[Sci-tech-public] STS Circle, December 2 - S.M. Amadae (Please RSVP)

[STS]

STS Circle at Harvard
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S.M. Amadae
Ohio State University, Political Science

on
Imagining the Neoliberal Subject: Nuclear Deterrence and the Prisoner's Dilemma

Monday, December 2
12:15-2:00 pm
Maxwell Dworkin, 33 Oxford Street, Room 119

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Lunch is provided if you RSVP.
Please RSVP to sts<mailto:sts at hks.harvard.edu>@hks.harvard.edu<mailto:sts at hks.harvard.edu> by 5pm Wednesday, November 27.

Abstract: The first neoliberal subject, imagined using game theory, was the US Cold War national security state.  Defense intellectuals used rational deterrence theory to produce the confidence that thermonuclear weapons could provide security.  This incarnation of strategic rationality normalized hegemony, escalation dominance and coercive bargaining as the effective means to project American power.  By the 1970s, the strategic actor was adopted as the new subject of technoscientific governance.  This neoliberal agent, embroiled in the 2x2 matrix Prisoner’s Dilemma game, was used to model anarchy and the social contract.  Concurrent with elite skepticism about participatory democracy, trade unions, Keynesian economics, and public interest, game theory was used to envision a new world order.  Neoliberal capitalism substitutes winners and losers for the liberal reassurance that all will prosper; derives profit from arbitrage and risk management instead of production; and displaces a participatory public sphere with a civic epistemology of technocratic public policy.

Biography:  S.M. Amadae is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Ohio State University, and a Research Fellow in the Kennedy School of Government’s STS Program.  Amadae is the author of Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy:  The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism, which won the American Political Science Association’s J. David Greenstone book award in Politics and History in 2004, and is completing Rationalizing Hegemony:  Game Theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma Social Contract for Cambridge University Press.



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