OUTLINE OF THE BOOK

Prisoners of Reason starts with two preliminary chapters that set the stage for its central argument that game theory provides a singular approach to purposive agency and collective action that informs late-modern neoliberal descriptive and predictive models.

Given the neoliberal institutionalists’ commitment to employing game theo­retic models to make the case that cooperation can emerge among egoists even in a state of anarchy in which no other actor can be trusted to cooperate, not even oneself, the association of this school with neoliberal economic practices may seem off-putting or unjustified. However, the goal of this book is to identify how, despite researchers’ best intentions, strategic rationality condones preda­tory behavior as a feasible and even necessary means to secure individual survival and success. Rational choice theorists acknowledge they are “generally concerned with pushing cynical explanations to their limit” to address the worst possible case and come up with sound remedies.^[23] Yet, as the pages ahead document, rather than finding such remedies, this analytic style is more likely to lead to the validation of cynical modus operandi and dismissal of alterna­tives.

The second preliminary chapter, “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” follows game the­orists in their identification of the particular prominence of this recalcitrant game in which individuals’ self-interest is mutually destructive, rather than mutually beneficial.^[24] The Prisoner’s Dilemma belies the classical liberal argu­ment that self-interest results in mutual prosperity. The chapter demonstrates how the pedagogy of the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) relies on a set of tacit assumptions that must be accepted to master this game. Mastering the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and therein embracing the assumptions underlying its standard operationalization, makes it difficult to resist the powerful logic of strategic rationality and inevitably leads actors to assimilate and accommodate neoliberal subjectivity.

Part I: War follows the progress of game theory in its entanglement with nuclear strategy. Chapter 3, “Assurance,” centers on the economist and strate­gist Thomas Schelling. This future Nobel Memorial Prize recipient uses game theory to develop the mentality of strategic rationality, which he first used to analyze nuclear deterrence before applying it more broadly to economics, politics, and conflict resolution. Although his research precedes the neoliberal institutionalist school, his work is consistent with those researchers’ aims. Schelling uses strategic rationality to identify and resolve the worst-case sce­nario to build a nuclear peace resembling the classical liberal commitment to mutual respect in the form of reciprocal deterrence. The accompanying discus­sion of nuclear strategy and arms development shows how game theory informed and made possible the integration of nuclear planning into US sover­eignty using rational decision technologies.

This chapter also introduces the consequential nuclear security debate between the two positions of mutual assured destruction (MAD), supported by Schelling, and nuclear utilization targeting selection (NUTS), supported by the defense analyst Herman Kahn. Given the outlay of hundreds of billions of dollars during the Cold War on nuclear hardware, and the additional $900 billion spent on command and control, the nuclear security debate is not only central to US history but also reflective of the application of game theory to render intelligible nuclear deterrence.³⁷ Although the average US citizen may have been unaware of NUTS, this aggressive strategy dedicated to preparing to fight and prevail in protracted nuclear war won the Cold War nuclear security debate by the end of Jimmy Carter’s presidency in 1980. Rational deterrence theory armed American strategists with the confidence and clout to mobilize these weapons of mass destruction in the service of American security and sovereignty.

Chapter 4, “Deterrence,” follows the conclusion of the debate between the liberal stance of MAD and the offensive realist policy of NUTS. The champions of neoliberal agency firmly suppose that in facing the worst-case scenario, mutual cooperation resembling classical liberalism can still be achieved. And yet, as is evident in the logical capitulation of MAD to NUTS, the inherent cynicism of supposing that every individual pursues ends despite other agents without regard for the dignity of personhood or the legitimacy of principles of conduct ends up ceding the classical liberal promise of mutual benefit to the neoliberal realism of coercive bargaining, predatory gain, and asymmetric deterrence.

³⁷ Daniel Volmar, PhD dissertation, The Power of the Atom: US Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications, 1945-1965, Harvard University, forthcoming 2016, p. 13 ($926 billion on Command and Control, in 1996 US dollars).

Part II: Government follows the application of game theory to modeling interactions constitutive of markets and governance. The themes in Part II will be familiar to anyone who knows game theory: the Prisoner’s Dilemma analysis of Hobbesian anarchy, the Prisoner’s Dilemma account of the social contract, the role of unanimous agreement, the role of consent, and the problem of collective action. These chapters discuss the core game theoretic findings in these areas of research and pinpoint what is unique to neoliberal political philosophy predicated on strategic rational action, specifically insofar as it deviates from classical liberalism.

Chapter 5, “Hobbesian Anarchy,” discusses how game theorists interpret Hobbes’s state of nature to be a Prisoner’s Dilemma game and see in his authoritarian Leviathan a solution: maintaining social order at the point of a sword. However, Hobbes viewed the problem of achieving social order akin to an Assurance Game, in which actors who prefer to cooperate end up seeking individual gain despite others because of a lack of trust, not a Prisoner’s Dilemma. Members of a commonwealth choose to cooperate once assured of others’ like preferment or commitment; their first preference is not to defect. Moreover, Hobbes’s solution is achieved by individuals laying down the right to all things. Any mode of action resembling strategic rationality is laid aside in favor of adopting side constraints as a precondition for harmonious living in civil society.

