Rational Choice theory is typically seen as the use of economic reasoning in contexts that were traditionally the concern of disciplines other than economics, especially of political science, sociology, and anthropology. If we take a more nuanced historical view, however, we might as soon see mainstream economics as the stepchild of the kind of reasoning about larger social institutions, norms, behaviors, and so forth that was central to the Scottish Enlightenment in the works of David Hume, Adam Smith, and many others. The genius of these thinkers was to make sense of such institutions, norms, and so forth as the products of individuals acting from their own private incentives. Their concern was that of James Coleman (1990), to explain macrophenomena from microchoices. Through most of the past two centuries, economists increasingly focused such reasoning on explaining the nature and working of the market, for example...