Jon Elster

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Jon Elster (born February 22, 1940 ) is a Norwegian - American social scientist and philosopher .

Life

He was trained at the École normal supérieure . He is currently Professor at the Collège de France , and Robert K. Merton - Professor of Sociology at Columbia University in New York. Elster is one of the most important representatives of the theory of rational decision ( rational choice theory ), in particular his work on the bounded rationality of actors appeared many groundbreaking. Since 1981 he has been a member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences . In 1988 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1989 to the Academia Europaea , and in 1997 he was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize . In 2012 he became a member of the American Philosophical Society . In 2016 he received the Skytteanska priset from Uppsala University . He holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Valencia and Stockholm University .

Together with Gerald A. Cohen and John Roemer , he founded Analytical Marxism in the 1980s and 1990s. Elster tried to apply the methods of decision and game theory to Marx's theory , beginning with the class struggle, in order to reconstruct it using and in the sense of methodological individualism .

Elster is the son of the Norwegian journalist Torolf Elster .

Act

In his works Ulysses and the Sirens and Ulysses Unbound , Elster particularly deals with the phenomenon of voluntary self-commitment . Self-binding can be used by rational actors in order to prevent foreseeable irrationalities. Elster uses the figure of Odysseus from Homer's Odyssey as an analogy to self- binding . Odysseus asks his companions to plug their ears with wax, but to tie him to the mast of the ship so that he can hear the sirens singing without falling for them and being killed. Odysseus thus succeeds in expanding his de facto scope of action through a voluntary self-commitment; it creates, as it were, “freedom through attachment”. However, since Sour Grapes (1983) , Elster has been increasingly critical of rational choice theories:

"I now believe that rational-choice theory has less explanatory power than I used to think. Do real people act on the calculations that make up many pages of mathematical appendixes in leading journals? I do not think so. … There is no general non-intentional mechanism that can simulate or mimic rationality. ... At the same time, the empirical support ... tends to be quite weak. This is of course a sweeping statement. ... Let me simply point out the high level of disagreement among competent scholars ... fundamental, persistent disagreements among 'schools.' We never observe the kind of many-decimal-points precision that would put controversy to rest. "

In the area of justice research , Jon Elster pointed out that at a decentralized level in the sense of “local justice ” a multitude of questions of justice are decided in relation to scarce goods, which are not in the focus of society as a whole, but are of great importance for the individual. In practice, there are equality-oriented principles (lottery, rotation), time-based concepts (queue), person-dependent criteria (age, gender, number of siblings) and needs-oriented concepts (welfare, efficiency) as well as combinations of these approaches (e.g. point evaluation systems). As a result, Elster worked out that in practice, due to the increasing need for justification, a growing trend towards the replacement of simple distribution criteria by methods of procedural justice can be observed.

Jon Elster has written or published a total of 34 books.

Fonts (selection)

  • Leibniz et la formation de l'esprit capitaliste (Paris, 1975) ISBN 2-7007-0018-X
  • Leibniz and the development of economic rationality (Oslo, 1975)
  • Logic and Society (New York, 1978)
  • Ulysses and the Sirens (Cambridge, 1979)
  • Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge, 1983)
  • Explaining Technical Change: a Case Study in the Philosophy of Science (Oslo, 1983)
  • Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge, 1985)
  • An Introduction to Karl Marx (Cambridge, 1986)
  • Rational Choice (Editor) (Oxford, 1986)
  • Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (Cambridge, UK, 1989)
  • Local Justice. How Institutions Allocate Scarce Goods and Necessary Burdens (New York, 1992)
  • Strong Feelings: Emotion, Addiction, and Human Behavior The Jean Nicod Lectures (MIT Press, 1997)
  • Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge, 1999)
  • Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints (Cambridge, 2002)
  • Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 2004)
  • Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (Cambridge, 2007)
  • Alexis de Tocqueville: The First Social Scientist (Cambridge, 2009)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Book of Members 1780 – present, Chapter E. (PDF; 477 kB) In: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org). Retrieved January 16, 2018 .
  2. ^ Membership directory: Jon Elster. Academia Europaea, accessed on January 16, 2018 .
  3. ^ Member History: Jon Elster. American Philosophical Society, accessed July 29, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Marco Iorio: Analytical Marxism, in: Michael Quante / David P. Schweikard (ed.): Marx Handbook. Life - Works - Work, Stuttgart 2016, p. 349f.
  5. ↑ Explaining Social Behavior , CUP 2007, 5, 25 f
personal data
SURNAME Magpie, Jon
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Norwegian-American sociologist
DATE OF BIRTH February 22, 1940