Political Psychology

This provocative textbook takes up and develops the themes of rationality and irrationality in Jon Elster's earlier work.

Jon Elster (Author)

9780521411103, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 29 January 1993

216 pages
22.2 x 14.3 x 1.9 cm, 0.378 kg

"As always, Elster has produced an analysis that is conspicuous for its elegance....Seldom can Tocqueville have been put through such a rigorous intellectual mincer." Rudolf Klein, Times Literary Supplement

This provocative new textbook takes up and develops the themes of rationality and irrationality in Jon Elster's earlier work. Its purposes are threefold. First, Elster shows how belief and preference formation in the realm of politics are shaped by social and political institutions. Second, he argues for an important distinction in the social sciences between mechanisms and theories. Third, he illustrates those general principles of political psychology through readings of three outstanding political psychologists: the French classical historian, Paul Veyne; the Soviet dissident writer, Alexander Zinoviev; the great French political theorist, Alexis de Tocqueville.

Abbreviations
Preface
Introduction: why political psychology?
1. A historian and the irrational: a reading of Bread and Circuses
2. Internal and external negation: an essay in Ibanskian sociology
3. Tocqueville's psychology I
4. Tocqueville's psychology II
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Social & political philosophy [HPS]