How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind
The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality
In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences – psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others – and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed.
"How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind" brings to life the people – Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others – and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a "Cold War rationality". Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality – optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical – in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy. The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.
Contents:
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Struggle over Cold War Rationality
Chapter 1. Enlightenment Reason, Cold War Rationality, and the Rule of Rules
Chapter 2. The Bounded Rationality of Cold War Operations Research
Chapter 3. Saving the Planet from Nuclear Weapons and the Human Mind
Chapter 4".The Situation" in the Cold War Behavioral Sciences
Chapter 5. World in a Matrix
Chapter 6. The Collapse of Cold War Rationality
Epilogue. Cold War Rationality after the Cold War
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Paul Erickson is assistant professor of history and science in society at Wesleyan University.
Judy L. Klein is professor of economics at Mary Baldwin College.
Lorraine Daston is director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
Rebecca Lemov is associate professor of the history of science at Harvard University.
Thomas Sturm is a Ramon y Cajal Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Michael D. Gordin is professor of the history of science at Princeton University.
Reviews
"Traversing territory from Micronesia to Berlin, from Kant to Kantorovich to Schelling, from psychology to economics, 'How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind' offers novel insights about a whole way of thinking. Moving beyond discipline-by-discipline studies, this all-star team of scholars sets the standard for new histories of American intellectual life and the vexed question of 'Cold War thought'" – David C. Engerman, Brandeis University
"This is an important book, one that should be read not just by historians of science but by anyone interested in the unique intellectual culture of Cold War America. In this context, reason was redefined, reduced, and simplified into a rule-governed thing – a seemingly universal technology for making choices in an uncertain world. This is a brilliant insight, and the authors carry its illumination into a range of fields, from game theory and operations research to studies of heuristics and biases in individuals and decision making in groups, from the lab and the 'situation room' to the wilds of Washington policy making" – Hunter Heyck, University of Oklahoma
"The inhuman assumptions of the postwar human sciences form the problematic for this fascinating book. If not quite a fons et origo, the Cold War arms race appears here as the uniquely disturbing frame for a wide-ranging campaign to extirpate irrationality by implementing strict rules of human reasoning" – Theodore M. Porter, University of California, Los Angeles
"In the wake of World War II, a generation of self-proclaimed 'action intellectuals' fought to save the world from nuclear Armageddon. They nearly destroyed it. This extraordinary book explains how and why a generation of American social scientists reconceived human reason as algorithmic rationality – and how, when they did, they delivered us into a world that remains anything but rational. If you've ever wondered where Dr. Strangelove was born, you need look no further" – Fred Turner, author of "The Democratic Surround"
