ABSTRACT
This was not Martin Hollis’s concern, but it is one which might have had a greater bearing on the outcome of his own journey than it in fact did. At the end of his discussion of the games of social life, two paths open up. In one direction we could start to speak about the degree of rational reflection which is possible within forms of life, about the degrees of openness or closedness of human communities and about the unstable balance between self-and other-regarding action (this is the broadly sociological path taken by Simmel, Mauss, Granovetter and even, at times, Durkheim), or we could return to game theory, now, hopefully, further enriched by the sociological detour. Martin Hollis choose the second path. The discussion of social life in Trust WithinReason is in the end reminiscent of a line from Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck: ‘Jeder Mensch ist ein Abgrund; es schwindelt einem, wenn man hinabsieht’ [Everyone is an abyss. It makes you dizzy when you look in]. Martin Hollis looked into forms of life and drew back from the precipice. But perhaps it is not the abyss he feared. Perhaps it is more congenial and indeed close to his own hint at the end of the book that mixed motives require mixed accounts.
