The new social science

Abstract

Szanto Zoltan and his collaborators, Orban Annamaria and Toth Istvan Gyorgy deserve the thanks of Hungarian social scientists for collecting into a short, concise volume their essays describing and explaining the accomplishments of the creative innovators who have fundamentally transformed and unified the social sciences in the past four decades. It includes broadly Gary Becker, Albert Hirschman, Mancur Olson, Douglass North, Robert Axelrod, James Coleman and a cast of supporting actors such as Peter Blau, George Homans, Mark Granovetter, Ronald Burt, to mention but a few from a longer list that I refer to as the “new social science”. The fields pioneered by these intellectuals have diverse names: game theory, new political economy, theory of collective action, social capital theory, network theory, rational choice, and new institutional economics yet they all share some common features. They cut across disciplinary boundaries and cumulatively provide a foundation for a unified social science. Their strategy for theorizing is methodological individualism. Human actor’s choices occupy a central place. Group behavior, norms, institutions, ideologies and other supra-individual structures and collective action are explained or can be explained by means of these two fundamental principles. As a useful simplification, when collective entities like states, organizations, political parties, etc., act in a unitary manner, they are treated as actors who make choices. If they are not unitary, the choices they make are analyzed as the result of the dynamics of factions, leadership groups, and other components of the collective entity. Rational choice as a method does not assume rationality from an external observer’s view point, but from the subjective perspective of the actor. Thus the choice of becoming a suicide bomber is viewed in terms of the benefits and costs of the bomber, i.e. ideological indoctrination, peer pressure, loyalty to a cause, belief in martyrdom. Non-rational behavior in the case of the suicide bomber would be if he activates the bomb in a deserted location rather than in a crowd, or detonates the bomb among allies rather than enemies. The new social science goes a long way to realizing the intellectual program of the Enlightenment and, closer to us, of Max Weber’s vision for a unified social and