How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality

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. ...