
individual actions, but by and large they gravitate toward a
structural and a dynamic perspective: a process approach which is
For a wholly uncompromising formula, a quotation from
James Coleman, Individual Interests and Collective Action.
Cambridge etc.: Cambridge U.P., 1986, p. 1: 'If an institution or
a social process can be accounted for in terms of rational
actions of individuals, then and only then can we say that it has
been explained.' (and a little further along, p. 16:) 'I will
start with an image of man as wholly free: unsocialized, entirely
self-interested, not constrained by the norms of a system, but
only rationally calculating to further his own self-interest.'
4
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especially characteristic of Norbert Elias's figurational
sociology.5
In a third quadrant one might find a school of theorizing that is
at once static and structural: network analysis.6 The fourth
quarter is reserved for the individualist and dynamic approach
that is common to such divergent schools as psychoanalysis7 on
the one hand and neo-Darwinian or geneticist evolution theory on
the other.8 This strain has been taken up by social scientists
who have tried to explain the evolution of cooperation from
individualist and maximizing principles.9
For an introduction to historical sociology: Philip
Abrams, Historical Sociology. Somerset: Open Books, 1982; Theda
Skocpol (ed.), Vision and Method in Historical Sociology.
Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1984; Denis Smith, The Rise of
Historical Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.
5
For a programmatic collection: Barry Wellman and S. D.
Berkowitz eds., Social structures: A Network Approach. New York:
Cambridge U.P., 1988; for an elementary introduction: John Scott,
Social Network Analysis; A Handbook. London etc.: Sage, 1991.
6
For an introduction: Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its
Discontents in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of
Sigmund Freud, vol. 21, pp. 57 sqq. See also: Fred Weinstein and
Gerald M. Platt, Psychoanalytic Sociology; An Essay on the
Interpretation of Historical Data and the Phenomena of Collective
Behavior. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins U.P., 1973.
7
For a popular but very radical introduction, Richard
Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. London/New York: Granada, 1978 and by
the same author: The Blind Watchmaker. New York/London: Norton,
1986. For applications of evolutionary selection to social
institutions: //Dunn Hall, Allan Carling//
8
Cf. S.A. Boorman and P. R. Levitt, The Genetics of
Altruism. New York: Academic Press, 1980; Robert Axelrod, The
Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books, 1984; Robert
Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary
Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985; Henk de Vos
and Evelien Zeggelink, 'The emergence of reciprocal altruism and
group-living: an object-oriented simulation model of human social
9
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The subject here is the encounter of rational choice theory
and historical sociology. The core problem of rational choice
theory is in one word 'order' - how are human efforts coordinated
given that individuals pursue their own interests?10 The core
question of historical sociology is to explain how contemporary
society emerged from its antecedents, and, more precisely, how
the scale of effective coordination could expand from the few
dozen members making up a band of nomads to multinational states
numbering a billion or more and to global exchange networks of
similar size, all in the relatively short time span of some ten
thousand years, less than five hundred generations.
Notwithstanding the vast disparity between the knowledge
interests of the two schools there is some common ground and
there have been some intellectual encounters. The main issues in
this confrontation are presented here, without attempting to
review the entire literature or discuss specific technicalities.
First, rational choice theorists have presented a reading of
historical sociologists in order to reconstruct the argument of
the latter in terms of the individualist premises of the
rationality model. What are the main compatibilities between the
two paradigms and which major incompatibilities remain?
Second, within rational choice theory, attempts have been made
(..vervolg)
evolution' Social Science Information, 33.3, 1994,
pp. 493-517.
"Surely there is no problem in the social sciences that
is more important than that of explaining why people cooperate."
Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx, 1985, p. 366.
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to overcome some vexing paradoxes by introducing more dynamic
concepts, especially in the analysis of the prisoners' dilemma.
To what extent have these revisions succeeded in bridging the gap
that separates historical sociology and the rational choice
model?
Third, rational choice concepts have been applied within the
theoretical framework of historical sociological studies.11 What
is the most promising strategy for incorporating ideas from the
rational decision approach in historical sociological work?
