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    Reason and Rationality
    Reason and Rationality
    Reason and Rationality
    Ebook44 pages34 minutes

    Reason and Rationality

    By Jon Elster and Steven Rendall

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    One of the world's most important political philosophers, Jon Elster is a leading thinker on reason and rationality and their roles in politics and public life. In this short book, he crystallizes and advances his work, bridging the gap between philosophers who use the idea of reason to assess human behavior from a normative point of view and social scientists who use the idea of rationality to explain behavior. In place of these approaches, Elster proposes a unified conceptual framework for the study of behavior.


    Drawing on classical moralists as well as modern scholarship, and using a wealth of historical and contemporary illustrations, Reason and Rationality marks a new development in Elster's thinking while at the same time providing a brief, elegant, and accessible introduction to his work.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateDec 29, 2008
    ISBN9781400833177

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      Book preview

      Reason and Rationality - Jon Elster

      Cover: Reason and Rationality by Jon Elster

      Reason

      and

      Rationality

      Reason

      and

      Rationality

      Jon Elster

      Translated by Steven Rendall

      Princeton University Press

      Princeton & Oxford

      Copyright © 2009 by Princeton University Press

      Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street

      Princeton, New Jersey 08540

      In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

      6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

      All Rights Reserved

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Elster, Jon, 1940–

      [Raison et raisons. English]

      Reason and rationality / Jon Elster ; translated by Steven

      Rendall.

      p. cm.

      Includes bibliographical references.

      ISBN 978-0-691-13900-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)

      1. Practical reason. 2. Rational choice theory.

      3. Philosophy and social sciences. I. Title.

      BC177.E4713 2009

      128'.33—dc22 2008029705

      British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

      This book has been composed in Adobe Garamond and

      Goudy Trajan

      Printed on acid-free paper.∞

      press.princeton.edu

      Printed in the United States of America

      1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

      Contents

      Reason and Rationality

      Works Cited

      Reason

      and

      Rationality

      In analytical approaches to human behaviors, the same Latin word, ratio, is at the root of two intellectual traditions that are at once very different and interconnected.

      On the one hand, there is the tradition that opposes reason to the passions and, more recently, to interests. Seneca’s treatise On Anger, for instance, is organized around the opposition between reason and passion, whereas the French moralists of the seventeenth century added the notion of self-interest. La Bruyère, in a famous passage, summed up their mutual relationships this way: Nothing is easier for passion than to overcome reason, but its greatest triumph is to conquer a man’s own interest.¹ The idea of reason is intimately connected to that of the common good.

      On the other hand, there is the still more recent idea of rational choice, which is opposed to the diverse forms of irrationality. The rational actor is one who acts for sufficient reasons. These reasons are the beliefs and desires in light of which the action appears to be appropriate in a sense that I shall discuss at length. The idea of rationality is often but wrongly related to that of the actor’s private good or self-interest in the moralists’ sense. Anyone who is pursuing the common good can—and even ought to—do so in a rational manner.

      Acting in conformity with reason, in the singular, and acting for good reasons, in the plural, are two different things insofar as reason is objective, whereas reasons are subjective. From an external point of view, we can evaluate a policy as being in conformity with reason or not. From an internal point of view, one can evaluate an action as being rational or not.² From this difference it follows that only rationality can be used for explanatory ends. It is only insofar as the agent has made

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