The odyssey of Jon Elster

Abstract

Jon Elster has made the story of Ulysses and the Sirens a central motif in his philosophical odyssey. In Elster’s philosophy a paradigm of imperfectly rational behaviour is to bind yourself against the mast, as a precaution against the predictable weakness of your will which would otherwise leave you ensnared by the sirens. The use of literary analogies is frequent in Elster’s work, whether he is Explaining Technical Change or Making Sense of Marx. Consequently it is not inappropriate to describe Elster’s own intellectual wanderings as an odyssey. Unlike Joyce’s Ulysses there is no trace in Elster of a predilection for scatological subjects, nor any danger of unreadability. But there is a similar technical and stylistic range, and a comparable breadth in intellectual debts, acquired from journeying through Western culture with several languages. Elster, like Joyce, is also crowned with the ability to make an artistic whole out of apparently disparate materials.