The article responds to Hartmut Esser's essay, “The Rationality of Everyday Behavior. A Rational Choice Reconstruction of the Theory of Action by Alfred Schütz,” which also appears in this issue. The author provides historical and contextual evidence in support of Esser's thesis that Schutz's theory of action converges with rational choice theory in fundamental respects. He is more critical of Esser's second purpose, however, which is to subsume Schutz's theory of action under the framework of subjective expected utility theory. Prendergast argues that the two-step selection rule that Esser devises to this end reduces rational choice to a tautology.
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