I did not set out to write about the Prisoner’s Dilemma and nuclear strategy.

Yet the entanglement of the two with social contract theory and liberalism made it impossible to continue my exploration of the philosophical foundations and institutionalized practices of free markets and democracy without understand­ing how game theory has altered our vision of citizenship and sovereignty.

I am grateful to those who invited me to give presentations in their depart­ments and conferences because these opportunities were vital to developing my ideas: Robert Cavelier, Lorraine Daston, Mark Bevir, Jenny Andersson, Silja Samerski, Anna Henkel, Heidi Voskuhl, Jessica Wang, Alexei Kojevnikov, and Stefan Schwarzkopf. I benefited from the rich facilities at the University of Oldenburg; the National Center for Scientific Research, CRNS Campus, Paris; Sciences Po, Paris; the University of Arizona’s Center for the Philosophy of Freedom; the Program on Science, Technology and Society, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona; the Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, New York University; the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society and Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley; the

xiii

Departments of the History of Science and Government, Harvard University; the Organization of American Historians; the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark; the History of Economics Society; the Social Science History Association; the Seminar in Logic and Games, CUNY; the Society for Social Studies of Science; the Political Science Department, Central European University; the American Political Science Association; the Western Political Science Association; the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum; the Hoover Institution Archive, Stanford University; University Archives, University of Rochester; and the Old Cambridge Baptist Church, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This project would not have been possible without the generous and exceptional assistance afforded by many distinguished colleagues: Robert Dreesen, Peter Dimock, Jonathan Cohn, John Ledger, Toni Maniaci, Diana Camella, Brittany Paris, Helen Gavel, Brianda Reyes, Jerry Udinsky, Alicia Anzivine, Philip Alexander, Linda Benson, and Melinda Wallington. I have benefited from the assistance of talented undergraduate researchers: Daniel McKay, John Adams, Halie Vilagi, James Chevako, Katie Grammenidis, Chris Urbano, Tori Mahoney, Hunter Phillips, Emilia Schrier, Lan Anh Le, and Garrett Nastarin.

I am grateful for the intangible support I received from individuals who stood as pillars of friendship and wisdom throughout the past years: Agi Risko, Diana Wear, Denise Bauman, Susan Spath, Kate Stocklin, Nancy and Wayne Hayner, Psyche North Torok, Teri McClung, Judi Stock, Jessie Labov, Kati Ratonyi, Sheryl, Olene and Jim Foley, Pauline Curley, and Ji Kwang Dae Poep Sa Nim. I appreciate my family members for their understanding of my unyielding com­mitment to writing and research: Sarah and Barry McLean, T Dani Adams, Paul Adams, Jim and Penny Adams, Pieter and Jacqueline Noppen, Ivan Ratonyi, and Dennis Gifford. Thus, finally, I am delighted to have this opportunity to express my boundless gratitude to Andras Ratonyi, without whose steadfast brilliance, ingenuity, and wide-ranging problem-solving skills Prisoners of Reason would not have been completed.

In this century, great advances in the most fundamental and theoretical branches of the physical sciences have created a nuclear dilemma that threatens the survival of our civilization. People seem to have learned more about how to design physical systems for exploiting radioactive materials than about how to create social systems for moderating human behavior in conflict.

—Roger B. Myerson, 1991¹

In 1989, as the Cold War was coming to a close, Francis Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy represented the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolu­tion” and the “final form of human government. ” It constituted, he asserted, the “end of history.”² With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Westerners concluded that there were no longer viable alternatives to capitalist democracy.³ To its advocates, this system, manifest in a combina­tion of consumer capitalism and thin political democracy, “resolved all of the contradictions of life for which, through the course of history, individuals have been prepared to fight.”⁴ Yet within a mere dozen years, the United States,

¹ Myerson was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2007; quote is from Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 1-2.

² Francis Fukuyama writing about his 1989 article, “The End of History?” (National Interest, summer 1989), in The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Books, 1992), xi.