These three distinct, but related questions deserve a brief
discussion to point out the problems and the prospects of
combining rational choice theory and historical sociology.
Several authors have confronted historical sociological studies
with their version of a rational choice model: Jon Elster wrote a
lengthy and elaborate critique of Marx' writings from a
methodological individualist viewpoint, attempting to salvage
those parts of marxist theory that could be reconstructed in
formal terms. His discussion of Marx' theory of class
consciousness is especially instructive for the present purposes,
as it is entirely framed in terms of an n-person prisoners'
E.g. Siegwart Lindenberg, 'Social Production Functions,
Deficits, and Social Revolutions; Prerevolutionary France and
Russia' Rationality and Society, 1.1, July 1989; see also Edgar
Kiser, Kriss A. Drass and William Brustein, 'Ruler Autonomy and
War in Early Modern Europe' International Studies Quarterly, 39,
1995, pp. 109-138, or William Brustein and Jürgen W. Falter, 'The
Sociology of Nazism, An Interest-Based Account' Rationality and
Society, 6.3, July 1994, pp. 369-399.
11
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dilemma.12
In an interesting essay on the 'figurational sociology' of
Norbert Elias, Hartmut Esser has pointed out that its historical
sociological method agrees with the major canons of
methodological individualism.13 And, in fact, it is not the oftcriticized reductionism of methodological individualism and its
close relative, rational choice theory, which makes for an
unbridgeable difference with the 'figurational' sociology of
Elias and other historical sociologists. On the contrary,
rational choice models and models from game theory are especially
well-suited to demonstrate the interplay between individual
strategies and aggregate outcomes. Many concepts from game
theory, such as 'zero-sum game', 'maximin strategy', 'free-rider'
or 'prisoners' dilemma', have acquired a second life in everyday
discourse precisely because they can convey so convincingly the
dramaturgy of actors whose fate depends on the other's
Idem, pp. 342-71. For another, interesting discussion of
marxist concepts that goes beyond the tenets of rational choice,
cf. Alan H. Carling, Social Division. London: Verso, 1991.
12
Cf. Hartmut Esser, 'Figurationssoziologie und
methodologischer Individualismus', Kölner Zeitschrift für
Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 36 1984, pp. 641-66. Much the
same point is made by H. D. Flap and Y. Kuiper, 'Figuratiesociologie als onderzoeksprogramma' [Figurational sociology as a
research program] Mens en Maatschappij 54.3 1979, pp. 323-369.
For a polemic between Esser and Arthur Bogner, a student of
Elias: 'Bemerkungen zu Hartmut Essers Aufsatz "Figurationssoziologie und Methodologischer Individualismus",' followed by a
comment from Esser and a reply from Bogner, Kölner Zeitschrift
für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie. 37.4 1985, pp. 800-7.
13
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decisions.14 There is indeed a close correspondence between the
notion of 'unintended outcomes' in rational choice theory and the
concept of 'blind process' in historical sociology, just as there
is a strong analogy between respectively the concept of 'external
effects' in the former and of 'interdependency' in the latter.
At the core of the rational choice approach is the notion of
rational maximization, i.e. the choice of the most efficient
means to realize a given end. Such optimizing behavior is
culture- and timebound, as historians and historical sociologists
have amply demonstrated. Nevertheless, in a weakened form the
rational choice axiom is valid for most of historical time. In
competitive situations where physical security, vital resources,
or reputation are at stake, people will remain alert and
attentive to possible advantages to be secured, damages to be
avoided; they will scheme and plot to secure their position and
avoid setbacks. The common sense grounds for this assumption are
somewhat strengthened by the fact that when physical, social and
moral survival are at stake, those who do lose out risk being
eliminated from the competition altogether.15
For an accessible introduction to game theory, cf.
Anatole Rapoport, Two-Person Game Theory: The Essential Ideas.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966, and idem, N-Person
Game Theory: Concepts and Applications. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1970, For an application of game theoretic
notions to a variety of social situations, see Thomas C.
Schelling's classic The Strategy of Conflict. New York: Oxford
U.P., 1963.
14
For a discussion of this argument, cf. Douglass C. North,
Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance.
