This book is an indispensible introduction to the social sciences. It should be used alongside with Deirdre McCloskey's Economical Writing and Wayne Booth's et al The Craft of Research. This trio of books provide the corner stones for any social science student: what it is, how to write it and how to do it.

Jon Elster has a long history of being one of the most usefull people in the social sciences. This book, despite its dull name, is wonderful.

Anyone interested in rational choice should make this a first stop- Elster's attempt isn't worth missing.

A very cogent summary of Elster's main themes: rationality and how one departs from it, especially from the static notion common in current rational choice theory. Anyone interested in rationality and departures from rationality--a topic much-ignored in current thinking and applications of rational choice theory-- should read this book. While I don't find that I agree with every conclusion Elster makes, he does make me think hard, which is about the best I ever expect.

I cannot praise this book enough. The writing is clear, the thinking is meticulous and infinitely clever, and the usefullness of understanding the different theories of the emotive being in the social scinces cannot be over-emphasized.

This book is Elster's best since "Political Psychology".

If you are not an Elster partisan, what is wrong with you?

Jon Elster has made his name among the best and brightest as one of the most usefull people in the social sciences. This is an excellent thing to be.

Making Sense of Marx was a beautifully portioned book that is hard to praise adequately. With scholarship five feet thick, Elster displays his full range of expertise in this book, bringing into play his vast learning from all the social and dismal sciences. Mostly picking apart Marx's main theories, he deftly displays what I can only call a complete Marxian understanding. The truly refreshing part of this book was its approach: Elster spoke using not philosophical or economic language, but the general social sciences language. I was hard pressed to disagree with any of his main notions, especially his quick and incisive dissections of Marxian notions of diminishing dynamic efficiency and the theory of history. While I am not a strict adherant of rational choice models, he structured the rational choice attacks as such to make them accessible to the non-believer as well. All in all, a perfect little book.

Nine chapters by multidisciplinary contributors from the US and Oslo, Norway offer insights into the controversies over whether addicts have control over their behavior, the extent to which treatment programs offer hope for recovery, and what causes relapses. The cultural values that infuse such issues, the neurobiology of addiction, and recent theories on the role of choice are major themes. Based on presentations at a Russell Sage Foundation conference in June 1997

If you were designing a political system from scratch, what decision-making procedures would you enshrine to guarantee fair and efficient outcomes? According to Jon Elster, all possible procedures are permutations of three ideal types: arguing, bargaining and voting.

Voting involves the aggregation of individual preferences. The typical example is the referendum by secret ballot. To be democratic, the principle of majority rule must apply. A fine procedure, we might say. But surely it is misplaced optimism to believe that some sort of invisible hand will guide the mass of probably uninformed voters towards mastery of a complex issue.

Bargaining, on the other hand, involves interaction between participants. The isolation and anonymity of the participants is removed, and decisions are arrived at after those that command the weightiest resources ( eg. money, control of the army, authority over demonstrators ) make an agreement in exchange for various concessions.

Arguing similarly involves participant interaction, but appeals are made to impartial reason rather than partisan interest. The deliberations of the jury room are the model for this procedure. If 'voting' has its roots in Rousseau's theory of democracy and 'bargaining' belongs with the liberal democratic tradition of Dahl and Schumpeter, 'arguing' is firmly rooted in the republican tradition. Elster cites Pericles' eulogy of Athens: instead of a stumbling block, discussion is "an indispensable preliminary to any wise action". The idea turns up throughout history: Burke's speech to the electors of Bristol implies a deliberative model of sorts.

Its most recent incarnation was partly a result of Habermas' influential theory of communicative action. Habermas' claim that speech 'does' things ( from Austin's speech-act theory ), and is primarily oriented towards understanding and consensus, was ideally suited to revamping the theory of deliberative democracy. Despite being an heir of Kant and Marx, Habermas does not really get away from the republican mindset inherent in the model. In this sense, the elitist implications of deliberative democracy worry me . . .

Elster's volume fleshes out some of these worries in a reasonably comprehensive way. Susan Stokes' essay 'Pathologies of Deliberation' is well worth reading, as is James Johnson's 'Arguing for Deliberation: Some Skeptical Considerations'. Elster makes the important distinction between deliberation in the making of a constitution and the level of deliberation in the final constitutional document.

Of the remaining essays, Cass Sunstein's 'Health-Health Trade-Offs' is the stand-out, managing to locate the debate in solid empirical examples. Sunstein's conclusion that must find a balance between 'voting' and 'arguing' struck a chord and reminded me of its applicability to the current hot political topic of GM food: how can we balance voter's 'gut feelings' against GM food with a vigorous scientific and public policy debate which is increasingly pointing to its advantages?

Deliberative democracy is not simply abstract theorising. It is very much located in the politics of modern societies. I strongly recommend this book.