³ For reference to this institution see Richard A. Posner, Crisis of Capitalist Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); phrase first sentence of Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values, 2nd ed. (Yale University Press, 1963), 1.

⁴ Michael W. Doyle’s description of Francis Fukuyama’s argument in Ways of War and Peace (New York: W.

which had been the world’s leading proponent of this ideology, took on a leading role in a global war on terror. American presidents, pundits, and citizens confronted an uncomfortable new reality characterized by entrenched military engagement in the Middle East and a shift of economic power from the West to the Far East.

Prisoners of Reason suggests that this unsatisfactory conclusion to the Cold War in part resulted from seeds sown from within that gave rise to neoliberal capitalism. The price of winning the Cold War was not only a vast nuclear arsenal and budget deficit but also the transformation of individual autonomy and collective sovereignty. By the close of the twentieth century, the free markets and democratic governance alluded to by Fukuyama had become unmoored from their classical liberal ideals and refashioned according to the strategic rationality of game theory. The no-harm principle at the root of classical liberalism no longer, neither in theory nor practice, animates the action of rational actors who instead seek gain despite others. The concept of mutual benefit has yielded to the inevitability of winners and losers. Norm bound negotiation has given way to coercive bargaining. Financialization, risk man­agement, and algorithmic control replace the efficient use of resources and technological innovations as the major engines for profit. Freedom, once rooted in self-determination and equality before the law, is reduced to individual choice as defined by one’s willingness and ability to pay for a product or service.

The exemplary neoliberal citizen and consumer is the strategic rational actor modeled by orthodox game theory. This observation is both trivial and pro­found. It is trivial because rational choice theory, which dominated the social sciences and professional schools by the 1980s, makes the identical claim. It is profound because of how game theory has come to shape the unique practices of contemporary late-modern capitalism.^[5] The strategic rational actor was codified in a mathematically tractable and operationalizable form particularly suited to rational deterrence: the US national security state was the world’s first rational actor.^[6] Given demands of nuclear security, strategists’ pursuit of fail-safe policy created the appeal for a comprehensive science of decision making.

Prisoners of Reason advances three arguments. First, strategic rationality, which game theorists understand to be an all-encompassing theory of rational decision making, informs an important strand of postmodern neoliberal sub­jectivity and agency: that operative in advanced capitalism. Rational choice theorists model complex interactions to predict collective outcomes and gen­erate public policy, legislation, or institutional design.⁹ Thus, second, their research has resulted in a canonical set of findings that characterize neoliberal theory and which this book will explore. These novel game theoretic findings directly correlate with the particular late-modern expression of capitalist democracy. Third, the political theory consistent with strategic rationality marks a distinct break with classical liberalism. In its standard form, rational choice theory rejects the rule-following normativity and logic of appropriate­ness embodied in classical liberal principles of no-harm, fair play, consent, and contractual commitment.¹⁰ Game theory develops a theory of fungible value consistent with philosophical realism, which, in alliance with international relations realism, further distances this system of thought and practice from

⁸ Studies have shown that students exposed to game theory will tend to demonstrate behavior consistent with its tenets. See Robert Frank, Thomas Gilovich, and Donald Regan, “Does Studying Economics Inhibit Cooperation?” Journal of Economic Perspectives (1993) 7, 159­171; Dale Miller, “The Norm of Self-Interest,” American Psychologist (1999) 54, 1-8; for studies showing that students exposed to economics are more prone to cheating, see Donald McCabe and Linda Klebe Trevino, “Academic Dishonesty,” Journal of Higher Education (1993) 64:5, 522-538; Donald McCabe and Linda Klebe Trevino, “Cheating among Business Students,” Journal of Management Education (1995), 19:2, 205-218; and Donald McCabe, Kenneth Butterfield, and Linda Klebe Trevino, “Academic Dishonesty in Graduate Business Programs,” Academy of Management Learning and Education (2006) 5:3, 294-305.

