Are companies, churches, and states genuine agents? How do we explain their behaviour? Can we treat them as accountable for their actions? List and Pettit offer original arguments, grounded in cutting-edge work on social choice, economics, and philosophy, to show there really are group agents, over and above the individual agents who compose them.

`convincing and illuminating ' Times Literary Supplement `important and enlightening ' Economics and Philosophy `Without a doubt, List and Pettit accomplish their threefold task of establishing the logical possibility of group agents, explaining the relation of design to the performance of group agents, and arguing in favour of holding these agents morally responsible.' Zachary J. Goldberg, Philosophical Quarterly

Christian List is Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at the London School of Economics. He works in individual and social choice theory, political philosophy, and the philosophy of social science. A graduate of the University of Oxford, he held research and visiting positions at Oxford, the Australian National University, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Konstanz. He was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Philosophy, a Nuffield Foundation New Career Development Fellowship, and the 5th Social Choice and Welfare Prize, the latter two awards jointly with Franz Dietrich, for collaborative work on the theory of judgment aggregation. He is an editor of Economics and Philosophy and an associate editor of Episteme. Philip Pettit is L. S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University. He works in moral and political philosophy and on related issues in the philosophy of mind and social science. Irish by background and training, he has taught at a number of universities, most prominently at the Australian National University, and is an honorary Professor of Philosophy at Queen's Belfast and the University of Sydney. He holds a number of honorary doctorates and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2010 he won a Guggenheim fellowship and is spending 2010-11 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral and Social Sciences, Stanford University. In 2007 Oxford University Press published Common Minds: Themes from the Philosophy of Philip Pettit, ed. by G.Brennan et al.