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. "For those with some grounding in the study of human behaviour, Elster does a remarkable job of bringing together seemingly disparate concerns. . . . [T]his essay (as it effectively is) provides a concise overview of his dominant concerns and a useful introduction to his thought." ---Ben Saunders, Political Studies Review "I highly recommend the book, which explains in clear and simple terms the complexity of human behavior and the logic that underlies it." ---Aaron Ben-Ze'ev, European Legacy "Jon Elster's Reason and Rationality is characteristically erudite, elegant, and philosophically sophisticated. It beautifully encapsulates lines of research that Elster has been developing for years, and it serves as a wonderful introduction to his more technical work." ―Daniel Weinstock, University of Montreal "This short book presents a broad synthesis of Jon Elster's work on reason and rationality, and their complex relations to interest and passion. With clarity and elegance, it presents some of the main positions of one of the most important authors on the subject. Reason and Rationality is a pleasure to read." ―Dominique Leydet, Université du Québec à Montréal "Jon Elster's Reason and Rationality is characteristically erudite, elegant, and philosophically sophisticated. It beautifully encapsulates lines of research that Elster has been developing for years, and it serves as a wonderful introduction to his more technical work." --Daniel Weinstock, University of Montreal "This short book presents a broad synthesis of Jon Elster's work on reason and rationality, and their complex relations to interest and passion. With clarity and elegance, it presents some of the main positions of one of the most important authors on the subject. Reason and Rationality is a pleasure to read." --Dominique Leydet, Université du Québec à Montréal "Jon Elster's Reason and Rationality is characteristically erudite, elegant, and philosophically sophisticated. It beautifully encapsulates lines of research that Elster has been developing for years, and it serves as a wonderful introduction to his more technical work." --Daniel Weinstock, University of Montreal "This short book presents a broad synthesis of Jon Elster's work on reason and rationality, and their complex relations to interest and passion. With clarity and elegance, it presents some of the main positions of one of the most important authors on the subject. Reason and Rationality is a pleasure to read." --Dominique Leydet, Université du Québec à Montréal Jon Elster holds the Chaire de Rationalité et Sciences Sociales at the Collège de France. Among his recent books are Explaining Social Behavior and Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective . REASON AND RATIONALITY By Jon Elster PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Copyright © 2009 Princeton University Press All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-691-13900-5 Contents Chapter One 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." 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.