Racionalidad sin utilitarismo. La caza y sus conflictos en El Escorial durante el Antiguo Régimen

Utilitarian perspectives have been on the rise in economic history. This paper focuses on the activity of hunting to stress that, beyond the maximizing cost-benefit calculus, there are other kinds of rationality -mainly procedural and expressive rationality- essential for understanding what drove the economic stakeholders. After studying the creation and evolution of the El Escorial royal hunting area, the recurrent violation of property rights is addressed to show the difficulties of an explanation based on the utilitarian theory of public goods. The disputes arising from hunting needs an alternative interpretation based on the conceptualization of hunting as a procedure which enable villagers to identify with their communities, which in turn received institutional recognition from the court. The local representatives then reproduced a shared image of collective ends constituting the individual interests of peasant-hunters. To conclude, micro-behaviour is always based on some kind of macrofoundation supplied by institutions that cannot be reduced to mere aggregation of individual actions.