neoliberal political philosophy

If there is a contentious element to the argument presented throughout Prisoners of Reason, that neoliberal subjectivity and governance are uniquely conceived by noncooperative game theory, the point of controversy is not the wide-reaching application of rational choice but the claim that it offers a distinctive and unpre­cedented understanding of action.

Each of the chapters of Prisoners of Reason is designed to impart a counter­intuitive self-contained insight that either clarifies the distinctive quality of neoliberal politics and economics from its modern classical liberal predecessor or sheds light on a misunderstanding theorists may have inadvertently perpe­tuated to maintain the continuity between classical liberalism and neoliberal­ism.

Chapter 2, “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” presents how the standard assumptions used to operationalize game theory in most contexts - only outcomes factor into choice, value is fungible and precedes social context, individuals act independently despite others, and gratuitous generosity is counter to instrumental rationality - are precisely those on which the Prisoner’s Dilemma game depends to generate its troubling outcome. Neoliberal subjectivity results from internalizing these guidelines for action. Clarity over the assumptions locking actors into a Prisoner’s Dilemma enables us to exit at will by disregarding a fundamental assumption of strategic rationality: we may consider means and act with commitment, explore non-finite sources of value derived from particular relations and circumstances, work as a team, and give to others without any expectations of gain to ourselves.

In Part I, “War,” Chapter 3, “Assurance,” Thomas Schelling derives a Prisoner’s Dilemma from an Assurance Dilemma to model the nuclear security dilemma. He initiated what would become the neoliberal institutionalist approach to international relations: accepting the most pessimistic motives of actors yet showing how they may still achieve a mutually beneficial cooperative outcome. Thus, Schelling used the PD model to defend mutual assured destruc­tion, which mimicked the classical liberal security stance of cooperating when others do but meeting aggression with aggression. Yet, in attempting to make his argument valid in the worst-case scenario, Schelling conceded the compre­hensive logic of game theory, and that benign cooperators must adopt the characteristics of aggressors in self-defense.

Chapter 4, “Deterrence,” argues that the new neoliberal approach to agency could not salvage the classical liberal approach to mutual security based on assurance and legitimacy recognizing people’s right to exist. The chapter analyzes how the strategists tasked with rendering deterrence rational, credible, and effective could not and did not decide the nuclear security debate between MAD and NUTS in favor of the former. Thus, in its highest expression of sovereignty, the ability to command and threaten others with nuclear devastation, the United States shifted its basis for engaging other nations to the sole platform of strategic rationality. Notwithstanding the existential certainty of MAD, no contemporary philosophy relying on strate­gic rationality could provide a sound argument to President Carter to counter his defense analysts’ conclusion that the only way to avoid nuclear combat was to prepare to fight a prolonged nuclear war.

Part II, “Government,” follows rational choice theorists’ conclusion that anarchy, like the intense nuclear security dilemma, whether among nations or among individuals, is best modeled by the Prisoner’s Dilemma game. Chapter 5, “Hobbesian Anarchy,” argues that game theorists’ assertion that Leviathan provided a solution to the Prisoner’s Dilemma game underlying Hobbes’s state of nature misses that Hobbes’s actors are better regarded to be in an Assurance Game than a Prisoner’s Dilemma. Moreover, strategic rationality proposes the opposite to Hobbes’s solution: whereas game theory assumes that actors calcu­late what to do based on knowledge of value, probabilities of outcomes, and common knowledge of others’ preferences, Hobbes assumes that radical uncer­tainty characterizes anarchy. Actors must stop acting out of the hope for immediate gain and must in every action seek peace by desisting from injuring others, obeying the commands of the sovereign, and upholding agreements personally made.

Chapter 6, “Social Contract,” analyzes James M. Buchanan’s construction of the social contract from a Prisoner’s Dilemma payoff matrix. Buchanan’s innovation, the core of neoliberal market exchange and governance, renders explicit the paradigmatic shift from classical liberalism to neoliberalism. The neoliberal social contract, or Prisoner’s Dilemma model of governance, dis­places normative bargaining predicated on the no-harm principle and voluntary compliance in favor of coercive bargaining and a strong security state. Actors can seek more gain by credibly threatening harm to others, and the strong can exploit the weak’s pursuit of subsistence by lowering their expectations should no social contract be achieved.

Chapter 7, “Unanimity,” investigates Buchanan’s transformation of this principle from a foolproof means to validate legitimate governance to a momen­tary expression of aligned preferences. Consistent with strategic rationality, Buchanan cuts the principle of unanimity free from either a foundation in an interpersonally evident basis of preference satisfaction or the expression of consent validated by commitment to uphold agreements. Hence, this formerly powerful means to sanction market exchange and validate governance loses the normative purchase to legitimate any collective outcome. Even if mutual coop­eration is unanimously preferred to unanimous defection in considering a social contract versus anarchy, if an individual could achieve a greater division through a new agreement, then that person may find it worthwhile to treat the prior mutually cooperative outcome as indistinguishable from mutual defection. This holdout tactic could force others to cooperate for less if they are more desperate for an agreement.

Chapter 8, “Consent,” examines how rational choice theory suggests that because individuals’ preferences over outcomes are path independent and stand outside of time, ex ante agreement and ex post agreement to terms are indis­tinguishable.

Chapter 9, “Collective Action,” discusses rational choice theorists’ analysis of the challenge of achieving collective action in terms of the multiple-actor Prisoner’s Dilemma game. It compares this analysis to that of Mancur Olson, who argued that very large groups are bound to have a difficult time securing cooperation, even if those actors are motivated by side constraints or concerns for others’ well-being, because individuals realize that their efforts make no causal impact on whether the collective undertaking fails or succeeds. Thus, we must distinguish between the problem of collective action in large groups that results from the failure of instrumental action through the worry of causal negligibility, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma logic in which actors defect because what they gain by suckering others is the causal result of displacing costs onto their partner in interaction. As under perfect competition, strategic rationality has no purchase in a large-scale collective action.

Part III, “Evolution,” draws attention to the extension of noncooperative game theory from international relations and civil society to evolutionary biology because this theory works at multiple levels from programming beha­vior, to modeling how behavioral norms arise from repeated patterns of indi­viduals’ expected utility maximization, to guiding individuals’ decision making and public policies.

Chapter 11, “Tit for Tat,” assesses the neoliberals’ silver bullet for explain­ing how cooperation can emerge among strategically rational actors. Although assuming consequentialism, realism, and individualism, the Tit for Tat beha­vioral rule mimics the Golden Rule by programming actors to first choose cooperation rather than defection in indefinitely repeated, two-actor Prisoner’s Dilemma games. However, Tit for Tat is not an evolutionary stable strategy, and the settings in which it could prove an effective decision rule are so limited that it is better regarded as contributing to a precarious equilibrium much like balancing a ball on the pinnacle of a cone.