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  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. Identity, Interest and Action
  • Cited by 212
  • Erik Ringmar, London School of Economics and Political Science
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
October 2009
Print publication year:
1996
Online ISBN:
9780511557705
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511557705
Subjects:
Social Theory, Sociology: General Interest, Politics and International Relations, International Relations and International Organisations, Sociology
Series:
Cambridge Cultural Social Studies
Information

Book description

This book offers an original combination of cultural and narrative theory with an empirical study of identity and political action. It is at once a powerful critique of rational choice theories of action and a solution to the historiographical puzzle of why Sweden went to war in 1630. Erik Ringmar argues that people act not only for reasons of interest, but also for reasons of identity, and that the latter are, in fact, more fundamental. Deploying his alternative, non-rational theory of action in his account of the Swedish intervention in the Thirty Years War, he shows it to have been an attempt on behalf of the Swedish leaders to gain recognition for themselves and their country. Further to this, he demonstrates the importance of questions of identity to the study of war and of narrative theories of action to the social sciences in general.

Reviews

"Erik Ringmar has done a neat job of comparing rational-choice models of decision making with cultural ones in Identity, Interest and Action....this is a powerful little study, smoothly written and tightly argued that sheds light on many different areas of sociology." James M. Jasper, Contemporary Sociology

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