Mathematical models, rational choice, and the search for cold war culture

ISIS

Volumn 101, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 386-392

  Erickson, Paul ^a  

^a WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; CYBERNETICS; GAME; HISTORY; SCIENCE; STATISTICAL MODEL; UNITED STATES; USSR; WAR;

CYBERNETICS; GAME THEORY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; MODELS, STATISTICAL; SCIENCE; UNITED STATES; USSR; WAR;

EID: 77953997486     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/653105     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. On the history of modern theories of rational choice see especially the review essay by Jamie Cohen-Cole, "Cybernetics and the Machinery of Rationality," British Journal for the History of Science, 2008, 41:109 -114;
2. Philip Mirowksi, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002);
3. S.M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003).
4. For critical assessments of rational choice models in the social sciences see especially G. M. Hodgson, How Economics Forgot History: the Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science (New York: Routledge, 2001);
5. Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1994);
6. Jeffrey Friedman, ed., The Rational Choice Controversy: Economic Models of Politics Reconsidered (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1996).
7. for example, Paul Forman, "Behind quantum electronics: National security as basis for physical research in the United States, 1940-1960," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 1987, 18:149 -229.
8. Stuart Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993);
9. Michael Aaron Dennis, "Our First Line of Defense: Two University Laboratories in the Postwar American State," Isis, 1994, 85:427- 455;
10. Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997).
11. On the prevalence of mathematical modeling in biological fields and psychology see,for example, P.G. Abir-Am, "The Molecular Transformation of 20th Century Biology," in Science in the Twentieth Century, ed. John Krige and Dominique Pestre (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1997);
12. Lily Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2000);
13. Peter J. Taylor, "Technocratic Optimism, H. T. Odum, and the Partial Transformation of Ecological Metaphor after World War II," Journal of the History of Biology, 1988, 21:213- 244;
14. Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).
15. On the role of wartime and postwar patronage for operations research and related mathematical theories see William Thomas, "The Heuristics of War: Scientific Method and the Founders of Operations Research," British Journal for the History of Science, 2007, 40:251-274;
16. Martin J. Collins, Cold War Laboratory: RAND, the Air Force, and the American State, 1945-1950 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002);
17. Larry Owens, "Mathematicians at War: Warren Weaver and the Applied Mathematics Panel, 1942-1945," in History of Modern Mathematics, ed. David Rowe and John McCleary, 3 vols. (Boston: Academic Press, 1989), Vol. 2, pp. 287-305;
18. Peter Galison, "The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision," Critical Inquiry, 1994, 21:228 -266;
19. Mirowski, Machine Dreams (cit. n. 1).
20. The adaptation of wartime techniques to postwar industry is traced most clearly in Stephen B. Johnson, "Three Approaches to Big Technology: Operations Research, Systems Engineering, and Project Management," Technology and Culture, 1997, 38:891-919.
21. Much literature treats this in the context of the history of the RAND Corporation: see, for example, Martin J. Collins, Cold War Laboratory: RAND, the Air Force, and the American State, 1945-1950 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002).
22. On how techniques from operations research and systems analysis made the leap from "warfare to welfare" see especially David R. Jardini, "Out of the Blue Yonder: The RAND Corporation's Diversification into Social Welfare Research, 1946-1968" (Ph.D. diss., Carnegie-Mellon Univ., 1996);
23. Jennifer S. Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2003).
24. The argument that the new mathematical tools could address problems of social and political institutions owes much to William Graebner's The Engineering of Consent: Democracy and Authority in Twentieth-Century America (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987);
25. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy (cit. n. 1), Ch. 1;
26. Sarah E. Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2007);
27. Hunter Heyck, Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005).
28. On public concerns with the rationality of civil defense planning in the 1950s see especially Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2005);
29. Andrew D. Grossman, Neither Dead Nor Red: Civil Defense and American Political Development During the Early Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2001).
30. The "critique of rationality"- often associated with Herbert Marcuse's popular One-Dimensional Man (1964)-is a common theme of cultural histories of the 1960s.
31. David Steigerwald, The Sixties and the End of Modern America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995);
32. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987);
33. Jerome Ravetz, "Orthodoxies, Critiques, and Alternatives," in Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. R. C. Olby et al. (New York: Routledge, 1990);
34. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter-Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1969).
35. he initial proposal for a "science of peace" came from psychologist Theodore F. Lentz in his Towards a Science of Peace: Turning Point in Human Destiny (London: Halcyon Press, 1955).
36. On the history of conflict resolution see especially Katrin Köhl, "Denkstilwandel im Kalten Krieg: Nachdenken über Krieg und Frieden und die Entstehung von Friedens- und Konfliktforschung in den amerikanischen un westdeutschen Socialwissenschaften" (Ph.D. diss., Universität Tübingen, 2003);
37. Anatol Rapoport, Certainties and Doubts: A Philosophy of Life (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2000);
38. Cynthia Kerman, Creative Tension: The Life and Thought of Kenneth Boulding (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1974).
39. Thomas Schelling, "Bargaining, Communication, and Limited War," Conflict Resolution, 1957, 1:19 -36;
40. Schelling, "Nuclear Weapons and Limited War," RAND Corporation Publication P-1620, 20 Feb 1959;
41. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960).
42. The rise of PD from a simple tale of cops and criminals to a metaphor for the Cold War itself is related in Rapoport, "Prisoner's Dilemma-Recollections and Observations," in Game Theory as a Theory of Conflict Resolution, ed. Anatol Rapoport (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974);
43. Rapoport, Certainties and Doubts (cit. n. 6).
44. Cedric Smith lays out the goals for his "peace research group" in a letter to "Peace Research Group," 13 August 1962, Lionel Penrose Papers (University College London, Special Collections), Box 41, Folder 8.
45. The founding publications of evolutionary game theory include John Maynard Smith and G. R. Price, "The Logic of Animal Conflict," Nature, 1973, 246:15-18;
46. W. D. Hamilton, "Selection of Selfish and Altruistic Behavior in some Extreme Models," in Man and Beast: Comparative Social Behavior, ed. J. F. Eisenberg and Wilton S. Dillon (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971), pp. 59-91;
47. Robert Axelrod and William Hamilton, "The Evolution of Cooperation," Science, 1981, 211:1390 -1396.
48. The notion of rational choice mathematics as a "currency" draws inspiration from the concept of "boundary objects," and from Peter Galison's provocative metaphor of a "trading zone" developed in Image And Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997). However, in speaking of a mathematical currency my emphasis is less on the coordination of scientific development across disciplinary and sub-disciplinary boundaries, and more on the processes governing the transmission and circulation of mathematical techniques and concepts. In this regard, the concept owes much to work in the history of theoretical physics exploring the circulation of "theoretical tools";
49. David Kaiser, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005);
50. Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003).