Cambridge/NY: Cambridge U.P., 1990, pp. 19-22.
15
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In anthropology and in the history of early and medieval
societies, a different view often prevails: pre-modern people
were strangers to the calculating and fore-sighted stance that
characterizes individuals in the Modern Era in the West. If this
implies that people in subsistence economies were and are not out
to maximize their money income over time in the manner of
contemporary entrepreneurs in a market economy, the observation
is correct and a truism. But if the point is that people in nonmonetary economies are propelled merely by passion and hemmed in
by norms, all the while unmindful of their interests, it is a
caricature. From the beginnings of sedentary agriculture, and
maybe even earlier, people have shown themselves quite alert and
scheming, at least in matters of marriage and warfare. Warriors
simply could not afford to allow the passions of fear and rage to
overcome them during battle. Peasant families have always
carefully arranged marriages with an eye to preserving and
extending their land holdings as the family heritage. Where
markets emerged, this alert and scheming stance spread with
them.16
In other words, the historical sociologist does well to assume
a degree of alertness and a calculating stance, but what it is
that is at stake in any given episode varies with time and place,
Cf. Th. Haskell, 'Capitalism and the Origins of the
Humanitarian Sensibility', Parts 1 and 2. American Historical
Review 90.2, pp. 339-61; 90.3, pp. 547-66, for an account of the
'market-oriented mentality' which may well be compatible with and
even promote altruistic propensities.
16
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and sometimes several games are being played at once, be it about
power, property or prestige.
But nevertheless a wide gap remains, notwithstanding the
bridge-building efforts of Esser and others: historical
sociology, and certainly Elias' brand of it, essentially
presupposes a process theory, whereas rational choice theory and
methodological individualism are incorrigibly static, at best
passing off iterative and cyclical models as dynamic constructs.
At bottom, formal theory implies a ceteris paribus assumption:
whatever is not explicitly introduced as a variable is assumed to
remain constant. The process perspective, on the other hand, may
best be introduced with a metaphor: the analogy of the clockwork
with wheels that turn at different speeds; some cogs - turning so
slowly that the casual observer hardly notices their movement nevertheless set in motion other wheels that move at visible
speed and in turn drive a sequence of cogwheels at an ever faster
speed, the last one connected to a balance wheel that by its
frenetic oscillation controls the movement of the entire
machine.17 Thus, within the very slow clock of biological time
turn the wheels of human history and within it again, much
faster, the gears of succeeding generations and finally the cogs
of human actions and events that together control the pace of
Cf. F. Braudel, 'History and the Social Sciences' in: On
History. (transl. from the French) Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980, pp. 25-54, on 'durée'. For a discussion of key
temporal concepts in historical sociology, cf. Ron Aminzade,
'Historical Sociology and Time,' Sociological Methods and
Research 20.4, May 1992, pp. 456-480.
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history. There is the rhythm of the species, the rhythm of
societies, the rhythm of individual lives and of particular
activities. But this is where the metaphor stops, since in last
analysis, all clocks are cyclical and periodical, no matter how
long the cycle may take, while biological evolution and human
history within it occur only once.18
In formal theory construction, only a few quantities are
treated as variables, most others are defined as parameters, held
constant for the sake of the analysis, while still other entities
do not even enter the argument as quantities that might change
over time. For example, price indices are calculated from the
prices of a 'basket' of goods and services; while the prices are
expected to fluctuate, the composition of the basket is treated
as a parameter, assumed to remain unchanged for the time being.
Of course, price indices can be recalculated over a longer time
span with a somewhat changed composition of the basket. But, over
an even longer time period, say the past century, the proportion
of goods produced at home versus that of goods bought in the
market has changed gradually but profoundly. In other words, the
share of the commodity basket in the family household has
increased as the money economy expanded. What appeared as a
constant for the short-term analysis turns out to vary in the
long run. Moreover, in this time perspective a new problem
presents itself: how to measure the proportion of goods and
Cf. my The Management of Normality; Critical Essays in
Health and Welfare. London/New York: Routledge, 1990, p. 5.
18
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services in the household that were not purchased with money.
