Analyzing Actors' Choices

Critical examination of the concept of actor shows, first, that actors' choices are an important part of the explanation of their actions (but those choices are not reducible to the rationality of the actors concerned or to effects of their structural location) and, second, that there are actors whose concerns and objectives are not reducible to those of human individuals (but classes are not among them). These arguments undermine analyses of politics in terms of the actions or interests of classes and the attempts of rational choice theory to analyze politics in terms of a methodological individualism.