⁹ Gary Becker, Sveriges Riksbank (Nobel) Prize winner in Economic Science, 1992, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Douglass C. North, Sveriges Riksbank (Nobel) Prize winner in Economic Science, 1993, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); for a recent example, see The Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change, which is available online, http://webarchive.nationalarc hives.gov.uk/+/http:/www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/sternreview_index.htm, see chap. 21, accessed July 20, 2015.

¹⁰ My critique is not of formal modeling per se, but rather of the orthodox application of game theory. Joseph Heath, Communicative Rationality and Rational Choice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); and Gerald Gaus, The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); both strive to accommodate the side constraints or commitment characteristic of classical liberalism by expanding the formal framework initiated by game theory. For another approach to commit­ment, see Margaret Gilbert, Joint Commitment: How We Make the Social World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

classical liberalism.^[8] Orthodox game theory assumes that actors must be strategic, or individualistically competitive against others, and thus rejects joint maximization and shared intention, and reduces preference satisfaction to narrow self-interest.^[9]

The association of game theory, as a systematic body of knowledge encom­passing all coherent choice, with late-modern neoliberal political economy may seem jarring at first. On the one hand, “neoliberalism” is a phrase coined by leftist critics of contemporary capitalism to draw attention to its extraction of monetary value from all human relations and its erosion of the public sphere, producing unprecedented levels of inequality. What is new about this stage of capitalism, contemporary critics argue, is the financialization and commodifi­cation of all experiential value.1^[10] On the other hand, “neoliberal institutional­ism” is a school of international relations theory that applies the tools of game theory to model complex interactions.^{[11] [12]} These theorists argue that actors in a state of nature can achieve cooperation through building regimes and institu­tions. From their perspective, cooperative norms can emerge which reflect stable behavioral patterns that arise when actors’ preferences and choices cohere naturally or when appropriate incentives are introduced to modify choice.

On the surface, these two uses of the term “neoliberalism” are distinctly at odds with each other. Neoliberal critics of late-modern capitalism carry forth Karl Marx’s dissatisfaction with laborers’ plight in industrial capitalism and thus critically assess contemporary market practices, their apparent destruction of lower and middle classes, and their creation of new means of extracting surplus value.1⁵ Neoliberal institutionalists use game theory to show how classical liberal achievements, namely effective governance and economic exchange, can be attained notwithstanding the minimalist and even cynical view of human agency that rational choice accepts.¹⁶ Surely, they reason, if mutually beneficial governance and markets can be derived from strategic rationality, proponents of an international relations realism are overly pessimistic in finding the inevitability of conflict. However, Prisoners of Reason argues that neoliberal market capitalism and neoliberal institutionalism share a common foundation: the assumption that strategic rationality governs all purposive agency.

Elite institutions of higher education in the West treat orthodox game theory as a canonical statement of instrumental rationality.¹⁷ It thus seems a mere truism to observe that contemporary citizens and consumers must either con­form to its dictates or risk acting “irrationally.” Yet, if game theory shapes actors’ subjective awareness of the meaning of their interactions; alters their behavior; and informs public policy, laws, and institutions, then we must examine the possibility that late-modern capitalism enacted by strategically rational actors is distinct from its earlier forms.1⁸ If indeed so, it would not be surprising that game theoretic models both analytically predict outcomes con­sistent with neoliberal theory and that these analytic conclusions directly corre­late with contemporary empirically evident neoliberal practices.

Such a view of the transformative aspect of game theory is antithetical to its portrayal as a value-neutral tool and the perennial structure of purposive agency.¹⁹

1 ⁶ Robert Axelrod and Robert O. Keohane, “Achieving Cooperation under Anarchy: Strategies and Institutions,” in Baldwin, ed., Neorealism and Neoliberalism, 1993, 85-115; °n the cyni­cism inherent in rational choice explanations, see Russell Hardin, Collective Action (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), xv.

