Abstract
This article is another unapologetic contribution to the gentle art of rational choice bashing. The debate over rational choice theory (RCT) may appear to have tired out; yet RCT is as dominant in political sciences as ever. The reason is that critics typically take aim at the symptoms of RCTs failings, rather than their root cause: RCTs very ambition of being the science of choice. In this article I argue that RCT fails twice, first as a science of choice and then as a science of choice. Both failures suggest that political sciences need an epistemologic (re)conversion away from the Platonic ideal of a deductive and universal science of choice toward a more inductive and pluralist paradigm. While advocates of RCT rightly insist that you cant beat something with nothing, I take their advice, with a grain of salt: in order for alternatives to appear, the frame of references needs to be modified. I draw a few perspectives for the political sciences.