Jon Elster

In the preface the author outlines his view of the philosophy of science which, he says, underlies the essays of this book. It's an interesting set of ideas which covers the social sciences and biology and even touches a little bit upon the physical sciences. But these essays have been written independently of each other and this greatly reduces the overall coherence of the book. The guiding philosophical ideas presented in the preface are completely lost for long stretches of the book when show more the author delves into game theory. But it is nevertheless a pleasure to read an author who exhibits such a wide range of learning across different disciplines and distills the key part of complex arguments into a clear conclusion. I particularly liked the argument that there is no place for functional explanation in the social sciences. The author provides a nice formalization of the criteria that a true functional explanation would have to meet. show less

The theory part of Marx. Most people don't go past Das Kapital or The Communist Manifesto, but this book takes writings from Marx's theoretical work, and presents its in lieu of its importance. The readings form this have popped up numerous times in my study in political theory and history.

A very dry discussion of social order based on rational choice theory and some other theories whose names I can't recollect. I suppose there might be some truth beneath all this theorizing, but in general the abstract nature of the arguments turned my interest off. I can only recommend this book to social theory enthusiasts.

Provides causal and phenomenological analyses of addiction and emotion, and explores how one and the other are each related to culture and choice.