Moral, Believing Animals Human Personhood and Culture

Along the way, Smith advances a sustained critique of rational choice theory, sociobiology, and other accounts of human social life drawn from the naturalistic, antimentalist, noncultural tradition of Western social theory as badly misunderstanding the character of the human animal. By contrast, this work argues that all people are at bottom believers whose lives, actions, and institutions are constituted, motivated, and governed by narrative traditions and moral orders on which they inescapably depend." "This approach - which has profound consequences for how we think about knowledge, culture, social action, institutions, religion, and the task of the social sciences - will be of interest to scholars in sociology, social theory, religious and cultural studies, psychology, and anthropology."--BOOK JACKET.