Such developments usually remain entirely outside formal models,
but they often do find their way into historical sociological
theories of the process type.19
Rational choice theorists do not eschew such 'slow moving
variables' out of a lack respect for history, but because
additional variables make it so much more difficult to infer a
limited set of precise predictions, and because uniform data that
may be statistically processed become scarcer as time periods
extend backward. As data become scanty and predictions fuzzy,
statistical tests lose their bite and formal theories their
discriminative edge.
And yet, once formal arguments had served to identify new
problems, time and again a breakthrough was achieved in rational
choice and game theory, by next relaxing some formal restriction
so as to generate a more realistic solution. T.C. Schelling chose
to open up the argument to the total perception and foreknowledge
of the players, their 'Gestalt', and this allowed him to suggest
very convincing solutions to tacit bargaining games, especially
games of coordination.20
Gary S. Becker, A Treatise on the Family. Cambridge,
Mass. and London: Harvard U.P., 1981, pp.94-8, in discussing the
'quality of children' over long historical periods presents
formal expressions that take into account both commodities
purchased in the market and goods or services produced in the
household by introducing time spent on child care as a variable,
without, however, operationalizing the latter term.
19
20
Thomas C. Schelling, op. cit.
1
There is yet another consideration of major importance: People
maximize along different dimensions that can not be reduced to a
single denominator (or sequence). Rather, the incommensurability
of various human strivings seems to be at the core of the human
condition. In each 'existential choice' people decide what at
that point prevails for them: honor or money, power or fame,
learning or riches... No formula can a priori determine that
choice. A theory that allows to reduce all strivings in human
society to a single preference order is still as far fetched as
the Grand Unified Theory is in physics, a single equation that
should express all forces in the universe. Physics can do without
such a construct, on weekdays. But due to this very shortcoming,
rational choice theory is time and again pushed into irrelevance,
tautology or indeterminacy. It is as great a defect of rational
choice theory as the ingrained statical character that is the
main theme of this article.
Some of the most vexing problems of human cooperation may
elegantly be expressed as dilemmas of collective action in terms
of the rational choice model. Ever since Mancur Olson,21 social
scientists have been painfully aware of the paradoxes in the
analysis of collective action, i.e. actvities aimed at bringing
about or maintaining a collective good. Such a collective good is
Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action. Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard U.P., 1965.
21
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'non-excludable': for technical or economic reasons, no one
(within some social circle) can be excluded from using it.
Moreover, in its purest form, that is as a 'public good', the
condition of 'jointness of supply' applies: use of the good by
one person does not diminish what is available for use by others.
Finally, it is usually assumed that the efforts of a single
person are not sufficient and those of all persons (within some
social circle) are not necessary to bring about or maintain the
collective good. A clean environment provides the classic example
of a pure collective, or public good.
Under these conditions, the suspicion that others may not join
in the effort to create or maintain the collective good is
sufficient for anyone to refrain from collaborating. As a result,
it will not be brought about, leaving all participants worse off
than they would have been if they had joined the collective
action that could have produced it. The predicament is more
acute, the larger the group concerned.22 The situation may be
rendered as an n-person prisoners' dilemma game.
From early on, it appeared that this paradox was in part the
result of a completely static, one-shot analysis of collective
action. The introduction of sequences over time had provided a
solution in the case of - non-cooperative - zero-sum games
without a saddle point: these games turn out to possess a stable
This inference has been formally refuted and contradicted
with a wealth of empirical argument by Gerald Marwell and Pamela
Oliver, The Critical Mass in Collective Action; A Micro-social
Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1993, pp. 38-59.
