Reason and Rationality cover art

Reason and Rationality

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Reason and Rationality

By: Jon Elster
Narrated by: John Lescault
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £4.99

Buy Now for £4.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

One of the world's most important political philosophers, Jon Elster is a leading thinker on reason and rationality and their roles in politics and public life. In this short book, he crystallizes and advances his work, bridging the gap between philosophers who use the idea of reason to assess human behavior from a normative point of view and social scientists who use the idea of rationality to explain behavior. In place of these approaches, Elster proposes a unified conceptual framework for the study of behavior.

Drawing on classical moralists as well as modern scholarship, and using a wealth of historical and contemporary illustrations, Reason and Rationality marks a new development in Elster's thinking while at the same time providing a brief, elegant, and accessible introduction to his work. The book is published by Princeton University Press.

©2009 Princeton University Press (P)2010 Redwood Audiobooks Consciousness & Thought Movements Philosophy Political Science Politics & Government

Critic reviews

"Jon Elster's Reason and Rationality is characteristically erudite, elegant, and philosophically sophisticated. It beautifully encapsulates lines of research that Elster has been developing for years, and it serves as a wonderful introduction to his more technical work." (Daniel Weinstock, professor of philosophy, University of Montreal)
"This short book presents a broad synthesis of Jon Elster's work on reason and rationality, and their complex relations to interest and passion. With clarity and elegance, it presents some of the main positions of one of the most important authors on the subject. Reason and Rationality is a pleasure to read." (Dominique Leydet, professor of philosophy, Universite du Quebec a Montreal)
No reviews yet