Elster earned his PhD in 1972 from the Paris Descartes University in Paris with a dissertation on Karl Marx under the direction of Raymond Aron. Elster was a member of the September Group for many years but left in the early 1990s. Elster previously taught at the University of Oslo in the department of history and held an endowed chair at the University of Chicago, teaching in the departments of philosophy and political science. He is now Robert K. Merton Professor of Social Sciences with appointments in Political Science and Philosophy at Columbia University and "professeur honoraire" at the Collège de France. He was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize in 1997 and the Skytte Prize in Political Science in 2016.