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  • How to Think and Influence People in the American Cold War
  • Howard Brick (bio)
Paul Erickson, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, and Michael D. Gordin. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. viii + 259 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $28.28.
Jamie Cohen-Cole. The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 397pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $40.50.
Joy Rohde. Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013. 224pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95.

We will never agree on what we mean by the Cold War. The term may refer to U.S.–Soviet rivalry (in any of its long or short versions), to the U.S. policy of containment, to the sharp East/West division of Europe (1945–89), to the intersection of superpower contests with the torturous politics of decolonization—or all that combined, and more. The phrase works well enough in a book title, to be specified later in the text, but it lacks precision if assumed to mark a clearly bounded entity or to identify a causal force in history. When it appears as a modifier, it is always hard to know whether the object—for instance, “Cold War rationality”—was constituted by those events and forces we know as the Cold War, or whether it merely happened to emerge during the years when the Cold War also prevailed. What years were those, anyway? In the United States, “Cold War America” almost inevitably signals “the Fifties,” while we think the 1960s initiated the “unraveling of the Cold War consensus,” notwithstanding the ongoing Soviet-American contests through 1991. For the purposes of this essay, I will consider the years of the high Cold War to be 1948 through 1963. The books under review all place their central developments in that period, though their narratives of a particular mode of thought rising to prominence and then declining often stretch some decades beyond that time. [End Page 697]

Historians have moved far beyond simply identifying “Cold War culture” in terms of McCarthyism, conformity, and multiple metaphors of “containment,” as the subtler and diverse trends of the mid-century decades have come under the purview of careful archival research. The three works here are exemplary instances of this “new” Cold War intellectual and cultural history, even if they do not entirely escape the pitfalls of the old. They work generally within the parameters of the history of science; study the course of particular theories, disciplines, and institutions with great rigor; and disclose curious, contingent developments in the evolution of thought and culture that belie any stereotypical matching of complex ideas with political ideologies. All provide ample grounds for recognizing a good deal of irony in intellectual history.

How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind—a very effective collaboration among six writers of varying seniority but similarly high levels of sophistication—posits an ideal type of “Cold War rationality” (hereafter, “CWR”) that focused intellectual debate for a few decades after World War II. Across six articulated chapters exploring varied aspects of the “decision sciences,” the book charts what the authors see as a concerted effort “to articulate a pure rationality, valid independently of the problems to which it was applied, and therefore also valid for everyone and always” (p. 2). They distinguish such “rationality” from reason as previously understood (particularly by those systematizers who came before in the Enlightenment): the stringent terms of CWR called for fashioning a highly formal, abstract, and procedural standard of decision making, ideally algorithmic in character—that is, “a finite, well-defined set of rules to be applied unambiguously in specified settings” that could, by means of “simple, sequential steps” provide “optimal solutions to given problems” (pp. 29, 3–4). How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind makes a strong case that such an aspiration lay at the heart of military-linked research programs, particularly the development of linear programming around logistical problems like managing the Berlin airlift of 1948–49 and then the embrace...

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