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Rationality and Revolution: A Response to Holmstrom on the Logic of Working Class Collective Action*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
In ‘Rationality and Revolution’ Nancy Holmstrom addresses an issue that has gained considerable currency among social and political theorists. She asks what insight, if any, Marxists might glean from rational choice accounts of radical working class collective action. The purpose of this comment is to argue that Holmstrom’s unfavorable estimation of rational choice accounts is ill-conceived.
Holmstrom raises two basic objections to rational choice explanations of working class collective action. First, she contends that such accounts are limited, inadequate or incomplete and indicates several manifestations of this purported deficiency. Second, Holmstrom alleges that rational choice accounts are ideologically suspect and, as such, fundamentally at odds with Marxist explanations of revolutionary action. Holmstrom appears to believe that this second line of criticism ‘follows’ (309, 318) in some sense upon the first. H so, it would be sufficient to establish the error of her initial line of argument. Because neither of her criticisms can withstand scrutiny, however, independent reasons will be advanced for rejecting each.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © The Authors 1987
Footnotes
*
Thanks to the participants in the Tuesday evening political theory seminar for comments on the larger project from which these remarks have been extracted. Special thanks to Russell Hardin, Jack Knight, Mary Jane Milano and Adam Przeworski for comments on this revised version. Any errors or infelicities that remain are my own.
References
1 Holmstrom, Nancy ‘Rationality and Revolution,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 13 (1983) 305–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. All parenthetical citations in the text are to this article.
2 See for example: Olson, Mancur The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1965)Google Scholar; Tullock, Gordon ‘The Paradox of Revolution,’ Public Choice 11 (1971), 89–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Buchanan, Allan ‘Revolutionary Motivation and Rationality,’Google Scholar reprinted in Cohen, Marshall et al. eds., Marx, Justice and History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1980), 264–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Edel, Matthew ‘Note on Collective Action, Marxism and the Prisoner’s Dilemma,’ Journal of Economic Issues 13 (1979), 751–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Elster, Jon ‘Marxism, Functionalism and Game Theory,’ Theory and Society 11 (1982), 453–82Google Scholar; Kavka, Gregory ‘Two Solutions to the Paradox of Revolution,’ Midwest Studies in Philosophy 7 (1982), 455–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Offe, Claus and Wiesenthal, Helmut ‘Two Logics of Collective Action,’ Political Power and Social Theory 1 (1980), 67–115Google Scholar; Lash, Scott and Urry, John ‘The New Marxism of Collective Action,’ Sociology 18 (1984), 33–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shaw, William ‘Marxism, Revolution and Rationality,’Google Scholar in Ball, Terrance and Farr, James eds., After Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984), 12–35Google Scholar. Among these and other writers, Holmstrom is quite nearly unique in her thorough repudiation of any relevance of rational choice to the concerns of Marxists. Throughout her article she focuses on ‘rationality as Utility maximization.’ The importance of this conception, however, is clearly the role that she sees it as playing in broadly rational choice approaches to social and political theory (306).
3 Hardin, Russell Collective Action (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 1982), 68Google Scholar
4 Elster, Jon Ulysseus and the Sirens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1979), 19–22, 143–6Google Scholar; Elster, ‘Marxism, Functionalism and Game Theory,’ 467–72Google Scholar
5 Edel, 753-4; Hardin, 125-38, 145-51
6 Oliver, Pamela Marwell, Gerald and Teixeira, Robert ‘Interdependence, Group Heterogeneity and the Production of Collective Action,’ American Journal of SociologyGoogle Scholar (forthcoming).
7 While rationality and self-interest sometimes are definitionally related as in Rapoport, Anatol Two Person Game Theory (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press 1966), 130Google Scholar, such a relation is not required by rational choice theories. See, for example, Elster, Ulysseus and the Sirens, 116; Shaw, 25.Google Scholar
8 Tullock
9 Shaw, 31; Brian Barry puts the point in this way: ‘ … it is hard to see why any reasonable person should object to the reminder that any polity, association or organization must find a way of providing people with reasons for doing what they have to do’; ‘Methodology vs. Ideology,’ in Ostrom, Elinor ed., Strategies of Political Inquiry (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage 1982), 138Google Scholar.
10 Elster, ‘Marxism, Functionalism and Game Theory,’ 138Google Scholar
11 As Clifford Geertz remarks in a closely related context, if rational choice theories are ‘to be countered it cannot be by mere disdain, refusing to look through the telescope, or by passioned restatements of hallowed truths, quoting scripture against the sun. It is necessary to get down to the details of the matter, to examine the studies and to critique the interpretations … ’, Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books 1984), 26. Cries of ‘ideology’ merely afford illusory relief from this task. Although many of the studies cited here in response to Holmstrom appeared after her essay was written, the ‘in principle’ tone of her objections places an extremely heavy burden upon them.
12 Elster, Jon Sour Grapes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983), 26–44Google Scholar, offers a discussion of ‘collective rationality’ from a rational choice perspective. Although Holmstrom promotes socialism for its collective rationality relative to capitalism (322) it is nonetheless true that it must be individually rational for individual workers to opt for socialism via political organization. In this regard the comment by Barry cited at note 9 above is particularly apposite.
13 Maguire, John Marx’s Theory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1978), 113–37Google Scholar
14 Ibid., 117; much of the discussion of game theoretic analysis of working class collective action emerged from recent debates over Marxism and functionalist explanation. For a succinct and fair, if partisan, overview of the issues involved see Roemer, John ‘Methodological Individualism and Deductive Marxism,’ Theory and Society (1982), 513–20Google Scholar.
15 Elster, ‘Marxism, Functionalism and Game Theory,’ 464–5, 477Google Scholars
16 Ibid., 474; Barry, 138
17 Hardin, 102, and Elster, Ulysseus and the Sirens, 126–7Google Scholar, acknowledge the difficulties which this problem poses for rational choice theories.
18 In this regard it is instructive to compare: (a) the comments in Rapoport, 202-3, 214, concerning the ‘limits’ of strategic rationality; (b) Elster’s discussion of the distinction between ‘parametric’ and ‘strategic’ rationality in ulysseus and the Sirens; and (c) the typology of ‘instrumental,’ ‘strategic’ and ‘communicative’ rationality in Habermas, Jurgen ‘A Reply to My Critics,’Google Scholar in John, Thompson and Held, David eds. Habermas: Critical Debates (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1982), 236–64Google Scholar. Offe and Wiesnethal seek to exploit the notion of ‘communicative’ rationality as a solution to the logic of working class collective action.
19 Elster, Sour Grapes, chapters 1 and 3; Sen, Amartya ‘Rational Fools,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 6 (1976-77), 317–44Google Scholar