The first part of the book has contributions mainly from philophers or with a methological emphasis. The second part is more oriented towards econometrics and formal expositions. Elster's own contribution stands apart, carrying a more empirical content about the way real people implement justice (see his book on "local justice" for more). Make sure you already understand the basics of moral philosophy and welfare economics before reading this.

An introduction should be just that, an introduction. At the very least, this means that exposition should predominate over commentary. When a work reverses those roles, the result is commentary, not introduction, regardless of title or pretensions to the contrary.This is basic to the genre, and has nothing to do with allegiance on part of writer, reader, or reviewer. The axiom that a reader cannot judge intelligently without first understanding what is being judged (in this case Marx) underlies the significance of exposition to an introduction, and speaks to an elementary point that apparently eludes the overzealous reviewer below. Properly understood, Elster's work is commentary, with its own agenda, and scant if any attention to the needs of introduction, let alone a good one. (Notice how Elster's preferred methodology is given priority of place and then used to critique what little is presented of Marx's.) I would have no quarrel were the book titled *Elster on Marx* or *Making Sense of Marx*. Nor do I necessarily have a quarrel with those who criticize or revise Marx. But to title a work Introduction and then bury a smattering of exposition inside a running critique - no matter how worthy or not the commentary - is to do reader and purchaser a disservice. Unfortunately, the book is about Elster, not Marx, and while there are many other introductions that do the job properly, this is not one of them. And, no, Mr. Ver Sluys, this is not about that tiresome chestnut of subservience to Marx - for that, I suggest you check your own effusions on Elster. What it is about is truth in packaging for readers who wish to make up their own minds.

Elster's book serves as a poor introduction to Marx's thought for several reasons. First, Elster doesn't lay out Marx's specific doctrines in much detail, leaving the reader with a mere impression instead of an understanding of the theories involved. Much lack of clarity and detail results from Elster's eagerness to refute specific theories at the same time he presents them. Moreover his interpretations are consistently uncharitable. Combined with little effort at elaborating Marx's theories to meet the objections, we're left with a pretty partisan result, and one made paradoxical by Elster's own self-described Marxism.

The impression throughout is of superficiality. I suspect much of this superficiality results from Elster's "methodological individualism" and fashionable reliance on game theory, the current paradigm of rationable behavior. Small wonder that Elster finds sympathy only in certain Marxian themes rather than specific results, given Marx's general allegiance to holistic forms of explanation. The book's unsatisfactory nature is almost redeemed by an outstanding chapter on self-realization as Marx's chief social value. The rest of the chapters pale in comparison to this little gem among the castoffs.

Apparently the gentleman below and I have read different books with the same title, because the book I read, "An Introduction to Karl Marx" by Jon Elster, was absolutely nothing like the book mr. Doepke reviewed.

The book, as far as I can tell with my level of marxian scholarship, is a complete introductoin, and it suffered from none of the failings attributed by it below. Descriptions flowed easily and succintly and I had no trouble understanding them at all. Perhaps this is because I am more of an advanced marx scholar than our other reviewer friend.

But I suspect that the reason mr. Doepke is not happy with this book is because it is a disspasionate consideration of Marxian ideas from a supremely educated man who holds no special religious-kind of attraction to Marx, as so many Marx scholars do.

Let there be no doubt- the disspasionate nature of mr. Elster's analysis of Marx and his contributions is what makes him a rare find. Most all Marx scholars have some kind of agenda in approaching marx, and are colored accordingly (Tom Sowell and Edward Herman, for example).

To his undying credit, Mr. Elster is a leftist who seems to have no agenda in speaking about Marx. Stunningly, he without exception atomizes Marx's main theses and considers them both seperately and as a whole. The result is incisive and dead-on commentary that no other scholar alive has ever even approached, to my knowledge.

What George Orwell did for concretly existing communist governments Jon Elster has done for Marxian theory- a deadly accurate eye methodically slashing through to the real core. I have never found a single scholar that I was not hard pressed to disagree violently with, but Elster manages to leave me without complaint and wondering how I am able to critique the bad points of his books. I am simply unequal to the task of disagreeing with any of Elster's main notions. This is an amazing fact considering we have no ideological common ground. That's how good this man is.

And a last point- unlike most Marx scholars, Elster has a wide range in a vast array of subjects, which makes him interesting to philosophers and economists such as myself in addition to nearly the entire sweep of the social sciences from psychology and sociology on outward.

Buy this book. Elster has no equal.

While it is true that Marx may be one of the harder theorists to understand, this book didn't really give me a better understanding of anything. If you want a good amount of straight Marx text, this is the book for you. If you want to understand Marx and learn about his work, I suggest looking into the introductory texts of George Ritzer. He does a MUCH better job a getting Marx across to the reader than anything in this book.