The Third Man; Or, Agency in History; Or, Rationality in Revolution

Theories of revolution invoke human agency to commit the violence that revolution entails, yet theorists of revolution often denounce the general theory of human agency called rational choice because (they say) it does not explain macrosocial facts like revolution and also leaves out culture. Actually, however, rational choice is the major premise of any cogent explanation of revolution, and it includes culture as a factual premise. Rational-choice theory applied to explaining revolution dates back to Thucydides, whose method of explanation is sound and whose theory of revolution is true. Thucydides explains the macrosocial fact of revolution by way of models whose elements are people doing what they hope will succeed, that is, acting on opinion alias culture. Theorists of revolution who make sense of it all rehearse Thucydides: they analyze the narrative history into strategic actions and reactions, explain these actions and reactions by rational choice, and document the explanation with direct and circumstantial evidence for hope of success, though they seldom own up on theory and method or preach what they practice.     

Marc Bloch: Did he repudiate Annales history?

Since the summer of 1944 when Marc Bloch fell before a Nazi firing squad, no book dedicated to him and his historical writing has yet appeared. There is, however, an imposing corpus of publications in learned journals and collections of articles discussing his contributions to historical methodology and also his life, especially those acts of courage that led to his untimely death. The task here, then, is to probe into Bloch's writings and to ponder his life and what others have said about him in an attempt to ferret out his thoughts about the nature of history and historical methodology and to determine whether in the last few years of his life his view of history altered dramatically.     

Environmental Public Voluntary Programs Reconsidered

Environmental “public voluntary programs” (PVPs) involve government offers of positive publicity and technical assistance to firms that reach certain environmental goals. A growing body of empirical work suggests these programs generally have little impact on the behavior of their participants. A natural policy conclusion would be to eliminate PVPs, but we argue that such a conclusion is premature. Many PVPs are best viewed as information diffusion programs, so identifying their effects econometrically is difficult because information is likely to diffuse to nonparticipants. Thus, after the early phases of even a successful PVP, it may well be impossible to detect a difference in the performance between participants and nonparticipants. We argue that new estimation approaches are needed to identify the effects of PVPs. We also explore the design of PVPs in detail, showing how PVPs can potentially enhance the diffusion of cost‐effective techniques for pollution abatement.