Josh McCabe reports that behavioural/experimental economist Herbert Gintis (a working colleague of Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd and Ernst Fehr, inter alia) is reviewing virtually every single book ever written on Amazon. For the sake of publicity, and since his reviews come with a handy RSS feed, one might consider Herbert Gintis writes a dense blog of book reviews at Amazon.
As Josh McCabe notes, Herbert Gintis is a fierce reviewer, and his meanest reviews are those that I find the most enlightening. In these reviews, the reader gets to learn a lot about Herbert Gintis himself, and about his views of other social scientists in several disciplines. For instance:
- His review of The Use and Abuse of Biology by Marshall Sahlins (“one of the finest anthropologists of the post-WW II period”) rejects as irrelevant the idea of judging a scientific doctrine (sociobiology) by its ideological content (social exploitation) and impact. Sahlins, by the way, wrote an excellent collection of aphorisms based on Michel Foucault—both Sahlins and Gintis have a particular taste for pointing at the segments of academia that they consider to be mistaken in a way or another.
- His review of An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology by Loïc Wacquant, comments on Pierre Bourdieu (“perhaps the leading sociological theorist in the last quarter of the twentieth century”) and sociology. The review contains a paragraph that sums up the history of core theories in economics and biology, followed by a paragraph that explains why Parsons failed to drive sociology at the same level of theoretical unity, and the devastating consequences of that failure (“a thousand glittering but laughably parochial fragments of nano-theories”). His critique of Bourdieu is scathing but well-grounded.
- His review of Foundations of Social Theory by James Coleman (“one of the leading American sociologists of the past half century”) has an interesting title: “With Friends like Coleman, Rationality Needs no Enemies.” The review develops a simple but powerful argument: “Coleman’s advocacy of the rational actor model, the centerpiece of economic theory, was courageous and far-sighted, but he imported from economics only one aspect of the model, and the part he imported is wrong.” For defending a “sociopathic conception of rationality”, Coleman gets the following verdict: “This book is almost completely wrong-headed.”
The reader will quickly identify the modus operandi of Herbert Gintis in his reviews: first, laud the author for being a major scientific figure; second, challenge his axioms of social theory; third and last, dismiss his work for being poorly documented and insufficiently, if at all, modeled. Some will hate these slapdash verdicts (“Now Erving Goffman is a great thinker, but this critique is a perfect throwaway.”), some will love them.
Update: if you wonder why a behavioural economist would read Bourdieu and consider him one of the most important names of the last century, read on. Thomas Schelling, speaking to Oxonomics:
[Behavioural economics] is sometimes referred to as the juncture of economics and psychology, which I think is pretty good. On the other hand, one could as well say sociology and anthropology… My colleague Robert Aumann, with whom I shared this prize, is on record as believing that behavioural economics is a flash in the pan, that it is not going anywhere. I think that is partly because he is totally devoted to the universality of rational choice. But I think this has opened up a whole range of the study of behaviour. And I think it has a big future.
I wonder what Jon Elster (who merges political science with moral philosophy, classical literature and social psychology) would say.