How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind
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How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind
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Author : Paul Erickson
language : en
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Release Date : 2013-11-22
How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind written by Paul Erickson and has been published by University of Chicago Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2013-11-22 with History categories.
In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences—psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others—and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people—Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others—and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a “Cold War rationality.” Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality—optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical—in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy. The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.
The Decisionist Imagination
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Author : Daniel Bessner
language : en
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Release Date : 2018-10-19
The Decisionist Imagination written by Daniel Bessner and has been published by Berghahn Books this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2018-10-19 with History categories.
In the decades following World War II, the science of decision-making moved from the periphery to the center of transatlantic thought. The Decisionist Imagination explores how “decisionism” emerged from its origins in prewar political theory to become an object of intense social scientific inquiry in the new intellectual and institutional landscapes of the postwar era. By bringing together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, this volume illuminates how theories of decision shaped numerous techno-scientific aspects of modern governance—helping to explain, in short, how we arrived at where we are today.
What Reason Promises
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Author : Wendy Doniger
language : en
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Release Date : 2016-06-20
What Reason Promises written by Wendy Doniger and has been published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2016-06-20 with Philosophy categories.
This collection demonstrates the range of approaches that some of the leading scholars of our day take to basic questions at the intersection of the natural and human worlds. The essays focus on three interlocking categories: Reason stakes a bigger territory than the enclosed yard of universal rules. Nature expands over a far larger region than an eternal category of the natural. And history refuses to be confined to claims of an unencumbered truth of how things happened.
The Invention Of Design
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Author : Maggie Gram
language : en
Publisher: Hachette UK
Release Date : 2025-06-03
The Invention Of Design written by Maggie Gram and has been published by Hachette UK this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2025-06-03 with Design categories.
From a brilliant cultural historian, “a secret history of the twentieth century” (Louis Menand) told through the story of design and its utopian promises Design has penetrated every dimension of contemporary society, from classrooms to statehouses to corporate boardrooms. It’s seen as a kind of mega-power, one that can solve all our problems and elevate our experiences to make a more beautiful, more functional world. But there’s a backstory here. In The Invention of Design, designer and historian Maggie Gram investigates how, over the twentieth century, our economic hopes, fears, and fantasies shaped the idea of “design”—then repeatedly redefined it. Nearly a century ago, resistance to New Deal–era government intervention helped transform design from an idea about aesthetics into one about function. And at century’s end, the dot-com crash brought us “design thinking”: the idea that design methodology can solve any problem, small or large. To this day, design captures imaginations as a tool for fixing market society’s broken parts from within, supposedly enabling us to thrive within capitalism’s sometimes violent constraints. A captivating critical history, The Invention of Design shows how design became the hero of many of our most hopeful stories—dreams, fantasies, utopias—about how we might better live in a modern world.
Think Tank Aesthetics
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Author : Pamela M. Lee
language : en
Publisher: MIT Press
Release Date : 2020-03-17
Think Tank Aesthetics written by Pamela M. Lee and has been published by MIT Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2020-03-17 with Art categories.
How the approaches and methods of think tanks—including systems theory, operational research, and cybernetics—paved the way for a peculiar genre of midcentury modernism. In Think Tank Aesthetics, Pamela Lee traces the complex encounters between Cold War think tanks and the art of that era. Lee shows how the approaches and methods of think tanks—including systems theory, operations research, and cybernetics—paved the way for a peculiar genre of midcentury modernism and set the terms for contemporary neoliberalism. Lee casts these shadowy institutions as sites of radical creativity and interdisciplinary practice in the service of defense strategy. Describing the distinctive aesthetics that emerged from such institutions as the RAND Corporation, she maps the multiple and overlapping networks that connected nuclear strategists, mathematicians, economists, anthropologists, artists, designers, and art historians. Lee recounts, among other things, the decades-long colloquy between Albert Wohlstetter, a RAND analyst, and his former professor, the famous art historian Meyer Schapiro; the anthropologist Margaret Mead's deployment of innovative visual aids that recall midcentury abstract art; and the combination of cybernetics and modernist design in an “Opsroom” for the short-lived socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1970s Chile (and its restaging many years later as a work of art). Lee suggests that we think of these connections less as disciplinary border crossings than as colonization of the specific interests of arts by the approaches and methods of the sciences. Hearing the echoes of think tank aesthetics in today's pursuit of the interdisciplinary and in academia's science-infused justification of the humanities, Lee wonders what territory has been ceded in a laboratory approach to the arts.
