ABSTRACT
I first met Martin Hollis in the autumn of 1984.1 was being interviewed for a professorship at the University of East Anglia, and he was on the interviewing committee. He questioned me about a paper I had just written, proposing a new theory of the rationality of voluntary contributions to public goods. He wanted to know whether my account could explain a person’s being willing to contribute to a public good when not every beneficiary contributed, but enough of them did-an issue which, as I discovered later, he had thought a lot about. Fortunately, my theory could indeed explain this. As far as I could tell, he was impressed by what he took to be my theoretical facility, while being sceptical about the philosophical value of economic models of rationality. At any rate, I was given the job. This cross-examination turned out to be the opening exchange in a debate about rationality and sociality which we carried on until his death at the beginning of 1998.