¹⁷ For a compelling statement that expected utility theory represents our state of the art under­standing of instrumental rationality, see Donald C. Hubin, “The Groundless Normativity of Instrumental Rationality,” The Journal ofPhilosophy (2001) 98, 445-465; for discussion of the restrictions on expected utility theory useful in game theory (strategic rationality and the debate over whether language is primordial and strategic action parasitic, or vice versa), see also Heath, Following the Rules, 2008, 12-41; and Heath, Communicative Action and Rational Choice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 49-81; Daniel M. Hausman and Michael S. McPherson, Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy, and Public Policy, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

¹⁸ Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1-28; Robert Frank, Thomas Gilovich, and Donald Regan, “Does Studying Economics Inhibit Cooperation?” Journal of Economic Perspectives (1993) 7, 159-171; Dale Miller, “The Norm of Self-Interest,” 1999, 1-8; for studies showing that students exposed to economics are more prone to cheating, see McCabe and Klebe Trevino, “Academic Dishonesty,” 1993; McCabe and Klebe Trevino, “Cheating among Business Students,” 1995; and McCabe, Butterfield, and Klebe Trevino, “Academic Dishonesty in Graduate Business Programs.”

¹⁹ Herbert Gintis, Bounds of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Stephen Quackenbush, “The Rationality of Rational Choice Theory,” International Interactions: Empirical and Theoretical Research in International Relations (2004) 30:2, 87-107. For the relationship between rational choice and confidence in social science, see Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Stanley Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

Game theory itself is a mathematical theory and thus derives its validity from analytic consistency.^[13] It cannot be tested as a valid instrumental theory of ration­ality without establishing a consistent common means to provide a universally recognized mapping of every individual’s subjective evaluation of the idiosyncratic features of outcomes and their relationship to the tangible phenomenal world governed by the laws of physics.^[14] Operationalizing orthodox strategic rationality invents a particular subjectivity, either as an ideal type or as an experiential fact, insofar as individuals are taught to master and apply strategic rationality in various contexts of choice.^[15] Thus, Prisoners of Reason analyzes what assumptions game theorists introduce about individuals’ choice to make interaction contexts, or “games,” susceptible to modeling and application in descriptive, normative, and prescriptive contexts.^[16]

This book analyses the work of game theorists who address rational deter­rence, the social contract and collective action, and the emergence of coopera­tion among pre-social actors in evolutionary biology. Theorists apply the same tools and models to these widely divergent fields of investigation, thus showing how game theory offers a unified methodology and results in a comprehensive understanding of agency from actors without deliberate intention, to humans and the nation state as a multiparty composite actor. Chapters focus on the prominent theorists Thomas Schelling, James R. Schlesinger, James M. Buchanan, Richard Posner, Russell Hardin, Richard Dawkins, and Robert Axelrod. Most chapters centrally address the Prisoner’s Dilemma game because many of these theorists gave this model priority in their contributions.^[17] Part I: War discusses the development of nuclear deterrence theory and practice.²⁵ Part II: Government analyzes the implications of the novel game theoretic findings for neoliberal, as opposed to classical liberal, political theory and practice. Part III: Evolution explores how game theorists attribute strategic rationality to biological organisms in their behavioral programming. These three parts together show how game theorists suggest that strategic rationality provides a comprehensive account of purposive action operative at all levels of organization from pre-intentional action to individual’s choice and interna­tional relations strategy.

Prisoners of Reason participates in the enduring Western celebration of reason and the contemporary critical discussion of rational choice. This discus­sion is comprehensive and directly impinges on the implications of game theory for understanding and achieving social order.²⁶ With respect to international relations theory, the discussion of critical assessments of rational choice mainly

Public Choice III (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Hargreaves Heap and Varoufakis, Game Theory, 2004.

