The Decisionist Imagination by Bessner Daniel Guilhot Nicolas

Author:Bessner, Daniel,Guilhot, Nicolas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2019-12-07T16:00:00+00:00

From Operations Research to Decision Theory

Since the more conventional history of neoclassical rational choice theory, forged at RAND and the Cowles Commission, is better known than our previous thumbnail sketches, we will opt to dispense with its summary here. However, the fact that the Cowles economists were almost exclusively market socialists, and developed their decision theories of rational choice in order to refute Hayek and the Neoliberal Thought Collective, is the indispensable starting point of any comprehensive history of “the decision.”

Postwar Americans were desperate to be seen to be refuting the trope that democracy led to Nazism, and by extension Schmittian decisionism, through subordination of the act of the decision itself to a framework of science-like algorithms. As our editors have argued, “generations of postwar social scientists embraced a form of technocratic politics in which decisions were made by systems of equations, not people.” What has not been appreciated, as yet, is the extent to which the return of the repressed happened first in military research, of which operations research during World War II was the exemplar, and then spread throughout the rest of the social sciences during the Cold War.47 What the military had thought it was paying for at RAND and the ONR was a science of war and planning; what it got was a science of rational choice. My argument will be that the rise of decision theory was first and foremost an expression of a conscious rejection of a charismatic construction of leadership and rationality, best exemplified by Schmitt, at first within the military itself, and then, with a lag, in the social sciences. The success of the army was no longer attributed to the brilliance of a few top brass or elitist esprit de corps; it was due rather to the fact that it was a smooth, well-oiled, cybernetic feedback mechanism: the very icon of rationality. Nuclear strategy was portrayed as a series of games played out on computers. The average citizen and the market participant alike would be portrayed as coming equipped with a natural algorithmic rationality, if unfortunately perhaps bereft of wisdom; political democracy and market purchases would be the public manifestations of that rationality. The rise of the computer out of the very same research units that first produced operations research cemented the connections. In other words, pace Giocoli, “decision theory” was not an obvious extrapolation of prewar themes in economics, however much there abided certain similarities in the mathematics; instead, it was the utter repudiation of pre-World War II social science altogether. Rationality stopped being about actual human reasons altogether, just as Lorraine Daston has suggested, and was recast as mere transitivity and consistency of unexplained preferences, under the joint aegis of logic and cybernetics. The major contribution of the economists was to make it seem as if there had been continuity within scientific economics, where in fact, there had been drastic rupture.

The historian Hunter Heyck has given the deepest explanation of this phase of the American reconstruction of “rationality.”48 It

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