Why Revolting? Identity, Self-Interest, and Action

Disciplines as diverse as economics, philosophy, sociology and political science are currently engaged in studying the relationship between identity and interest. To go to the main point, one of the challenges of bringing these two concepts lies in the confrontation of two models explaining the action. Schematically, the first one, we must instead look to theories of rational choice finalized by the satisfaction of the interests of the agents, considers (or induce to admit) that the identity of individuals can be understood in a purely instrumental way, as a means for obtaining material resources or positional goods, or even be reduced to the satisfaction of a symbolic interest in even when it is understood in a expressively way. The second model, which wants to be as including as the first, argues, first, that the possibility of an instrumental use of identity presupposes that one is already equipped with and that it is indeed difficult to imagine to acquire an identity to the sole purpose of using it in a instrumental way. He explained then that the interests of an agent, whether they are “interests for...” or “interests to...” are actually understood in connection with the properties that defines the agent. In short, his interests depends ultimately on what he is, which would tend to reverse the order of subsumption: not the identity under the interest, but the interest under the identity. This article confronts these two models starting from the question of the defection in the mobilization for conflicts of recognition.