A collaboration between a philosopher and an international relations scholar, this work examines the philosophical issues that underlie the theory of international relations. Part I focuses on the dominant theories of Idealism, Realism, and Behavioralism, and Part II examines the international system, the state, bureaucracies, and the individual--four factors commonly assumed to account for international behavior. The authors conclude with a summary of the links between the two forms of analysis and an open-ended assessment of their relative merits which will stimulate further...

Economics is probably the most subtle, precise and powerful of the social sciences and its theories have deep philosophical import. Yet the dominant alliance between economics and philosophy has long been cheerfully simple. This is the textbook alliance of neo-Classicism and Positivism, so crucial to the defence of orthodox economics against by now familiar objections. This is an unusual book and a deliberately controversial one. The authors cast doubt on assumptions which neo-Classicists often find too obvious to defend or, indeed, to mention. They set out to disturb an influential concensus...

In this book, the author is attempting to make sense, as a philosopher, of the ideas of rationality put forward by economists, sociologists, and political theorists. The book intervenes in intense current debates within and among several disciplines. Its concern is with the true nature of social actors and the proper character of social science. Its arguments are the more challenging for being presented in simple, incisive, and lucid prose.

Did Adam and Eve act rationally in eating the fruit of the forbidden tree? That can seem to depend solely on whether they had found the best means to their ends, in the spirit of the "economic" theories of rationality. In these essays, culled in revised form from twenty-five years' work, Martin Hollis argues that social action cannot be understood by viewing human beings as abstract individuals with preferences in search of satisfaction, or by divorcing practical reason from questions of the rationality of norms, principles, practices and ends.

In the revised and updated edition of this classic introductory text, Martin Hollis leads his readers through the age-old philosophical questions of free choice and human nature, appearance and reality, reason and experience.

The crisis of liberalism is found in the liberal claim to endorse a set of neutral procedures that allow individuals and groups to pursue their own good, when the very possibility of such neutrality is brought into question by the growth of plural societies, and the divided loyalties that go with them. This collection explores this crisis. Modern states rely on agreements to secure the loyalty of citizens. But growing social pluralism means a growing division in loyalties among citizens along lines of ideology, ethnicity, gender, religion and locale. The liberal answer to diversity is to...

All social theorists and philosophers who seek to explain human action have a 'model of man'; a metaphysical view of human nature that requires its own theory of scientific knowledge. In this influential book, Martin Hollis examines the tensions that arise from the differing views of sociologists, economists and psychologists. He then develops a rationalist model of his own which connects personal and social identity through a theory of rational action and a priori knowledge, allowing humans to both act freely and still be a subject for scientific explanation. Presented in a fresh series...