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, of course, is finding out what preferences are, how they are formed, and how actors calculate what is rational. Laitin attempts to solve this problem outside the theory by turning to Geertzian ethnography: “Only with a keen understanding of the meanings embedded in shared symbols—the first face of culture—can one adduce cultural preferences without tautologically claiming that preferences can be derived from the behavior of actors who are assumed to be rational.”68 It is here that cultural interpretivists might make the greatest contribution. People act on the basis of preferences and toward desired goals, but the preferences, goals, and strategies are provided and given meaning within a cultural system. Culturalists contend that a large part of politics is the struggle over meaning and the right to be authorized to speak. For culturalists, language not only expresses but also constitutes the political world. Derived from neither social position nor ideology, language itself helps to shape perception of position, interests, ideologies, and the meanings attached to the social and political world.69 Interests and identities, even what might constitute strategic choices, are themselves part of a political process of constructing meanings. The process of constructing meaning, agents, and even the very notion of rationality, something central to cultural interpretivist explorations, is largely left out in normal rational choice work.
Cultural interpretivists can certainly admit that, in certain circumstances, people operate strategically to maximize their interests, as they conceive them, and even that material or power incentives influence human action in many contexts. But that is only part of the story. Interpretivists are suspicious of any strict separation of culture and politics, identities and interests. In an exemplary essay on early-modern familial states, Julia Adams generously accepts the contributions of rational-choice analysts, who have demonstrated the transhistorical structural factors compelling rulers to pursue economic resources, but goes on to show how a culturalist approach opens the issues of who the rulers were, what their values consisted of, and how the identities, values, and emotional commitments of rulers shaped their preferences and actions. Her argument “insists on the socially malleable boundaries of self, originally formed in the family, the cultural component of identity, and the historically specific role of affect for early modern elite political actors.”70 Among her patrimonial rulers it is familial concerns, their identities and discourses, that structured choices. Identities and emotional attachments take on causal weight, as Adams argues that they led to resistance to change, even when change might have been economically advantageous.
Adams employs the useful distinction between “thin” and “thick” versions of rational choice theory: thin versions “are agnostic about actors’ goals and values, whereas ‘thicker’ versions try to specify actors’ desired ends, at least as exogenously given constraints.” In either case, however, the ultimate ends or goals are “exogenously determined, and random with respect to the general theory, at the same time that they are held to be contingent on a universal means to an end [in this case]—revenue—that must itself be a goal if any higher-order ends are to be realized.”71 Although rational choice is agent-centered, actors, for all their importance, are conceived in fundamental ways as being independent of their historical and cultural context.
Rational choice has made significant contributions within political science (not to mention within economics), but in a whole range of political behavior, such as ethnic politics and nationalist movements, its value is limited. If we think about ethnic violence, a theory of instrumental rationality works best under two conditions. When there is total breakdown of the state, a “security dilemma” is created in which groups defined as ethnic or national may perceive a threat from neighbors and take preemptive action. In a second case, there may be a “bandwagon” story in which individuals will join a nationalist movement or follow a leader when they perceive the real possibility of victory. But instrumental rationality fails to explain why such movements get started in the first place, or why people are ready to die or kill for such symbolic goods as the site of a defeat 500 or 1000 years ago. Rationality makes sense as a means to reach a goal, but both means and goals are very often constituted by religious, historical, or cultural values that have little to do with material or status improvement. Cost-benefit analyses do not help much with the kinds of ends set by cultures, which can require self-sacrifice, pain, and even death.72 Both preference formation and strategic choices, then, must be considered within cultures and historic time. Rational choicers are ready to concede that culture and history, reason and emotion, help determine first order preferences. I am suggesting that they also determine second order preferences—institutions and structures—and the very strategies that actors adopt.
The added value offered by the cultural turn is exceptionally apparent in the study of nations and nationalism. Senses of mortality and desire for immortality, of the ethnic group or nation as kinship or the family writ large, of the conviction unquestioned that this group above all others is a part of nature rather than of choice, are fundamental to the bonds of solidarity that people forge in ethnic and national communities. These affective ties—the promise of redemption from oblivion, the remedy for anonymity and meaningless mortality—must be taken seriously if we are to understand why, in the very process of constructing and imagining certain communities, the effort of construction is so emphatically denied.73 A critical question is why constructed identities and fabricated histories are held sacred as sources of primordial allegiances.74
Finally, the cultural turn strongly warns against seeing cultural units, nations or classes, as unitary and internally homogeneous. Treating them as unitary actors with coherent identities and interests leads to essentialist conclusions about group