Revisiting The Nazi Occult
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Author : Monica Black
language : en
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Release Date : 2015
Revisiting The Nazi Occult written by Monica Black and has been published by Boydell & Brewer this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2015 with History categories.
New collection of essays promising to re-energize the debate on Nazism's occult roots and legacies and thus our understanding of German cultural and intellectual history over the past century.
Age Of System
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Author : Hunter Heyck
language : en
Publisher: JHU Press
Release Date : 2015-09-01
Age Of System written by Hunter Heyck and has been published by JHU Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2015-09-01 with Science categories.
In the years after World War II, a new generation of scholars redefined the central concepts and practices of social science in America. Before the Second World War, social scientists struggled to define and defend their disciplines. After the war, “high modern” social scientists harnessed new resources in a quest to create a unified understanding of human behavior—and to remake the world in the image of their new model man. In Age of System, Hunter Heyck explains why social scientists—shaped by encounters with the ongoing “organizational revolution” and its revolutionary technologies of communication and control—embraced a new and extremely influential perspective on science and nature, one that conceived of all things in terms of system, structure, function, organization, and process. He also explores how this emerging unified theory of human behavior implied a troubling similarity between humans and machines, with freighted implications for individual liberty and self-direction. These social scientists trained a generation of decision-makers in schools of business and public administration, wrote the basic textbooks from which millions learned how the economy, society, polity, culture, and even the mind worked, and drafted the position papers, books, and articles that helped set the terms of public discourse in a new era of mass media, think tanks, and issue networks. Drawing on close readings of key texts and a broad survey of more than 1,800 journal articles, Heyck follows the dollars—and the dreams—of a generation of scholars that believed in “the system.” He maps the broad landscape of changes in the social sciences, focusing especially intently on the ideas and practices associated with modernization theory, rational choice theory, and modeling. A highly accomplished historian, Heyck relays this complicated story with unusual clarity.
The Politics Of Paradigms
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Author : George A. Reisch
language : en
Publisher: SUNY Press
Release Date : 2019-05-01
The Politics Of Paradigms written by George A. Reisch and has been published by SUNY Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2019-05-01 with History categories.
Uncovers long-ignored political themes—ideology, propaganda, mind control, and Orwellian history—at work within the pages of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The Politics of Paradigms shows that America’s most famous and influential book about science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions of 1962, was inspired and shaped by Thomas Kuhn’s political interests, his relationship with the influential cold warrior James Bryant Conant, and America’s McCarthy-era struggle to resist and defeat totalitarian ideology. Through detailed archival research, Reisch shows how Kuhn’s well-known theories of paradigms, crises, and scientific revolutions emerged from within urgent political worries—on campus and in the public sphere—about the invisible, unconscious powers of ideology, language, and history to shape the human mind and its experience of the world. “This book raises and explores important questions about the ideological background of some of the most important work in the philosophy of science in the twentieth century. It challenges conventional wisdom about the ideological neutrality of that work.” — Peter S. Fosl, editor of The Big Lebowski and Philosophy: Keeping Your Mind Limber with Abiding Wisdom
Armageddon And Paranoia
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Author : Rodric Braithwaite
language : en
Publisher: Profile Books
Release Date : 2017-09-21
Armageddon And Paranoia written by Rodric Braithwaite and has been published by Profile Books this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2017-09-21 with History categories.
A gripping account of the intense rivalry between Russia and the West, from bestselling author and former diplomat Rodric Braithwaite In 1945, the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Warfare was never the same again. Armageddon and Paranoia relates how the power of the atom was harnessed to produce weapons capable of destroying human civilisation, and what this has done to the world. There are few villains in this story: on both sides of the Iron Curtain, dedicated scientists cracked the secrets of nature while dutiful military men planned out possible manoeuvres and politicians wrestled with intolerable decisions. Patriotic citizens acquiesced to the idea that their country needed the ultimate means of defence. Some protested, citing the unanswerable question: what end could possibly be served by such fearsome means? None wanted to start a nuclear war, but all were paranoid about what the other side might do. The danger of annihilation - by accident or design - has never quite left the world. As fears about who controls the nuclear codes continue to make headlines, Rodric Braithwaite (author of bestsellers Moscow 1941 and Afgantsy) has painted a vivid and detailed portrait of this intense period in history - and its terrifying implications today.
After The Enlightenment
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Author : Nicolas Guilhot
language : en
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Release Date : 2017-04-24
After The Enlightenment written by Nicolas Guilhot and has been published by Cambridge University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2017-04-24 with History categories.
This is the first comprehensive intellectual history of political realism and international relations theory.