The Dictionary of Human Geography

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postulate is to ensure that the best ends – that

is, those yielding greatest individual satisfac-

tion – are chosen given the constraint of lim-

ited means. Often couched in terms of the

mathematics of constrained maximization,

the problem of making the best choices is

formally shown to reduce to a formal set of

consistency requirements (Hahn and Hollis,

1979). Those requirements define rationality

in the sense that if any one of them is contra-

vened, the choice is not rational.

The historical antecedents of rational choice

theory are with the British classical econo-

mists, but it is now most closely associated

with their successor,neo-classical econom-

ics, and a maverick strain of Marxism (ana-

lytical marxism). Within economics, it is not

just economic acts that are explained by

rational choice. The University of Chicago,

Nobel-Prize winning rational choice econo-

mist Gary Becker (1930– ) uses the theory to

explain all human acts from birth (the decision

to have a child) to death (choosing suicide)

and everything in between, including racial

discrimination, committing crime, going to

school, falling in love and filing for divorce

(Becker, 1976). Nothing falls outside the ‘lore

of calculated less or more’. The rational

choice assumption is deployed across the

social sciences, including sociology (rational

individuals choose their socialclass), political

science (scenarios ofgeopoliticalbrinkman-

ship modelled viagame theory) and anthro-

pology (cultures are ‘a collection of choice-

making individuals’; Burling, 1962, p. 811).

Withinhuman geography, rational choice

theory is most frequently found ineconomic

geographyand, in particular, in the formal

location theoryassociated withregional

science. Its role is to impose a determinant

order on spatial arrangements, allowing the

theorist to make scientific claims to precision,

exact inference and predictability.

There have been many criticisms of the

rationality assumption, and they frequently

focus on the unrealistic characteristics att-

ributed to the rational actor (sometimes

described in the gendered language ofHomo

economicus, or ‘rational economic man’): per-

fect knowledge; unyielding egoism; independ-

ent preferences; the ability and desire to

maximize utility (minimize costs); and pursuit

of a single goal (seesatisficing behaviour).

Such criticisms are often moot, however,

because the rationality postulate by its very

construction is empirically untestable, a nor-

mative rather than a ‘positive’ theory, and

therefore charges of unrealism have little

purchase. More incisive are those criticisms

that tackle the normative character of the pos-

tulate by arguing that it offers an unappealing

vision of the world. Karl Marx (1818–83) (see

Marx, 1976 [1867], ch. 6) satirizes rational

choice by invoking the invidious character of

‘Mr Moneybags’, and the American institu-

tional economist, Thorstein Veblen (1857–

1929) (see Veblen, 1919, p. 73), makes it

clear that ‘economic man’ is not even close

to human: he is a ‘homogenous globule of

desire. .. with neither antecedent nor conse-

quent. He is an isolated, definitive human

datum, in stable equilibrium except for the

buffers of the impinging forces that displace

him in one direction or another’ (seeinstitu-

tional economics). Another line of attack is

to criticize the postulate’s intellectual origins

and consistency. Mirowski (1989) does this by

locating both the conceptual corpus of the

rational actor and its associated mathematical

techniques within the nineteenth-century

physics of energetics. In other words, the ration-

ality postulate was brought to social science via

re-description: it is ametaphor.Apartfromthe

fact that energetics itself was short-lived and

quickly superseded, Mirowski argues that those

economists who took up the metaphor never

successfully transferred the core relations from

physics to economics. The gap is of two different

worlds, revealing a contradiction at the very

heart of the project. tb

Suggested reading

Barnes (1996, chs 2 and 3).

realism Realism comes in many forms, and

realists vary widely in what they are prepared

to be realist about. At its most general, realism

entails belief in an external world that exists

and acts independently of our knowledge of it

or beliefs about it. The weakest form of real-

ism simply asserts this belief, but is unspecific

aboutwhatexists. A ‘common-sense realism’

asserts the existence of everyday objects, such

as trees, stones or chairs. All of us are probably

realists at this level. In thehumanities, realism

identifies a broad literary movement that iden-

tifiedartin general, andliteraturein par-

ticular, with the truthfulrepresentationof

the world through the meticulous and dispas-

sionate observation of contemporary life. Its

central arch spanned the mid-nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries – from the novels of

Gustave Flaubert (who in fact rejected the

label) to those of Henry James – and some

writers later re-described the project as a

‘naturalism’. Thus E ́mile Zola argued that in

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REALISM