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Title: Culture and Social Theory by Sun-Ki Chai, Brendon Swedlow, Aaron B. Wildavsky, Aaron Wildawsky ISBN: 1-56000-275-1 Publisher: Transaction Pub Pub. Date: April, 1998 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $44.95

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Comment: If Culture and Social Theory becomes unavailable... for any reason, it can also be obtained from the publisher, Transaction, or, in Europe, from the distributor, Eurospan Ltd.

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Comment: These essays use a common interpretive framework to show how economic and other concepts are socially constructed, how political philosophers and the workings of democracy can be understood, and how rational choice theories might be given wider application and greater discriminatory power. Aaron Wildavsky hoped that fellow social scientists would be persuaded of the unifying and integrating potential of what Mary Douglas called "grid-group theory"(which he further developed as "cultural theory") by seeing this explanatory tool used in so many different ways and with regard to such a variety of issues and questions. Wildavsky selected, grouped, and sequenced all but three of the essays in Culture and Social Theory prior to his death, including four never-before-published pieces. The volume is the first in a series of Wildavsky's collected writings being published posthumously[the second is Federalism and Political Culture, also available from Amazon]. In the first section, Wildavsky argues that concepts such as externalities, public goods, altruism, and even risk and rape, are constructs of rival, ubiquitious societal subcultures engaged in a perpetual interpretive and political struggle with one another. In the second section, he shows how his own cultural constructs and concepts can be used to understand the competing human objectives of normative and analytic political philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes and John Stuart Mill. In this section, Wildavsky also takes a turn at political philosophy himself, using his theory to characterize the societal bases of democracy and to argue that democratic stability and longevity depend on a particular mixture of his subcultures. In the third section, Wildavsky suggests how his cultural ideas might be combined with those of rational choice theorists by adding a theory of preference formation and ultimate objectives to their theories of efficient preference realization and instrumental rationality. Concepts such as "self-inte! rest" and "the prisoners' dilemma," he maintains, can be given greater explanatory power and empirical purchase when placed under his cultural constraints. In essays written with one of the editors, he shows the cultural conditions under which participation in political violence becomes individually rational and how cultural commitments lead to voting stability and the distinctiveness of party ideologies, thereby suggesting a solution to two paradoxes created by spatial theories of voting.