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The Handbook of Rational Choice Social Research provides an overview of the rational choice paradigm. This review article shows how the rational choice approach has gradually become a paradigm by seeking to overcome sociology’s traditional divisions. Firstly, the rational actor’s decision-making environment has been significantly enriched for a better understanding of the influence of social structure on choices. At the same time, the image of the rational actor has been greatly altered by integrating some of the many experimental results that have found homo economicus to be empirically inadequate. There is a third route by which it has become a paradigm. These more complex models have stimulated the study of social phenomena that were previously not much explored by the rational choice approach — we discuss the example of violence — establishing, according to some authors, new relationships between the various disciplines in the social field.