22
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solution when considered as instances in an infinite sequence of
iterations in a 'super game': the 'mixed strategy' of random
choices in a fixed proportion.23 Michael Taylor applied this
approach to another class of games, prisoners' dilemma games with
their especially vexing paradoxes, and succeeded in demonstrating
that the 'supergame' consisting of an infinite sequence of
prisoners' dilemmas, under certain conditions does possess an
equilibrium outcome based on cooperative strategies.24 Although
the analysis was hardly dynamic, at least a notion of time was
introduced in the analysis, a concept of repetition, of actors'
anticipation and of their discounting future outcomes. In his
final comments to the argument, Taylor remarks:
Perhaps the most important shortcomings of the Prisoners'
Dilemma supergame as a model of the process of public
goods provision is that it takes place in a static
environment: the supergame consists of iterations of
the same ordinary game. In some of the public goods
problems of interest here, a more realistic description
of reality would require a changing payoff matrix,
possibly a changing set of available strategies, and
even a changing set of players.25
Cf. John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of
Games and Economic Behavior. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U.P.,
1944.
23
A very elegant argument based on sequences of bilateral
encounters in a population is presented by Axelrod op. cit.:
Cooperation unrequited again leads to loss, but when reciprocated
it results in mutual gain. A 'tit for tat' strategy of initiating
every interaction with cooperation but punishing the opponent's
refusal to cooperate with immediate non-cooperation turns out to
be most advantageous individually and might in due course be
adopted throughout the population. The encounters are reiterated
on the same terms, but in the population as a whole; in this case
a process does occur: the spread of the 'tit for tat' strategy of
initial cooperation and prompt revenge for non-cooperation.
24
Michael Taylor, Anarchy and Cooperation. London: Wiley,
1976, p. 96. Taylor continues with an interesting suggestion (p.
25
1
Elster, commenting on Taylor's analysis, suggests that after
prolonged interaction the actors will begin to form a stable
group and each individual's utility function will come to reflect
the welfare of the other players. In other words, the individuals
will begin to care for each other and what used to be the gains
of individual defection will not look so attractive anymore, once
the damage done to others is also taken into account. The final
result is an 'Assurance game' which has a - conditionally cooperative solution.26 Unmistakably, Taylor's afterthoughts and
Elster's reflections refer to an approach that goes beyond mere
iteration, allowing for parameters to adopt new values, i.e. they
incorporate changes over time and in a certain direction, in
other words, the authors begin to consider collective action as a
process.
In Michael Hechter's Principles of Group Solidarity,27
collaboration is the result of members' dependence on the
collective good and the group's capacity to enforce compliance:
(..vervolg)
97): 'Where, for example a "commons" (--) is being exploited, the
payoffs might decrease steadily as more and more non-Cooperative
("exploitative") choices are made over time...'
Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens. p. 146. Cf. also his
discussion in Making sense of Marx, Cambridge/Paris: Cambridge
U.P./Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1985, pp. 358-367.
26
Michael Hechter, Principles of Group Solidarity. Berkeley
etc.: University of California Press, 1987; see also Michael
Hechter and Satoshi Kanazawa, 'Group Solidarity and Social Order
in Japan' Journal of Theoretical Politics 5(4), 1993, pp. 455493,
27
1
its 'control capacity,' which rests on the possibilities to
monitor the members' behavior and the availability of selective
sanctions.
In his subsequent argument, Hechter relaxes some of the most
stringent assumptions of rational choice theory: first of all, he
is willing to face the fact that people have been socialized to
cooperative ('pro-social') behavior in their past (they have a
past!); secondly, he considers the possibility that the group
itself has a history in the course of which it acquired its
capacity for control. Hechter provides no conclusive answer to
the question how such control mechanisms may emerge in groups,
but it clearly is the result of deliberation and interaction
among group members who are equipped with memories, e.g. of prior
socialization, and with knowledge of the external world, e.g. of
the norms that exist out there. Moreover, a concept of process is
central but mostly implicit in the argument.
Some people may profit much more from the supply of a
collective good than others, some people have more time or money
available to spend on collective action: those with the strongest
interest and the largest resources will be the first to
contribute towards the collective good, and if together they are
effective in bringing it about they constitute the 'critical
mass' for collective action.28 In this approach, developed by
They need not even explicitly collaborate towards the
collective good: people with similar 'social production
functions', each on their own, may act to prevent major loss,
e.g. rebel against tax legislation, in 'tacitly coordinated,
individual collective action.' Lindenberg, op.cit., pp. 51-77.
