REVIEWS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Prologue: Schumpeter, Hayek, and Popper

Part I. Rational Policy Analysis and the National Security State
Chapter 1. Managing the National Security State: Decision Technologies and Policy Science

Part II. Rational Choice Theory in American Social Science
Chapter 2. Kenneth J. Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values
Chapter 3. James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock's Public Choice Theory
Chapter 4. William Riker's Positive Political Theory
Chapter 5. Rational Choice and Capitalist Democracy

Part III. Antecedents to Rational Choice Theory
Chapter 6. Adam Smith's System of Natural Liberty
Chapter 7. Rational Mechanics, Marginalist Economics, and Rational Choice

Part IV. Rational Choice Liberalism Today
Chapter 8. Consolidating Rational Choice Liberalism, 1970-2000

Epilogue: From the Panopticon to the Prisoner's Dilemma
Notes
Bibliography
Index

EXCERPT
CHAPTER 1. Managing the National Security State: Decision Technologies and Policy Science

About six or seven years ago there was a "technological breakthrough" at The RAND Corporation in the art of doing Systems Analysis.

--Herman Kahn

[I]n the last few years war and defense have immensely stimulated the search for social as well as technological devices of social control, as is illustrated by the work of the RAND Corporation.

--Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom

A particular problem for modern democracies... is the predominant response they give to their electoral constituencies.... The classical liberal model of the democratic state, therefore, is not particularly reassuring at present technology levels.

--Paul Hammond

Part 1 of this book investigates the critical role of the archetypal Cold War institution, the RAND Corporation, in the post -World War II emergence of rational choice. Understanding the forces leading to the development of rational choice theory requires contextualizing its interrelationships with the imperatives of the Cold War national security state. It is not possible to draw a line clearly separating rational policy analysis and rational choice theory. Game theory was rescued from academic oblivion by its active development at RAND for its potential relevance to problems of nuclear strategy. Kenneth Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values was inspired by a research question pertaining to predicting collective outcomes for the Soviet Union. William Riker's ambitious program of positive political theory was partially inspired by two RAND theorists' research into a mathematically defined "power index."

In this first part I tell the story of how systems analysis and rational policy analysis, much of it originating at RAND, became an accepted standard of public decisionmaking, first at the U.S. Department of Defense and then throughout government via Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs. The incursion of rational decision technologies into the halls of power occurred against the backdrop of the missile gap, the Sputniks, and John F. Kennedy's presidential election. The extraordinary impact of these decision technologies on actual government practice is clear in Senator Henry Jackson's 1968-69 congressional hearings into the change in public decision procedures effected by RAND's policy analysis. A decade later, the influence and institutionalization of these tools spread even further as the professional schools of leading universities, such as Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, reorganized their structures and curricula around RAND-style policy analysis.

These new rational decision technologies constitute a "regime of knowledge production." This phrase is used to refer to how the formation of these tools and concepts led to a far-reaching and comprehensive system for defining appropriate beliefs and actions. Participation in this system was controlled by a new policy elite. These leading figures-- including Thomas Schelling, Charles Hitch, Howard Raiffa, Henry Rowen, and Alain Enthoven--went from their humble origins as contractors for the U.S. Air Force to controlling enormous budgets,influential departments of government and universities, and key federal initiatives affecting all Americans. It was their ability to redefine "democratic decisionmaking" to suit their agenda, using these analytic tools, that made such a breathtaking rise possible. Once this comprehensive regime came into place, it gained de facto legitimacy through ubiquity rather than proven merit.

Rational choice theory as a social scientific method and rational policy analysis as a decision technology share key theorists, core ideas, institutional venues, and sources of funding. Any attempt to understand the phenomenal success of rational choice theory within the social sciences must acknowledge the interconnections between rational choice as a decision tool for government policy initiatives and as an explanatory device for predicting the outcomes of human action.

Soon after taking office, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara held his first press conference. It was to be one of the shortest on record, consisting of only one question. A reporter asked, "Mr. Secretary, you've been here three or four weeks. The missile gap obviously was an important element in the campaign and a major security issue. What are you doing about it?" McNamara replied, "Well, you're quite right, it was important [and] it is important. I focused on that, and I've determined there wasn't a missile gap, or if there is, it's in our favor." In McNamara's own words, reporters "broke the doors down" running to call their editors. The next day's headlines screamed, "McNamara Denies Missile Gap," and the Republican Senate majority leader called for his resignation. Despite this complete reversal of official U.S. government position and the resulting public outcry, every policy idea based on the belief in the (nonexistent) Soviet missile advantage was implemented over the next seven years. This chapter explores the processes of knowledge production and political interaction that manufactured the "gap" in the public mind and public record, initiated a sea change in American national security policy whose rationale originated in the missile gap, and empowered a new policy elite whose authority was grounded in the supposed objectivity of rational policy analysis.

