Conference Papers & Current Trends
Discussion of Rational Choice Theory
Round 2: Reviews & Rejoinders
Manuel Vasquez, University of Florida and Wesleyan University's Center for the Americas
Ed Cleary asked me if I would like to respond to Prof. Gill's rejoinder. Since I do not find much in his book that is groundbreaking, I do not have a lot to add. I would limit myself to highlighting the fact that Prof. Gill and I basically disagree about what constitutes good, robust social theory. While for Prof. Gill simplicity is paramount (and I commend him for his modest claim that rational choice is just a helpful approach and not "the unifying theory in the social sciences"), for me this quality is only one among others, including elegance, coherence, capacity to deal effectively with complexities and perceived anomalies, and potential for cross-fertilization with other models, such that we can gradually extend explanatory power to more and more domains of human action.
It would seem that this privileging of simplicity is informed by a positivistic outlook that has shown significant signs of exhaustion. (I think that, at least unconsciously, a similar kind of positivism is what has U.S. religious studies folks so upset at the work of Stark, Finke & co). What is at stake, then, is not the applicability of economic categories to religious behavior (although Prof. Gill seems to think that this is the issue, given the considerable energy he spends arguing for the obvious claim that religion is also of this world). As I stated in my initial comments, I am very much in favor of the whole notion of economies of faith, provided that they are defined in a conceptually rich fashion. Instead, the problem with Gill.s work is an economistic positivism that is set against non-reductive, flexible yet rigorous theories of religion as a complex field of activity (simply because these theories "invariably end up reporting spurious relationships between variables that are not causally related").
Perhaps it is unfair to ask Prof. Gill to commit himself to this kind of theoretical openness, given some of the dominant trends in his discipline. At any rate, I am willing to wait and see if the much-cherished simplicity of rational choice models can enrich our understanding of Latin American religions.