Twenty-five Years with The Logic of Collective Action

A quarter of a century has passed since Mancur Olson wrote The Logic of Collective Action (1965). In this seminal work, Olson argued that collective action will not take place if individuals are rational egoists and the group is large. This is a review article summing up 25 years of continuing debate about the validity of this argument Surprisingly little has been added that goes beyond Olson's informal analysis. His formal analysis has proved less robust. Above all, his size argument has been shown to be defective. Collective action is not a simple function of group size. The main message of this article, however, is that the assumption of self-interest, used by Olson and by a majority of rational choice theorists, is inadequate and must be replaced by an assumption of mixed motivations. What this mix is going to be is still an open question.