I was recently asked for reading suggestions about the world of “Cold War rationality” — e.g the interrelated academic, military, and cultural environments we associate with game theory, systems science, simulations, and broadly “Dr. Strangelove things.” I came up with a quick list for them that I decided to share here.
This quick list is heavily biased towards intellectual history — theory over practice — and broad overviews rather than specific topics.
Journal articles
- Gilman, Nils. “The Cold War as intellectual force field.” Modern Intellectual History 13, no. 2 (2016): 507-523.
- Freedman, Lawrence. “Social science and the Cold War.” Journal of Strategic Studies 38, no. 4 (2015): 554-574.
- Engerman, David C. “Social science in the Cold War.” Isis 101, no. 2 (2010): 393-400.
Books (single author)
- Edwards, Paul N. The closed world: Computers and the politics of discourse in Cold War America. MIT Press, 1996.
- Lemov, Rebecca, Thomas Sturm, Michael D. Gordin, Judy L. Klein, and Lorraine Daston. How reason almost lost its mind: The strange career of Cold War rationality. University of Chicago Press, 2019.
- Heyck, Hunter. Age of system: Understanding the development of modern social science. JHU Press, 2015.
Edited compilations/special issues/talks
- Solovey, Mark, & Cravens, Hamilton (Eds). Cold War social science: knowledge production, liberal democracy, and human nature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
- Boldyrev, Ivan., & Kirtchik, Olessia (Eds). “Social and human sciences across the Iron Curtain.” History of the Human Sciences, 29, no. 5 (2016).
- Edge, David. “Science and the Cold War,” Social Studies of Science, 31, no. 2 (2001).