Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe. By Roger D. Petersen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 338p. $59.95.

Extract

The most challenging task in today's comparative politics is crafting a fruitful combination of a general theory of political behavior with a nontrivial and sufficiently rich portrayal of that behavior's social, cultural, and historical context. At the same time, a consensus is emerging that holism is out, individualism is in, and the discipline's intellectual effort should be primarily focused on the reconstruction of the rules (mechanisms) governing the strategizing behavior of individuals in various social and cultural contexts. Macro-historical-structural explanations are largely out of favor. Given this intellectual climate, the premium is placed on studies that employ rational choice/game theoretical framework and test its applicability and limitations in the study of non-Western political systems. Such tests of applicability inevitably involve a confrontation between slim and parsimonious game-theoretic models and detail-rich ethnographic or historical reconstructions. Sometimes such confrontations end up in fruitless, mutual acrimony; recently, however, they have led to many instances of cross-fertilization and productive revisions of both sides' analytical assumptions.