²⁵ The most prominent here are Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, i960); Thomas Schelling, Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, i960); Glenn H. Snyder, Deterrence and Defense: Toward a Theory of National Security (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961); Philip Green, Deadly Logic: The Theory of Nuclear Deterrence (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, i966); Jack Snyder, The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Limited Nuclear Options (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, Sept. 1977); RobertJervis, The Illogic of Nuclear Strategy (Cornell University Press, 1984); Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981); Fred M. Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983); Gregg Herken, Counsels of War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985); Douglas P. Lackey, “The American Debate onNuclearWeapons Policy: A ReviewoftheLiterature 1945­85,” Analyse and Kritik 9 (1987), 7-46; Joseph S. Nye Jr., Nuclear Ethics (London: Free Press, 1986); Steven J. Brams, Superpower Games: Applying Game Theory to Superpower Conflict (Yale University Press, 1985).

²⁶ With respect to the large and general critique of game theory, key texts are Sen, “Rational Fools,” 1990;Jane Mansbridge, ed., Beyond Self Interest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science (Yale University Press, 1994); Kristen Renwick Munroe, The Economic Approach to Politics: A Critical Reassessment of the Theory of Rational Action (New York: HarperCollins, 1991). With respect to the particular texts analyzing the implications of strategic rationality for social contract theory and collective action, see James M. Buchanan, Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1975); Michael Taylor, Anarchy and Cooperation (New York: Wiley, 1976), and The Possibility of Cooperation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Russell Hardin, Collective Action (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Martin Hollis, Trust within Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Ken Binmore, Playing Fair, 1994, and Game Theory and the Social Contract, vol. 2, Just Playing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Joseph Heath, Communication Action and Rational Choice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Gintis, Bounds of Reason, 2009; and Gaus, Order of Public Reason, 2012.

follows the contours of the debate between the schools of realism and neoliberal institutionalism.²⁷ This book intersects with researchers investigating the his­torical roots of game theory in the Cold War.²⁸ Prisoners of Reason also relates to the burgeoning critical engagement with neoliberal capitalism.²⁹

The central argument of Prisoners of Reason builds on recent analyses of modern liberal political theory by Michael Doyle, Richard Tuck, and Elaine Scarry. Doyle, in his Ways of War and Peace (1997), provides a discussion of theories of international relations, including classical realism and classical liberalism, to pave the way toward revitalizing a commitment to liberal international relations theory. He identifies theoretical principles of classical liberalism that ground individual freedom, private property, and equality of opportunity and extend to the domain of relations among

²⁷ Robert Jervis wrote an early paper addressing the relationship between realism and game theory: “Realism, Game Theory, and Cooperation,” World Politics (1988) 40, 317-349; see also Jervis, “Realism, Neoliberalism, and Cooperation: Understanding the Debate,” International Security (1999), 24, 42-63. Baldwin’s edited collection sets forth the debate as it developed in the 1980s and makes clear that advocates of realism promote strategic rationality and a commitment to underlying objective sources of power, and that neoliberal institutionalists concede this frame­work but argue that even under this most limited set of assumptions, cooperation in interna­tional institutions and regimes is still attainable: Baldwin, Neorealism and Neoliberalism, 1993. Michael Doyle’s Ways of War and Peace (1997) discusses the debate between a contemporary renewed commitment to the classical liberal tradition in international relations and a realist approach. Prisoners of Reason dovetails with Doyle’s Ways of War and Peace in drawing attention to the assumptions and structure of classical liberalism vis-a-vis contemporary realism and instrumentalism consistent with orthodox game theory. On rational deterrence and rational decision theory (game theory), see Keith Kraus, “Rationality and Deterrence in Theory and Practice,” in Contemporary Security and Strategy, ed. by Craig A. Snyder (New York: Routledge, 1999), 120-149.

²⁸ Key texts are Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002; S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Robert Leonard, Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory: From Chess to Social Science, 1900-1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Paul Erikson et al., How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); William Thomas, Rational Action: The Sciences of Policy in Britain and America, 1940-1960 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015); Paul Erickson, The World the Game Theorists Made (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). On Cold War social science more generally see Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014); and Mark Solovey, Shaky Foundations: The Politics­Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013).

