The-Sleep-of-Reason-Produces-Matrices-Review-of-How-Reason-Almost-Lost-Its-Mind-The-Strange-Career-of-Cold-War-Rationality-Paul-Erickson-Judy-L-Klein-.pdf

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Book Review
Endeavour
Vol. 38 No. 3–4
Full text provided by
www.sciencedirect.com
ScienceDirect
The Sleep of Reason Produces Matrices: Review of How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality, Paul
Erickson, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, Michael D. Gordin, University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Michael Rossi
University of Chicago, Department of History 1126 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, United States
Born of the polygamous coupling of behavioral science,
mathematical formalism and nuclear strategy; reared by
the US military, RAND corporation and select research
universities; fed on babysitters, grad students and canned
goods – Cold War rationality was, after a fashion, a mon-
ster. The contorted apotheosis of the ideal of reason – as
beautiful as it was obscene – it flourished in the imaginar-
ium of American social scientists in the 1950s through
1980s before turning jaws-to-tail and devouring itself,
leaving only vague suggestions of its erstwhile being flick-
ering against the broader backdrop of the history of
thought.
The goal of How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind is to argue
for the existence of this monster – to detail its natural
history, to show how the specific circumstances of the Cold
War shaped its contours, to ‘‘identify and define [this]
phenomenon that for a few decades spanned several dis-
ciplines’’ (10).
Cold War rationality, argue the authors, drew from a
deep history of concepts of rational thought, but adapted
them to the particular geopolitical circumstances of the
mid 20th century. Enlightenment thinkers, for instance,
valued calculation, algorithmic rule-making and formal
precision – and, indeed, were fascinated with automata
– just like their Cold War successors. But whereas even the
most arithmetically obsessed philosophe would have
viewed reason as necessarily the function of a reflective,
moral, human consciousness, Cold War rationalists (as the
authors call their actors) sought to strip this very humanity
from their concept of rationality. No culture, no intuition,
no emotion, no morality: Cold War rationality was an idea
for a time in which a single irrational decision – informed
by human arrogance, fear, anger, or just plain stupidity –
might trigger a nuclear war.
Through six roughly-chronological chapters, the
authors demonstrate that this austere, anti-humanistic
concept of rationality underpinned the work of a far-flung
and heterogeneous group of scholars pursing a truly diz-
zying variety of research programs. The book spends some
time on familiar figures, tools and episodes of Cold War
social science. Herman Kahn and John Nash both show up,
for example, sporting a complement of game theoretical
matrices and prisoners’ dilemmas. Many of the chapters
are grounded in well-studied events like the Berlin Airlift,
US nuclear tests in Micronesia and the Cuban Missile
Crisis. But the bulk of the book is devoted to the more
obscure paths down which social scientists ventured. Thus
did researchers attempt to model the behaviors of teen-
agers haggling over babysitting wages in the same way as
Corresponding author:
Rossi, M. (michaelrossi@uchicago.edu)
Available online 6 September 2014.
www.sciencedirect.com
0160-9327/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2014.07.007
they did college students simulating nuclear disarmament.
And thus could the same standardized menu of behaviors
and analysis be applied to children at play, couples in
marriage counseling and soldiers at work. The point is
not simply that Cold War rationalists cast a wide net.
Rather, it is that these scientists felt certain that a singu-
lar, underlying rationality could be conjured to explain all
human behavior, if only it could be isolated from the
peculiarities of actual humans. Ultimately, argue the
authors, this increasingly stark concept of rationality
doomed itself, as Cold War rationalists honed in on ev-
er-more stringent standards of rationality during the
1970s and 1980s, even as fluctuating tensions in the Cold
War itself allowed for greater and greater behavioral
possibilities between would-be combatants.
As an example of a seldom-seen phenomenon – the
multiply-authored act of narrative history – How Reason
Lost Its Mind can itself be viewed as something of an
experimental chimera. The book’s broad base of source
material and sometimes idiosyncratic approach to argu-
ment testify to the research interests that each of the six
authors bring to the project. At the same time, the writers –
and their editors – pull off the not insignificant feat of
weaving six, individual voices into a coherent, lively and
fast-moving whole.
Sometimes, indeed, the pace of the argument is too fast.
On more than one occasion the authors introduce impor-
tant terms without sufficiently explaining them. Game
theory, for instance, crops up throughout the book as a
key intellectual touchstone for many Cold War rational-
ists, but what the authors mean by the term is not defined
until page 133. ‘‘Bayesian statistics’’ and ‘‘Bayesianism’’,
meanwhile, both get their own entries in the book’s index,
but are never explained. Other examples of this habit occur
throughout the text, which will make portions of the book
rough going for readers who are not familiar with the
material. Readers who are familiar, meanwhile, might well
desire more precise detail to make the authors’ claims
clearer.
Still, one imagines that this minor shortcoming is the
result of trying to accommodate an overabundance of
interesting material to a readable number of pages. The
overall effect of the book is like that of an animated
conversation between voluble interlocutors – one which
sometimes runs away with itself, but is always strange and
fascinating. More to the point, How Reason Almost Lost Its
Mind advances a provocative argument about a period of
American social science that is now attracting increasing
and well-justified attention. Historians of post war social
science will certainly read this book with profit, as
will scholars of the history of thought and, indeed, more
generally of scientific practice in the United States.

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