28
1
Marwell and Oliver, the sequence of decisions is of the essence,
and so is the 'production function' that defines how the supply
of the collective good increases with each additional resource
contribution. Clearly, decisions are interdependent and
collective action occurs in a sequence over time, albeit within
strict parameters.29
Using ideas from network theory, first advanced by
Granovetter30, Michael Macy has proposed a simulation model in
which participants take their cues for cooperation from others in
the network according to the strength of their ties. After
several rounds of costly inactivity the participants may learn
that cooperation can be more rewarding and that others think so
too. Again, once a critical mass has been achieved, a stampede
towards collaboration may ensue.31
(..vervolg)
Marwell and Oliver, op. cit., p. 15: 'We assume that each
individual's interest and resources are fixed characteristics at
the moment of decision about collective action. Violation of this
assumption would necessitate rewriting our models. Our models
cannot capture the dynamics that arise when people's
understandings are changing over time. We do not believe that
interests and resources are actually static, but we do believe
that the patterns we can identify using static models are
valuable baselines that must be constructed before we can hope to
develop models that successfully capture complex dynamic
processes.
29
Mark Granovetter, 'Threshold Models of Collective
Behavior', American Journal of Sociology 83, 1978, pp.1420-43.
30
Michael W. Macy, 'Chains of Cooperation: Threshold
Effects in Collective action' American Sociological Review 56,
1991, pp. 730-47.
31
1
What appears as an afterthought or as a latent theme in the
preceding analyses is the explicit point of departure for the
theory of the collectivizing process: collective action is
considered as a process which produces both the collective good
and the collectivity with respect to which the good is
collective.32 In the course of their effort to establish some
collective good, as the interaction proceeds, the actors
gradually come to constitute a group, with a 'we-feeling', with
shared memories, expectations and values. In other words, the
capacity to monitor and sanction, to control members' compliance,
is a property of the collectivity that may emerge in the process
of collective action. Moreover, in this perspective, the dilemmas
of collective action are themselves characteristic of a
transitory phase. They occur when participants are
interdependent, and aware of their interdependence, but without
their actions yet being coordinated at a higher level of
integration: the level of the collectivity. Once collective
action does get underway, it may bring about both a collectivity
and a collective good at this next higher level of integration.
'The main fault of formal theory as it stands is its
inability to deal with processes - with changes over time. This
reduction from dynamics to statics may be overcome in a
sociogenetic approach. The logical paradox disappears in
sociological analysis: a paradigm shift.' Cf. the introduction to
my In Care of the State; Health, Education and Welfare in Europe
and the USA in the Modern Era. Cambridge/New York: Polity
Press/Oxford U.P., 1988 , which sets out to apply the concept of
a 'collectivizing process' in a comparative historical
sociological study of the emergence of welfare states in the long
run.
32
1
But in order for the collective action to begin, somehow the
initial, reciprocal suspicion of parasitism (or 'free-riding')
must be overcome. This may be achieved by 'entrepreneurs' who
manipulate members' expectations into believing that the others
will cooperate; or it may come about because members hold
illusions, underestimating the costs of cooperating while others
do not, or overestimating the others' readiness to join the
effort; or it may be brought about by external interventions such
as grants and fines or coercive measures.
Once collective action is initiated, it may bring about a
collectivity which is capable of imposing selective incentives.
The cheapest of these are informal sanctions such as ridicule,
rebuke and gossip, which may well come at no cost or even at a
premium: many people at least occasionally enjoy the opportunity
to scold or blame others for their delinquency, especially if
one's peers agree.33
But for such sanctions to be effective,
actors must be in a position to communicate freely among
themselves and to assess one another's contributions (what
Hechter calls 'monitoring'), and there must be some agreement
In the literature it is routinely assumed that such
disciplinary measures are imposed only at a cost and that this
effort again evokes dilemmas of collective action, and so forth,
into infinite regression. Cf. Gerald Marwell and Pamela Oliver,
op. cit., p.8: 'The problem is simply that somebody has to pay
for the selective incentive, and paying for a selective incentive
is also collective action in that it will provide a benefit to
everyone interested in the collective good, not just the people
who pay for the incentive.' But the selective incentive for some
may be a pleasure to administer.
