I have a mate who's a solid pianist and guitarist, and he plays guitar hero too. Like me, he's skeptical of academic types who try and steer every detail of th

I have a mate who's a solid pianist and guitarist, and he plays guitar hero too. Like me, he's skeptical of academic types who try and steer every detail of the little people's lives with grand-plan political philosophies. This Jon Elster character sounds like a tripper. In one of the quotes he uses the idea of 'marginal utility' to further an argument. The quote is taken from a book about (and by a broad proponent of) Marxism. Much of Marxism is built on the labour theory of value, which proponents of marginalism believe to be discredited by the marginal theory of value, which is tightly derived from the idea of marginal utility. I haven't read any of Elster's work. All the same, I'm confident there's some rigorous turd-polishing going on between the pages of that volume. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Elster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Elster Update: I may be selling him short. There seems to be a lot written by this under the topic of 'Analytical Marxism', including that "Elster and Przeworski were notable departures from the group in the early 1990s.". I've heard friends recount stories from professors about the period that say that buying into Marxism was in some circles had a similar dynamic to baptism in born-again Christian circles. In that respect I suppose that pattern of trying to bring more sense to loved themes is no better or worse than Catholicism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_Marxism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_Marxism I'm now miles out of my league and this will be my last edit here.