Jon Elster
The bio below comes from a published article and may now be dated.
Jon Elster (b. 1940) teaches political science at Columbia University. All his life he has been skating on thin ice, by venturing into issues and disciplines about which he knew little. Although in doing so he has made many mistakes, only the most important of which are reproduced here, he has been rescued by the generous willingness of those who know better to overlook them. His research has been organized around questions of individual and collective decisionmaking, including rational-choice theory, the theory of emotions, questions of distributive and of transitional justice, and constitution-making. He is currently engaged in a large-scale comparative analysis of the Federal Convention in 1787 and the first French constituent assembly in 1789–1791. His email address is je70@columbia.edu.