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“... and ethics are fascinating. With Logic and Society (1978) and Ulysses and the Sirens (1979), Jon Elster sprang to the fore as an exciting exponent. His gifts for simplifying technicalities, for novel applications and for scholarly connections have helped to spread the word across many disciplines. His rampant individualism – the conviction that ...”

“... wants from the slave something he necessarily cannot have – ‘unilateral recognition’, as Elster puts it in Logic and Society, a recognition freely accorded to him by someone who is a chattel, who cannot freely recognise anyone. This state of consciousness is essential to the master, and implicit in the historical forms that his institution ...”

“... phases? Did Shakespeare say to himself: ‘No way I can beat Hamlet, so why write again?’ Jon Elster wrote two gems in the 1970s and 1980s, Ulysses and the Sirens and Sour Grapes. Not that they have deterred him from publishing at a stupendous rate since, though he has never recaptured that earlier refulgence. In Alchemies of the Mind, he ...”

“... Jon Elster needs, as they say, no introduction to regular readers of the London Review, who will be familiar not only with his name but also with the cast of his mind and the breadth of his interests. What makes him distinctive is a combination of philosophical acuity and detailed attention to contemporary work in history, the social sciences and cognitive psychology ...”

“... clearly, and defended in the plainest prose. Lest that give the impression that Jerry Cohen, Jon Elster and John Roemer see themselves as Marxists first and philosophers second, it must at once be said that their work is remarkable for the unflinching way in which they throw out whatever won’t pass a dispassionate scrutiny. ...”

“... a turbulent childhood who became a modest and engaging young gentleman when strapped to a magnet. Jon Elster’s wide-ranging series of essays, now issued in paperback, deals with normal man. The Multiple Self considers the question of whether the normal self is a unity, or whether it should be regarded, in some non-metaphorical sense, as divided. Just ...”

“... which for most common-sense analysts would entail rejecting all counter-factuals. More usefully, Jon Elster proposed that a valid counter-factual had to develop consistently out of a single historical branching-point: ‘the alternative state,’ he argued, had to ‘be capable of insertion into the real past’ (Logic and Society, 1978). Hawthorn ...”

“... on John Roemer’s A General (Grand?) Theory of Exploitation and Class (reviewed here by Jon Elster on 20 October 1983). The definition enables him to salvage, as it were, the proletariat of advanced capitalist societies, since it follows from it that the ‘working’ class is still much the largest component of the labour force even in Sweden ...”

“... be logically sound. To this end she takes a formal characterisation of functional explanation from Jon Elster. Because it is not easy to grasp abstractly, I’ll venture a colourful example. A well-known phenomenon of the British Dominions up to 1939 was the remittance man. English sons who fell out with their fathers due to ...”

“... new ‘connections’ between phenomena, and indeed ‘connections between connections’ (as Jon Elster described it, LRB, Vol. 4, No 17). These bridging speculations perform their magic either by deliberately leaving to others the challenge of overall integration on a national scale, or by denying its necessity. Moreover the desire to ...”

“... debate conducted by empowered citizens, of the sort championed by political scientists like Jon Elster and Amy Gutmann, and the consumption of patriotic propaganda in the interests of the state. Hariman and Lucaites look back with some nostalgia to the ‘good war’ and its flag-raising as a high point of American public culture. They recognise ...”