Max Weber on Rationality in Social Action, in Sociological Analysis, and in Modern Life

2 Replies

For my first post on Rational Action, I’d like to offer a summary of Max Weber’s classic analysis of rationality and social action in his posthumously published Economy and Society (E&S, 1922).1 This subject has not exactly wanted for attention. Weber’s discussion is unquestionably an important reference in twentieth-century thinking about rationality, and we will no doubt have ample opportunity to link […]

Martin Shubik on the Flavors of Game Theory

Beatrice Cherrier has asked me to put together a post on Martin Shubik’s informal tripartite classification of work in game theory: High church Low church Conversational Shubik discussed this classification in two retrospective, reflective articles: M. Shubik, “What is an Application and When is Theory a Waste of Time?” Management Science 33 (1987): 1511–1522. Martin Shubik, “Game […]

Optimization and the Gulag: A brief tour of certain 20th-century intellectual anxieties

In her recent New York Times Magazine essay, “A Sucker is Optimized Every Minute,” Virginia Heffernan posits that an increasing infatuation with “optimization” in our society is leading to cultural, economic, and political harms. Her themes and some of the topics she examines are very much in this blog’s wheelhouse, so I thought it would be useful to take a look […]