About The Jon Elster Page
Aim
The aim of this page is to be a research tool for people who are interested in the ideas of Jon
Elster. To fulfill this aim we maintain a large database which contains a list of his books
(including table of contents, covertexts and prefaces), a list of his articles, a list of reviews and
a general index of terms mentioned in his works. We are also gradually creating a database
containing the full text of the articles mentioned. This means that you are saved the trouble of
looking up the indexes of ten different books to locate the places in which Elster has written
about a special topic.
Statistics
In the database we have more than 140 articles by Elster, 150 reviews, 40 books and 4000
index entries. The information will be continually updated.
Who is behind?
The page was started and is maintained by Hans O. Melberg. If you want to help, please send
an e-mail to Hans O. Melberg
A word about style
Since the main aim of the page is to be a research tool, I have had to sacrifice some aesthetic
aspects. For example, I have included the page numbers in the in the tables of contents,
although it makes the pages more messy. Furthermore, I have not spent time on developing
fancy graphics to make the information more appealing. I have also broken up the scanned
texts when there was a page shift in the original document. These steps maximizes the
information content (so if you use the information to create a reading list or to quote, you
know which page numbers you should use), although it makes the layout less pleasing.
I have also tried to convey all the information in the original documents by maintaining the
italics. I might have missed some italicized words in the original texts, but in general I think
you can feel safe that when a word is (/is not) italicized on screen, it was also italicized (/not
italicized) in the original document.
On a couple of points I had to compromise the intention of faithfully reproducing the original
document. First of all I have transformed all the footnotes into endnotes. It was simply too
messy to leave the footnotes as they were when they appeared on separate pages. You still
know which page the notes appeared on because the notes themselves, unlike the content of
the note, have not been moved from their original pages. Second, I have tried to make the
tables of contents a bit more uniform by transforming headings with all capital letters into the
same style as the rest.
Future developments
Future plans for this page include:
- Articles written exclusively for this page about some aspect of Elster's works
- A list of definitions of terms central in the works of Elster;
- Debates
- An index of terms mentioned in the articles (not just the books as now)
- Suggestions?
Bibliographic note
If you use this page in your work, you should include the following note in your
bibliography:
Melberg, Hans O. (the year), (the URL address, in italics)
For example:
Melberg, Hans O., (1996), http://home.sol.no/hansom/elster.htm
When you quote from one of the documents, without checking the original source, you should
use the following format:
Ryan, Alan (1991), When It's Rational to be Irrational,
http://home.sol.no/hansom/ryan91.htm, The New York Review of Books 38
(16):19-22
The intention behind this format is to avoid confusion that arise as the result of mistakes in the
scanned documents as compared to the original documents.
If you don't know how to find the URL address:
In Netscape there is an area, right above the document itself, which reads "LOCATION: " The
text after "LOCATION: " is the URL address.
Suggestions, Comments
If you have any comments, or if you discover any mistakes, please do not hesitate to contact
me. Click here to e-mail me.
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