Collective Action
Collective Action by Russell Hardin, published by Resources for the Future in 1982, is a scholarly exploration of public choice theory within political theory. This edition spans 248 pages and is presented in English. The book investigates how individuals and societies make decisions that impact their collective lives, challenging the notion that people always act in their self-interest when making collective choices.
In this work, Hardin examines the discrepancies between theoretical models of decision-making and real-world behaviors, focusing on why individuals sometimes collaborate in situations deemed unlikely by traditional public choice models. He employs constructs from modern political economy, such as public goods and game theory, to analyze significant movements in American history, including civil rights and environmental concerns. This book is aimed at theoreticians and graduate students in public choice, political economy, and political theory, as well as those interested in the dynamics of collective action in various social contexts.
Official synopsis Publisher
Public choice, an important subdiscipline in the field of political theory, seeks to understand how people and societies make decisions affecting their collective lives. Relying heavily on theoretical models of decision making, public choice postulates that people act in their individual interests in making collective decisions.
As it happens, however, reality does not mirror theory, and people often act contrary to what the principal public choice models suggest.
In this book, Russell Hardin looks beyond the models to find out why people choose to act together in situations that the models find quite hopeless. He uses three constructs of modern political economy–public goods, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and game theory–to test public choice theories against real world examples of collective action. These include movements important in American society in the past few decades–civil rights, the Vietnam War, women’s rights, and environmental concerns.
This classic work on public choice will be of interest to theoreticians and graduate students in the fields of public choice, political economy, or political theory–and to those in other disciplines who are concerned with the problem of collective action in social contexts.
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