33
1
among participants as to the distribution rule which has been
violated.
As the collectivizing episode proceeds and collective action
continues, an emergent collectivity may acquire all sorts of
resources for controlling its members. Unilateral defection may
no longer appear so tempting, and indeed, actors might even begin
to care for one another, allowing someone else's welfare to enter
their calculations.
This conception of collective action is a long way from the
formal and static models presented in pure rational choice
theory. However, it also fall short of a theory that allows
precise predictions to be inferred from its assumptions.
Moreover, it is unclear so far which body of empirical data the
theory refers to.34 Of course, formal rational choice theory does
not always yield precise or unique predictions either, and when
it does they often turn out to be wrong, whereas the empirical
referents of the theory are often equally undetermined.35 But in
Cf. Hechter, op. cit. p. 55. 'Often the data required to
test this kind of theory do not exist. Perhaps if enough
researchers become intrigued with the theory, systematic attempts
to collect the relevant evidence may be made. But the lack of
suitable ready-made data hinders the appeal of any new theory.'
34
The rational choice 'literatures' in American political
science have hardly produced testable hypotheses, and of those,
very few have been actually tested against empirical data, almost
none was supported by the facts; cf. Donald P. Green and Ian
Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of
Applications in Political Science. New Haven: Yale U.P., 1994.
35
1
more general terms, formal and static rational choice theory
yields a gain in precision and systematics, at the price of a
loss in scope and relevance, while process theories offer the
reverse trade off.36
The most promising strategy for assessing the validity of
process theories of collective action is to reconstruct carefully
specific collectivizing episodes from the available evidence and
determine whether such empirically grounded accounts lend
plausibility to the assumptions. This is a far cry, indeed, from
the ideal of a definitive test of the theory's inferred
predictions against a body of uniform data with the aid of
standard statistical procedures. But process theories, operating
with shifting terms, pose other requirements of validation. They
are best tested in the course of a discursive reconstruction of
events, i.e. in a historical sociological account. The process
theory itself should contain the concepts necessary to organize
the narrative and define the domain of relevant events that serve
to test the theory's plausibility.37
The four criteria are proposed by Johan Goudsblom,
Sociology in the Balance; A Critical Essay. Oxford: Blackwell,
1977, pp. 2-5, 196-8.
36
Edgar Kiser and Michael Hechter, 'The Role of General
Theory in Comparative-Historical Sociology', American Journal of
Sociology. 97.1, July 1991, pp. 1-30, (p. 11), defend general
theory on the one hand against the 'historicist particularists'
who 'conceive of the relation between particular events as
contingent and accidental' and on the other hand against the
'inductive generalists' of comparative-historical sociology who
lack clear criteria for defining the class of relevant events.
37
1
Taylor and Axelrod were both able to demonstrate that cooperative
strategies might be stable under certain conditions by treating
each game as a round in a long sequence of iterations. Taylor,
Elster and Hechter all suggested that the dilemmas of collective
action might be resolved if some crucial parameters are treated
as variables, if payoffs are allowed to change in the course of
the sequence, if players may be added or removed and if available
strategies are introduced or eliminated in the course of
interaction. This transforms the supergame of consecutive but
identical games into a sequence of gradually changing games, i.e.
into a process. In this process perspective, the capacity to
control the actors, to effectively coordinate their efforts, is
an emergent property that results from ongoing collective action.
In the course of a collectivizing episode a collective good is
realized, and at the same time a collectivity that coordinates
the individual actions into an increasingly coherent effort. In
this manner mutually interdependent actors, who are aware of
their interdependence, may overcome their dilemmas and come to
constitute a collectivity at a higher level of integration.38
Of course, the 'actors' may represent individuals, or
families, or villages, or towns, corporations, states etc. At
some point, the question may arise whether and why the entity
that functions as an actor is indeed a unit that effectively
coordinates the actions of its constituent elements. Rational
choice theorists try to make good on their promise to answer that
question all the way down to the level of individual persons. But
the question why aggregate agents are coherent need not always be
answered first. E.g., the interactions of states in world society
may be studied by treating them as coherent actors, pending a
full account of their internal composition, coherence and
consistency.