Chapter 6, “Social Contract,” follows James M. Buchanan’s application of the Prisoner’s Dilemma to social contract theory. Buchanan’s Limits of Liberty: Between Liberty and Leviathan exemplifies neoliberal political the­ory. Buchanan uses the Prisoner’s Dilemma to argue that as long as the social contract offers more than the state of nature - for him defined by the worst every individual can threaten on every other actor - citizens will conform to its division of goods. Whereas John Rawls believes that stability under the social contract is achieved when actors are motivated by tacit consent under the veil of ignorance, Buchanan argues that actors will accommodate any social con­tract backed by sufficient coercive force. Therefore, he calls for force rather than legitimacy to address the civil unrest characterizing the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Chapter 7, “Unanimity,” follows Buchanan further in his attempt to apply a key insight of the neoclassical economists who identified in the principle of unanimous agreement a solid ground for government and collective decisions. Surely, if every member of a community agrees that one outcome is superior to all the rest, then the leadership and citizens can confidently enact it as law. However, counterintuitively, in neoliberal political theory, unanimous agree­ment has no intrinsic mobilizing force for collective action. Since individuals each relentlessly maximize expected utility in competition with one another, their agreement to an outcome or a law can only ever be strategic. At any moment when spoils are on the table to be shared, regardless of any prior unanimous agreement on divisions, renegotiations are inevitable, with actors forming unstable coalitions, engaging in coercive bargaining, and preferring to sucker others.

Chapter 8, “Consent,” examines Richard Posner’s treatment of this titular topic throughout his school of law and economics, which defines justice as wealth maximization. Posner relies on rational choice theory’s stipulation that rational individuals have preference rankings over all outcomes independent of time to conclude that consent prior to an exchange and consent after an exchange are equivalent.

Chapter 9, “Collective Action,” examines the standard game theoretic exten­sion of the two-person Prisoner’s Dilemma to a large number of individuals. Game theorists argue that voluntary cooperation must fail because all actors prefer to free ride on others’ contributions. This chapter contrasts this neolib­eral PD logic with Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective Action (1965), which argues that group size dictates a group’s ability to cooperate. Olson proposes that in large-scale collective ventures, agents fail to cooperate for the same reason that perfect competition requires that no single actor can alter the price of a product: in large group settings, no single individual has the where­withal to causally impact the outcome for the group or any one of its members. Individuals’ failure to cooperate, then, stems from a sense of causal impotence rather than a desire to free ride.

Part III, “Evolution,” explores how strategic rationality has been used to model organisms in a state of evolutionary natural selection. Chapter 10, “Selfish Gene,” follows the application of game theory to evolutionary biology with the implication that all life forms are deduced to follow the laws of strategic rationality to survive the demands of natural selection. Game theory provides algorithms that may have been programmed into organisms’ behavior and assumes no conscious choice. Evolutionary game theorists hold that organ­isms compete over a source of objective fitness value and that each organism’s survival depends on gaining more than others. Richard Dawkins uses these analytic models to argue that humans must have evolved to carry a gene for selfish behavior that conforms to the principles of noncooperative game theory.

Chapter 11, “Tit for Tat,” discusses Robert Axelrod’s argument that coop­eration can emerge among the egoistic utility maximizers modeled by noncoo­perative game theory. Axelrod uses a repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma game played by two actors to argue that reciprocal altruism along the line of the golden rule would be a successful strategy in this setting. Axelrod’s argument is pivotal for the neoliberal institutionalists’ hopes that cooperation can emerge even among actors who abide by the principles of noncooperative game theory. Hence, according to this analysis, markets and institutions reminiscent of classical liberalism can be sustained notwithstanding the pessimistic assumptions about the character of actors. However, as this chapter shows, Tit for Tat cooperation is an idealized solution that must be supplemented by coercive sanctions and vigilante punishment for cooperation to emerge in settings beyond those with two individuals interacting indefinitely with perfect recall who play their stra­tegies without error and value the future as much as the present.

The final chapter, Pax Americana, restates the unique findings of neoliberal theory derived from rational choice. Neoliberal subjects are those stymied by the Prisoner’s Dilemmas theorized to exist throughout life’s experiences. However, acting in accordance with the strategic imperatives of noncooperative game theory is optional. One can instead choose to actualize the classical liberal disposition to acknowledge others’ right to exist, a more comprehensive view of value that transcends fixed-sum resources, and permits both joint maximization and the classic liberal imperfect duty of altruism. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a loaded trap that seems perplexing precisely because its historical development has superimposed the will to dominate others on top of the motive to act cautiously and independently to protect one’s interests. The bright-line test of whether actors are really caught in a PD game, and whether they qualify as neoliberal subjects, is whether these individuals would choose to cooperate after the other actor has already chosen to do so in situations classified as tangible resource dilemmas in which everyone seeks to secure scarce goods. Classic liberal society is constructed on the premise that if others cooperate in market exchange and provision of public goods, then one will voluntarily do so as well. Neoliberal theory asserts that every actor will likely cheat, free ride, and seek self-gain by threatening harm on others even if others cooperate. It may seem that strategic actors can simply incorporate a predilection for cooperation into their utility functions. However, in its orthodox form, noncooperative game theory permits only the consideration of consequences, views joint maximiza­tion as unsound, and stresses fungible rewards directly associated with actors’ chances of instrumental success. Rather than regarding norms and rule follow­ing as deliberate choices, game theory views norms as behavioral patterns that emerge solely as a consequence of individualistic preference satisfaction.