The story of RAND, the Cold War, the missile gap, and McNamara's wholesale reorganization of the Pentagon traditionally has been told as one of decisive response to overwhelming imperative. In the late 1950s, RAND scientists in their Santa Monica ivory tower discover a critical vulnerability in the defensive posture of America. Their findings result in a top secret government report, detailing an unsuspected strength in the Soviet adversary--a missile gap. The unresponsive Eisenhower administration tries to ignore the gap, but the dramatic launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik I forces it into action.

I contend, however, that the Cold War struggle was not so much one of enemy pitted against enemy in a ferocious to-the-death struggle as it was a fight over which interpretation of Cold War events would prevail and would serve as the foundation for determining action. Here the drama is recast such that, rather than seeing the United States as a unified actor on a bipolar world stage, it is an internal U.S. struggle among interested parties vying to gain control over defining the Cold War. Those whose interpretation of events were accepted had the power to direct policy. Thus, ironically, the actual Cold War drama lay in the manufacture of the "Cold War" itself, as policymakers sought to convince the American nation of its peril and to orchestrate policy reforms in order to stave off the perceived threat.

Close attention to the historical record discloses a concatenation of actions that demands this alternate narrative. The Cold War drama, though acted out in the Pentagon, executive branch, and the halls of Congress, was scripted and themed within the walls of the RAND Corporation, America's first military think tank. In the first section of this chapter, I consider how RAND developed its unique product, "systems analysis," which McNamara later would use to gain control over the Pentagon. I also sketch out the alliances behind RAND and the Ford Foundation, both of which were built on a steadfast commitment to a rationally managed technocratic society. In such a society, "objective" experts made difficult policy decisions outside the fray of partisan politics characteristic of legislative democracy. In the second section, I relate how President Eisenhower invited H. Rowan Gaither Jr., chairman of the board for both RAND and the Ford Foundation, to head a committee to study the American civil defense program. Gaither's efforts resulted in the top secret "Gaither Report," which was the source behind the fallacious assertion of a missile gap between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Gaither Report also outlined a plan for a tremendous defense buildup and wholesale reform of the department of defense using the tools of rational management. In the third section, I consider how McNamara successfully established control over the U.S. armed forces by using the epistemological leverage afforded by RAND's systems analysis. Then, in the chapter's penultimate section, I trace the implementation of RAND's decision theoretic tools first in the department of defense,and then later throughout the federal government via President Johnson's Great Society programs, re-sulting in the establishment of a knowledge production regime that would revolutionize government policymaking in the United States. This regime of knowledge production, with McNamara as its chauffeur, shifted governmental decisionmaking from a legislative-democratic platform to a policy sciences model that depended on claims of objectivity and scientific rigor for its authority and legitimacy. A closing section argues that rational policy analysis and rational choice theory in the social sciences both share origins in the toolbox of decision theoretic methods developed at RAND in the 1950s.

The history that emerges is relevant to broader discussions of the tension between the ideal of liberal democracy and the tendency of elites to develop means to control societal decisionmaking processes. Since its inception as a social form predating the French and American Revolutions, and going back to at least the British civil wars,the drama of democratization has in part been about conveying the appearance of inclusion while designing means to retain actual control over decisionmaking in the hands of a social elite. This impetus for elite control has had various guises,from aristocratic resistance to the retrenchment of liberalism on the part of a newly successful bourgeoisie in late-nineteenth-century Britain. But increasingly, as democracy became recognized as the legitimate form of government among Western nation-states and the universal franchise of adult citizens became widespread following World War I, a new form of struggle emerged,evident in the United States, to retake the reins of authority in order to neutralize the unruly potential of mass democratic politics. Guy Alchon makes this argument with respect to the early decades of the twentieth century when American philanthropies and government insiders formed an alliance with "objective" and "impartial" social scientists who were empowered with control over social decisions outside the auspices of democratic politics. This chapter similarly argues that following World War II an alliance was forged between philanthropies (in this case the Ford Foundation), the business community, and scientific policy analysts. This alliance resulted in the development of rational policy analysis, which functioned as a means to relocate the authority for policy decisions from elected officials to a supposedly "objective" technocratic elite.