²⁹ Crucial texts in this investigation are Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 2007; Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mount Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy, Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Michel Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979 (London: Picador Reprint ed., 2010); Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

nations. For liberal political theory, individual freedom is premised on “the right to be treated and the duty to treat others as ethical subjects, not as objects or means only.”^[18] Although the “will to subjugate” may be an ever-present concern, this need not compromise an actor’s intention to seek peace and build “the mutual confidence and respect that establishing a true peace will 31

require. ^[19]

Tuck’s Free Riding (2008) provides a template for Prisoners of Reason in combining historical insights with philosophical analysis to focus attention on how contemporary rational choice theory inverts commonsense understanding of the causal efficacy of collective intention. Tuck provides examples from modern European political thought to demonstrate that theorists, including David Hume and John Stuart Mill, stressed the rationality of collaboration. Thus, throughout the modern era, the state had to introduce legally backed sanctions to prevent collusion among firms or collaboration among individuals pursuing collective bargaining rights.^[20] Tuck argues that large-scale market competition defies the logic of strategic competition because no individual actor has the causal power to make any appreciable difference on collective outcomes. The foremost concern over the failure of collective action is thus the worry about individuals’ lack of causal efficacy in large-scale undertakings, and not the Prisoner’s Dilemma concern that rational individuals seek to free ride on others’ efforts. Like Free Riding, Prisoners of Reason highlights how rational choice introduces a novel approach to coherent action that displaces earlier conventional wisdom.^[21] Specifically, neoliberalism jettisons the commonsense understanding that civil society depends on mutual respect and the good will to make at least one person better off and no one worse off in every interaction.

Scarry’s Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing between Democracy and Doom (2014) draws attention to how the invention of nuclear weapons altered the US practice of sovereignty from republican democracy with the military under civilian authority, to a system of command and control with its own prerogatives and little respect for either citizens’ participation or the no-harm principle. Scarry contrasts modern liberal political theory, which stresses the inviolability of corporeal persons, with the post-World War II reliance on secrecy and disregard for embodied persons. Scarry’s discussion of the social contract points out the ways in which the exercise of sovereignty through the threat to destroy peoples and civilizations with weapons of mass destruction interrupts the classical liberal commitment to a contract among the ruled and those who rule. Her chapter on “Consent and the Body” reminds readers how throughout modern political philosophy, giving consent was an embodied practice with direct implications for the well-being of those voicing a willingness to participate. Scarry’s analysis in Thermonuclear Monarchy complements Prisoners of Reason’s argument that the development of game theory and its integration into law and public policy facilitated the exercise of nuclear sover­eignty. Game theory views individuals as abstracted sets of preference rankings free from corporeal embodiment, and it empties the practice of consent of meaning because actors' preferences exist outside of time and thus can be artificially incorporated into public decision making without the direct partici­pation of citizens.

Finally, this book incorporates methodological insights from Sheila Jasanoff’s States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and the Social Order (2004). Jasanoff contributes to the methodology of science, technology, and society studies and argues that scientific innovation and its incorporation into social life unfold in a process of co-production.^[22] Applied to the US exercise of superpower sovereignty through deterrent threats of catastrophic harm and the manifestation of neoliberal subjectivity in the form of deferring to rational choice theory as the ultimate science of purposive decision making, Jasanoff's perspective invites us to investigate into how individual autonomy and collec­tive agency coevolve with the decision technologies that rationalize action. Such a perspective helps show how game theory developed together with the “nuclear dilemma.” John von Neumann, a cardinal architect of neoliberal economics, formalized game theory, axiomatized quantum thermodynamics, and contrib­uted to the Manhattan Project. Von Neumann views the social world in terms of relentless competition over scarce resources that everyone alike seeks, and he inscribes this worldview into the mathematical foundations of his social science. Prisoners of Reason excavates these original foundational assumptions and reveals their implications for instantiating late-modern political economy on their basis.