In the previous chapter the failure of Rational Choice Theory to explain the constitution of values was included among the problems with that whole approach to rationalities. ‘There's no accounting for tastes’ may be an adequate response to the choice of Pepsi rather than Coke (or vice versa) but not to contrasting ideas in Islamabad and Ann Arbor about the relation between the sexes. Here the Rational Choice theorists need to listen to historians. Conversely, historians need to lift their empirical expertise up to a higher level of generality to understand why so many different value systems have such a tenacious purchase on different sets of minds. It can hardly be genetic! G. A. Cohen tries a thought experiment about identical twins separated at birth:

The study of value systems is a field par excellence where the old discipline of History, if allowed to go beyond period specialisation to comparisons disciplined by clear concepts, can redress the imbalance in the relatively new field of Rational Choice.