38
1
It may be possible to render such collectivizing episodes in
the formal terms of a dynamic rational choice model, but
available mathematics do not adapt themselves easily to such
process constructs, due to the poverty of formalism: formal
models of process theories are rare or nonexistent.
Although historical sociological theories will not soon be
couched in the formal terms of the rational choice model, process
theorists may borrow its central concepts and adopt notions from
game theory or the theory of collective action to guide their
research and structure their narrative. If indeed, the central
question of historical sociology is how the scale of effective
coordination could expand from an order of magnitude of dozens to
billions in the span of a few hundred generations, then the
problem of collective action should be at the heart of historical
sociological theory: the dilemmas of collective action occur, as
mentioned before, precisely in the transition from one level of
integration to the next. In order to explain this transition, the
question must be answered why people do collaborate and why they
do not defect. Once the collectivity is in place, and payoff
matrices have been modified accordingly, cooperation may be taken
for granted and other questions take precedence, e.g. the process
of integration at the next higher level. In other words, the
analyst may take a structural view in dealing with one level or
one stage of integration and a conflict theoretical, rational
choice perspective at the next higher, more recent, still
emergent level.
1
In this perspective, historical sociology should make
pragmatic use of rational choice theory, adopting its key notions
as search strategies and 'sensitizing' concepts. As formal theory
is constitutionally incapable of dealing with processes, there is
no reason why historical sociologists should swallow its precepts
whole and allow it to dictate their standards to them. Nor should
they let their research questions be determined by the
consideration whether sufficient and uniform data are available
for statistical testing. Rather, in this instance also, the
questions should be generated by priorities of theoretical
relevance, while research and validation methods are to be
adapted to pragmatic considerations.
Rational choice theorists identify their professional ideals
with those of the exact sciences, with population biology,
mathematical micro-economy, and experimental psychology, and that
is from where they draw their standards of inference and
validation. Historical sociologists, on the other hand, do not
seem to attach equal importance to logical inference and
statistical testing, but neither do they simply adopt the
criteria of history or the other humanities: beyond the precision
of historiography they aim for the scope and systemics that grand
theory claims for itself. This double ambition often locks them
into a double bind of having to satisfy the frequently
contradictory criteria of both history and science. It is this
predicament that defines the historical sociologists' habitus in
the field between 'history' and 'social "science".'
1
But what most deeply separates rational choice theorists and
historical sociologists is the tendency of the former to think in
terms of steady states versus the predilection of the latter for
a process perspective.
Historical sociologists must deal with the increasing scope of
human coordination as their core problem and they do well to
assume that people display a degree of scheming alertness during
critical episodes, a stance that may well have spread and
intensified in the course of history. For these reasons,
historical sociologists will profit greatly from using rational
choice concepts and using them as they see fit.
If one had to explain the course of a conflict, one should
always look first at the kinds of behavior that in a given
figuration maximize peoples' chances of power, success and
prestige. One certainly ought to look carefully at the hidden
gains of apparently impulsive and emotional behavior; one should
trace how people ostentatiously stick to their principles and in
the meantime estimate the odds that others will do the same; and
if people stick to their habits, one should want to know if that
is their way of hedging against loss from changing circumstance.
In brief, it is necessary to look for the alert and scheming
components of behavior in interaction.
Why? Because they are so effective.
All along one must avoid the premature quantifications,
circular arguments and tautologies that rational choice theory is
apt to produce as soon as it transcends the economic sphere in
1
which ideally everything can be brought under the one denominator
of money as the unit of valuation and calculation. As a matter of
fact, the use of a rational choice model is by itself a choice
model of a pure rational choice strategy: in an academic world
dominated by the exact sciences, where economics in its turn
dominates the social sciences, the rational choice model is most
highly regarded and rewarded most generously.
In conclusion, the core ideas of rational choice theory must
be liberated from the scientistic straight jacket of 'modelled'
theories, massive data sets and statistical tests. These core
ideas may then be applied quite profitably to historical
sociological theory in an evolutionist vein.