Research Catalog

Culture and social theory

Title: Culture and social theory / Aaron Wildavsky ; edited by Sun-Ki Chai and Brendon Swedlow ; with a foreword by Charles Lockhart and Richard M. Coughlin.
Author: Wildavsky, Aaron B.
Publication: New Brunswick, N.J. : Transaction Publishers, 1998.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	HM101 .W448 1998	Off-site

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Description

xxviii, 324 pages; 23 cm

Summary

These essays use a common interpretive framework to show how economic and other concepts are socially constructed, how political philosophers and the workings of democracy can be understood, and how rational choice theories might be given wider application and greater discriminatory power.
Aaron Wildavsky hoped that fellow social scientists would be persuaded of the unifying and integrating potential of what Mary Douglas called "grid-group theory" (which he further developed as "cultural theory") by seeing this explanatory tool used in so many different ways and with regard to such a variety of issues and questions.
In the first section, Wildavsky argues that concepts such as externalities, public goods, altruism, and even risk and rape, are constructs of rival, ubiquitous societal subcultures engaged in a perpetual interpretive and political struggle with one another. In the second section, he shows how his own cultural constructs and concepts can be used to understand the competing human objectives of normative and analytic political philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes and John Stuart Mill.
In the third section, Wildavsky suggests how his cultural ideas might be combined with those of rational choice theorists by adding a theory of preference formation and ultimate objectives to their theories of efficient preference realization and instrumental rationality.

Subjects

Bibliography (note)

Contents

Introduction: Political Cultures -- 1. On the Social Construction of Distinctions: Risk, Rape, Public Goods, and Altruism -- 2. Why the Traditional Distinction between Public and Private Goods Should be Abandoned -- 3. At Once Ubiquitous and Elusive, the Concept of Externalities is Either Vacuous or Misapplied -- 4. Accounting for the Environment -- 5. The Social Construction of Cooperation: Egalitarian, Hierarchical, and Individualistic Faces of Altruism -- 6. If Institutions Have Consequences, Why Don't We Hear about Them from Moral Philosophers? -- 7. Thomas Hobbes and His Critics: Interpretive Implications of Cultural Theory -- 8. The "Multicultural" Mill -- 9. Democracy as a Coalition of Cultures -- 10. Cultural Pluralism Can both Strengthen and Weaken Democracy -- 11. Indispensable Framework or Just Another Ideology? Prisoner's Dilemma as an Antihierarchical Game --
12. Why Self-Interest Means Less Outside of a Social Context: Cultural Contributions to a Theory of Rational Choices -- 13. Can Norms Rescue Self-Interest or Macro Explanation be Joined to Micro Explanation? -- 14. Culture, Rationality, and Political Violence -- 15. Cultural Change, Party Ideology, and Electoral Outcomes.

ISBN

1560002751 (alk. paper)

LCCN

96052657

OCLC

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries