The ‘Unbearable Lightness’ of the Economic Approach to Economic Behavior in the Social Setting: Rational Action and the Sociology of the Economy

Abstract

This article entails endeavours to properly conceive the theoretical‐methodoÍlogical relations between sociology of the economy or economic sociology and the economic approach to human behaviour or rational action theory. These endeavors are induced by recent proposals for an economic approach to economic sociology and other conflations between the two disciplines. Such proposals exemplify the tendency of rational action theorists to dissolve economic (and all) sociology into their universalist ‘theory of everything’. Many economic sociologists display a bona fide attitude toward such extensions of the economic approach albeit these can be essentially incongruous with a sociological perspective on the economy as advanced by their discipline. The article allows for the possibility that the economic approach to economic sociology is unsustainable in epistemological terms. This would imply epistemologically non‐rational grounds for the attraction of economic sociologists to the economic approach to human behaviour.