ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the checkered career of the rational choice perspective and discusses the reasons for its persistent failure to be granted status as a serious, testable, or even reasonable theory about human behavior. It describes the vicissitudes to the irreconcilable conflict of basic assumptions about human nature that underlies criminological theorizing—between those who hold to the image of human beings as social animals and those who perceive them as self-seeking. The chapter suggests that social control theory, through its more realistic image of offenders as "losers," can provide a useful counterbalance. The distinction between crime and criminality and the division of labor between choice and control theories thus allows us to resolve the long-standing dispute between those who favor looking at specific offenses and those who would treat offenses as interchangeable. The choice perspective typically pays little attention to correlates of crime beyond the certainty, celerity, and severity of legal punishment.
