Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice is a book authored by Oxford University professor Bent Flyvbjerg and published by The University of Chicago Press (1998).^[1] The book is a study of how power influences rationality and democracy. The book's theory and method build on a tradition in power studies that runs from Thucydides via Machiavelli to Nietzsche and Max Weber. The author explicitly acknowledges Machiavelli's studies of power in Florence as a source of influence for the choice of in-depth case studies to understand the dynamics of power and how power enables and constrains rationality and rational government. The research methodology employed in Rationality and Power is called phronetic social science and is described in detail in Flyvbjerg's (2001) book Making Social Science Matter.^[2] This book set off the so-called Flyvbjerg Debate, a debate about what social science is and ought to be. Phronetic social science and the Flyvbjerg Debate are critically assessed in Schram and Caterino (2006 eds.).^[3]

Rationality and Power has been reviewed in European Review (Vol. 7 No. 3, 1999), Times Literary Supplement, (March 26, 1999), Sloan Management Review (Summer 1999), Political Studies (Vol. 47, No. 5, December 1999), Public Administration (Vol. 77, No. 3, 1999), American Political Science Review (Vol. 93, No. 1, March 1999) and many other journals.^[4]

• Rule according to higher law