About the book
Expanding and revising his earlier Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences, Jon Elster gives an account of what explanation means in the social sciences. Across 26 short chapters he surveys the key mechanisms that explain behavior, using hundreds of examples taken from psychology, behavioral economics, biology, political science, history, philosophy and fiction. Elster avoids formal models and jargon, aiming instead for accuracy and clarity in plain language. His conclusion defends qualitative social science in a war on two fronts, against soft obscurantism of the literary kind and hard obscurantism of the mathematical kind.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb read it twice, and on first reading judged it the best compendium of social science ideas, valuing its nuts-and-bolts approach over general theories.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Flaneur)
I read this book twice. The first time, I thought that it was excellent, the best compendium of ideas of social science by arguably the best thinker in the field. I took copious notes, etc. I agreed with its patchwork-style approach to rational decision making. I knew that it had huge insights applicable to my refusal of general theories [they don't work], rather limit ourselves to nuts and bolts [they work].
Then I started reading it again, as the book tends to locate itself by my bedside and sneaks itself in my suitcase when I go on a trip. It is as if the book wanted me to read it. It is what literature does to you when it is at its best. So I realized why: it had another layer of depth --and the author distilled ideas from the works of Proust, La Rochefoucault, Tocqueville, Montaigne, people with the kind of insights that extend beyond the ideas, and that makes you feel that a reductionist academic treatment of the subject will necessary distort it [& somehow Elster managed to combine Montaigne and Kahneman-Tversky]. So as an anti-Platonist I finally found a rigorous treatment of human nature that is not Platonistic --not academic (in the bad sense of the word).
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