Systematic Knowledge Production

The story begins at the Santa Monica-based RAND Corporation which, in the 1950s, became the think tank icon of Cold War America. In its halls, nuclear strategists thought the unthinkable as they came to terms with thermonuclear war. RAND physicist Herman Kahn would be memorialized in American folklore as the title character in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, subtitled How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. To the Soviets, RAND represented "[a]n American Academy of Death and Destruction."

Project RAND (1946-48)

In the wake of World War II, RAND grew out of the joint vision on the parts of General Henry "Hap" Arnold of the U.S. Army Air Force and executive leaders at the Douglas Aircraft Company. General Arnold anticipated that with the conclusion of the war, scientists and technical experts would flock back to universities and industry; he was eager to maintain and perpetuate the symbiosis of scientific talent and defense needs that had been organized to fight the war. Since it seemed doubtful that researchers would give up civilian status, this inventive plan required the creation of a new institutional format conducive to harnessing technical expertise for Air Force ends. Frank Collbohm, assistant to the vice president of engineering at Douglas, whose wartime experience included stints at MIT's Radiation Laboratory and at the Manhattan Project, similarly worried that the exodus of technical competence from the military arena would prove crippling. In his mind, America might have "won the military campaign, [but] we've lost the war." In early 1946 "Project RAND" was hatched: the idea was to fund a autonomous division within Douglas Aircraft that would function quasi-independently from both Douglas and the Air Force, but would be devoted to researching Air Force concerns.

Arnold made available $10 million of Army Air Force funds, Donald Douglas acquiesced to housing the effort, and Collbohm accepted the mantle of leadership. As a pet project of General Arnold's, RAND was structured from the start to have access high in the Air Force chain of command. Collbohm initially reported directly to General Curtis LeMay, future head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC). The original RAND research team numbered four, and functioned as a separate division within Douglas Aircraft. By 1948, project RAND would grow to have 255 employees and an annual operating budget of $3.5 million. The organization was still funded from Arnold's original allocation, and occupied offices in an old Santa Monica newspaper building. All RAND researchers required security clearances, but in the early days following the war, researchers brought preexisting clearances from previous positions.

According to RAND's charter, "Project RAND is a continuing program of scientific study and research on the broad subject of air warfare with the object of recommending to the Air Force preferred methods, techniques, and instrumentalities for this purpose." Collbohm, an electrical engineer by training, had a solid hardware track record including contributions to aircraft design and radar development. His roving and eclectic assignments during World War II led him to have an expansive vision for RAND. It was from the start envisioned as broadly interdisciplinary, and designed to consider sweeping questions of military strategy through the lens of a hardware orientation. It was also crucial to the RAND mythos that the institution jealously guard its intellectual independence from its patron. Hence RAND was based three thousand miles away from the demanding Washington environment, and RAND researchers took on "voluntary projects" rather than assignments. RAND strove to meet Air Force needs, but did so on its own terms, developing its own strategies for setting up research agendas. From the Air Force's perspective, the arrangement and the objectives underlying it looked different. General LeMay recollected that "[w]e didn't have any of the tools . . . necessary to conduct a program leading to intercontinental missiles and supersonic airplanes . . . [s]o, the gimmick was to contract with a nonprofit organization to accomplish the task, and pay their bills, and let them go out in the open market and hire the talent they needed at the going rate."

RAND's first large-scale study, undertaken at the request of General LeMay, then deputy chief of Air Staff for Research and Development, is telling of the client-patron relationship between RAND and the Air Force. In early 1946, it came to LeMay's attention that the U.S. Navy was drawing up a proposal to the Joint Research and Development Board advocating the potential role of the Navy in space satellite development. Motivated by interservice rivalry, LeMay presented RAND with the task of investigating the technical feasibility of various space satellite systems. When the competing Navy and Air Force proposals were presented to the board in 1947, it favored the Air Force proposal, finding its analysis to be more comprehensive than the Navy's, and subsequently terminated the Navy's foray into satellite development.

RAND had served its patron well: the outcome of the satellite study demonstrated that RAND could provide authoritative clout to Air Force initiatives, enabling them to prevail in policy venues. Attentive to this role, one RAND researcher recounted how Winston Churchill had similarly used "Operational Research" in order to exert his will over military bureaucracies during World War II, using such analysis as an authoritative edge over entrenched leaders. Repeatedly over time, RAND studies would be deemed a success or failure by the simple metric of whether they furthered Air Force weapons procurement and strategic agendas.

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