Although some reviewers believe that mid-century “political science produced almost no general scientific propositions of a high degree of conclusiveness,” the intense discussions within the discipline—between historical political theory and “the new science of politics,” on questions of values and political culture, for example—prepared the ground for a critical reaction in the late 1960s. The mobilization of the disenfranchised undermined the positive consensus about American politics, questioned assumptions about liberalism and actually-existing democracy, and inspired new interest in justice and egalitarianism. While Marxism and critical theory remained on the margins, younger scholars were fascinated by the social structural work of Barrington Moore, the critique of modernization theory presented by dependency theory, new comparative studies of capitalism and labor, and a left turn in political theory.59
Ironically, at the moment when Western Marxists were abandoning economic determinist models of explanation, and historians wrestled with anthropology and literary criticism, many political scientists found new value in a view of human and group choice borrowed from economics. Much of political science had emphasized the predatory activities of elites, the established structures and procedures of modern politics, the determining effects of political culture, or the complexity of political decision-making that makes the agency of citizens difficult if not impossible, whereas new departures toward rational choice theory centered the individual and his or her choices.60 Rational choice theory (closely related to social or public choice) and its associate game theory offered students of politics a theory that claimed to explain politics across time and space as the result of strategic, rational, goal-maximizing behavior within given structures and institutions.61 This methodological individualism questions the sufficiency of structuralist explanations, with their emphasis on constraints, and focuses instead on the choice of strategies adopted by actors to achieve their goals.62 The model does not account for the formation of goals (first order preferences), but is interested in the institutions and structures that shape strategies (second order preferences). The theory assumes only that people choose the means most likely to bring about their desired ends, that they can order their priorities, and that they hold consistent preferences.63 When theorists in this tradition looked at parties, nations, or classes, they treated them as unitary actors capable of rationally calculating their preferences and strategies toward utility maximization, in the manner of individuals. Although not all political science succumbed to rational choice theory, methodological individualism proved to be a muscular challenger to both the political culture approach and the post-behavioralist “inclination to stress institutional phenomena.”64 And in many ways rational choice appears to be at the opposite pole in the discipline from cultural interpretivist approaches.
The question for political science has not been whether to deal with culture. Political scientists had followed American anthropology into an appreciation of the diversity of cultural forms in the 1920s and had generally adopted its relativist and value-neutral approach, and from the 1950s they carried that interest further into political culture. The question was how to deal with culture. Some political scientists consider political systems to be products of and limited by their cultures, with an elective affinity of one to the other, and still others treat culture as an instrument available for elites to use politically. There is no consensus on whether culture is just a piece of information to be considered or an independent explanatory variable.
Rational choice has taken several different approaches to deal with the inconvenience of culture. At one end, transhistorical and deductive notions of human preferences ignore cultural specificities and determinations. Here analysts assume that all people want either wealth, status, or power and that other motivations can be reduced to these fundamental preferences. Others within the tradition recognize the importance of culture. Shared symbols, they argue, create a field of communication and trust and solve coordination and collective action problems. Cultural systems are political resources that can be employed by political entrepreneurs to mobilize otherwise divided populations without paying the start-up costs of organization. Yet, critics point out, reducing culture or constructions of identity to instrumental decisions, calculated strategic choices, loses much of the texture, complexity, and richness of actual politics. Such simplifications have led to a stark polarization in the discipline. As Lisa Wedeen argues,
Insofar as individualism presupposes agents who are forward-looking strategists forever calculating costs and benefits, there will be a serious ontological and epistemological divide between most rational choice and interpretivist theorists. Interpretivists, in my view, can rightly claim that individualist assumptions prevent rational choice scholars from asking important questions about politics, not the least of which is how we come to know that people maximize their interests, if they do.65
The reductionist psychology of rational choice theory has been a source of debate and discussion within political science from its earliest appearance. The early neo-institutionalists were among the most effective critics, raising the point that although self-interest certainly permeates politics, actual human action “is often based more on discovering the normatively appropriate behavior than on calculating the return expected from alternative choices. As a result, political behavior, like other behavior, can be described in terms of duties, obligations, roles, and rules.”66 Rational choice theorists have responded by introducing culture, values, and morals and then considering their instrumental employment. “To share a culture,” David D. Laitin writes,
means to share a language or a religion or a historiography. Very rarely do these cultural systems coincide perfectly within a large society. People must often choose which among their religious group, language group, and so on will be their primary mode of cultural identification. This choice is often guided by instrumental reasoning, based on the potential resources available for identifying yourself … Once a cultural group organizes politically, the common symbolic system makes for efficient collective action.67
For Laitin, culture is “Janus-faced,” that is, “people are both guided by the symbols of their culture and instrumental in using culture to gain wealth and power.” But this claim leads us to ask: How do we know when actions will be guided by values within the terms of a culture or instrumental in terms that transcend time, place, and culture, like wealth and power? It appears that rational choicers would like to have it both ways: people may be guided by preferences that are historical and cultural, but their ultimate ends and the real nature of human actions—goal maximization—are transhistorical, ultimately the same in all contexts. And one cannot help but notice that the most prevalent preferences posited by rational choice are ones that have come to dominate modern capitalist Western societies. Certainly wealth, material well-being, or power is a strong motivation for many, but interpretivists propose that such motivations are always culture-bound and historically derived. Status, security, respect, and love also function frequently, but the most interesting questions to ask are precisely about what meanings are attached to such concepts, and under what conditions they drive people to act. For historians deeply located in different times and cultures, what may seem the most strategic choice is precisely the one that is most inflected (infected?) by culture or values in a historic setting.
The difficulty,