Customer Reviews

The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences

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Shapiro's book is an excellent overview on the major trends in US regarding methodology in social science. This book's aim is to stress the importance of not ignoring the reality and empirical evidence when producing the theories in social science. Shapiro dared to say what majority of students think and this book can serve as a starting point for everyone who is starting PhD research and it is confused whether to choose quantitative or qualitative approach. In summary, Shapiro advocates more liberal and creative approach to studying contemporary world.

Mancur Olson's Logic of Collective Action (1965) was the start of a revolution in political thought, known as the rational choice school. Olson applied a simple economic logic to the question: when will a rational individual join in collective action, at personal cost? His answer is that, unless the group is very small so that the individual's contribution to the success of the action is great, or some external sanction is applied to the individual for failing to participate, the rational individual will not join. In 1994, some three decades later, Ian Shapiro coauthored Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory, asserting that this school had produced nothing of importance, and its commitment to a universalist model of human behavior precludes it ever from doing so. This book, The Flight from Reality, includes several follow-up essays, including a reply to the rational choice critics of his earlier book, and a long critique of Judge Richard Posner, the most prominent rational choice theorists among legal scholars.

It is hard not to sympathize with Shapiro's "show me the beef" approach to political theory. Rational choice theory has not revolutionized political science in the same way it has revolutionized economics. By and large, rational choice theorists have taken hold of the "high theory" segment of political science departments, but their methods are honored mostly in the breach when students go on to study real political problems. However, it is also hard (at least for this writer) not to sympathize with the intention of political theorists to ground their subject analytically, as has been done in economics and biology. The rational choice theorists in political science may not yet have succeeded, but they cannot be faulted for attempting to build an analytical political theory. Shapiro comes off as the alchemist who doesn't mind dirtying his hands in chemical soups, but who criticizes the chemists because they haven't yet solve the problem of the transmutation of the elements.

Why has rational choice theory failed? Shapiro's answer is that all "reductivist" theory must fail. However, all science is reductivist, and tolerates emergent properties of complex systems only after sustained failure to model them analytically. Thus, Shapiro is really an anti-science realist. The correct answer, I believe is that rational choice theorists learned the wrong lesson from Mancur Olson. Clearly large-scale collective action exists in the world, and without such action, human society as we know it could not exist. Voting itself is an example that violates Mancur Olson's theory, as are the collective actions that gave rise to representative institutions, political democracy, striking down of racially discriminatory institutions, and some measure of gender equality. What we must give up in Mancur Olson's argument is not his postulate of rationality, but rather his postulate that rationality implies self-interest. This, the rational choice school in political science has not done.

Economists and biologists use rational decision theory to model choice. This accounts for the analytical success of behavioral theories in biology and economics. We can describe the rational choice model more accurately as the Beliefs, Preferences, and Constraints model. The theory holds that individuals maximize a preference function, subject their knowledge/beliefs, and subject to whatever constraints they face. However, the content of preferences, and the nature of beliefs, cannot be derived from the concept of rationality itself. In particular, the notion that it is irrational to prefer something because it promotes the welfare of others (e.g., giving to charity), or because it is the moral thing to do (e.g., being honest, or voting) cannot be sustained by any known plausible argument.

There is a deep irony in the political science rational choice school that they felt that adopting the analytical rigor of the beliefs, preferences, and constraints model necessarily obliged them to accept the economist's model of Homo economicus, that supremely sociopathic personality who is rarely found outside of impersonal market interactions. Shapiro, were he a real scientist, would have known the two decades of behavioral game theory that rejects the equation of rationality with self-interest (see, for instance, Colin Camerer, Behavioral Game Theory, Princeton University Press, 2003), and instead of assuming the role of harping critic, could have set rational choice theory on a better road. But, those with alchemistic predilections just prefer to muck around in reality with no need for theorizing at all.

I demote this book two stars because it is wrong, and one star because it is a collection of previously published essays. I add one star because it is beautifully produced with a dynamite dust jacket.

As a political theorist and global studies scholar, I deeply sympathize with Shapiro's call for a return to problem-driven social inquiry that can illuminate the central questions of our global era. The book is written in an accessible, lucid style and offers strong arguments for a "middle way" between the Scylla of jargonistic metatheory and the Charybdis of quantative abstraction. A must read for those who think that politics matters!