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Michael Hechter (b. 1943) is an American sociologist and political scientist who has written extensively on rational-choice theory, social movements, solidarity, and comparative historical accounts of rebellion and nationalism. His empirical work on political action, nationalism, and rebellion works from within a collective-action frame asking how actors’ coordinated behaviors and intersecting interests create significant social change. His most cited work is Internal Colonialism (1975), which examined differentials in social solidarity across the Celtic, Scottish, and English areas of Britain. The work argues that the alignment of tasks with ethnicity via a “cultural division of labor” between a core and peripheral parts (“internal colonies”) fosters a dependent development that stunts economic growth and cultural autonomy. Importantly, the book makes two distinct arguments, one resting on the macro-structural division of labor between regions and a second on the level of individuals that turns on interaction and ethnic self-identity. The cultural division of labor conflates class with ethnicity as a medium for identity formation, which undercuts a generalized class identity in favor of an ethnic one.

Theoretically, Hechter has been at the forefront of generalizing rational-choice models for individual agency to explain social structural outcomes, starting with the edited volume The Microfoundations of Macrosociology (1983), and followed with his own extensive treatment in Principles of Group Solidarity (1987). Generally, rational-choice approaches seek to identify how structure emerges as an unintended consequence of individual action; with price minimums intersecting at supply and demand being perhaps the best-known example. Contemporary work recognizes the problems associated with free-rider and other social dilemmas that require active social interaction to overcome. In Principles of Group Solidarity, Hechter builds on this tradition by attempting to provide a methodological individualist account for the classical problem of social order and group cohesion. Hechter argues that none of the classical approaches (norms, function, structure) can adequately account for variations in group solidarity (1987: p. 29), noting in particular the failure of such approaches to curtail free riding. For Hechter, “The challenge is to show how group obligations evolve and then how members are induced to honor them” without reference to black-box concepts, such as “norms.” Hechter reduces the problem of solidarity to the joint problem of the “extensiveness of group obligations” and the “probability of compliance with obligations.” Compliance is a complex problem with many variants, but ultimately rests on the control capacity of groups. This control capacity is also subject to free-riding issues (since it is a “second-order public good”), but they are often not as severe as general compliance.

In his more recent writing, Hechter continues to both expand on the value of rational-choice models for sociological work and engage deeply with historical and collective action empirical contexts. In Rational Choice Sociology (2019), Hechter collects a set of previously published papers in one place that directly challenge notions that rational-action models cannot be applied in non-market settings. His most recent empirical book (2020), with Steven Pfaff, examines the role of solidarity and action identification in royal navy mutinies.