Lists of Wartime Operational Research Groups June 24, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.4 comments
As far as I know, no one has ever assembled a list of all World War II-era operational research groups. Some of this information is available in published resources; other bits are from archival research. Bullet points under particular groups represent changes of name. Dates can be a little fuzzy, since they can refer to when a group was formally approved, or when it started work; or when one or two people arrived at a location, only later to grow and be formally recognized. I have tried to date things to when work actually began, but have probably not always been consistent in this. Some form of this list will likely appear in my book, but as a general service in the meantime, here it is:
McCumber and “Rational Choice Philosophy” June 21, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Alex Abella, G. W. F. Hegel, Hans Reichenbach, Howard Raiffa, John McCumber, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Margaret Thatcher, Oskar Morgenstern, R. Duncan Luce, S. M. Amadae, W. V. O. Quine
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I often say that the first college-level history course I ever took was the history of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany with Peter Hayes at Northwestern University. However, on Monday I was reminded that my first history course there was really in the philosophy department: History of Philosophy, II: Medieval Philosophy* with John McCumber. McCumber, who it turns out studies the philosophy of the German tradition, had a piece in the New York Times’ The Stone series called “The Failure of Rational Choice Philosophy” which wanders into what has come to be my favorite historical terrain.
In his piece, McCumber begins by citing Hegel to the effect that “history is idea-driven,” and then makes the common historical and critical move of connecting the rise of theories of rational decision with the present dominance of a market-oriented polity, authorized by a selfish ethics implicit to a purportedly neutral analytical framework. In another move that is itself common enough to have been brilliantly parodied by the Simpsons in 1994, McCumber identifies the RAND Corporation (est. 1946) as the key vector for the translation of intellectual work into the realm of political and social ideas “(aided in the crossing, to be sure, by the novels of another Rand—Ayn)”:
Functionaries at RAND quickly expanded the theory from a tool of social analysis into a set of universal doctrines that we may call ‘rational choice philosophy.’
Schabas on Economics and the Engineering Mentality June 15, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Book Club.Tags: David Ricardo, John Maynard Keynes, Leon Walras, Margaret Schabas, Max Weber, Milton Friedman, Richard M. Goodwin, William Stanley Jevons
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The central argument of Margaret Schabas’s The Natural Origins of Economics (2005) is that, over the course of the 19th century, economic thought abandoned links to natural science and began to concentrate on the object of “the economy” which was perceived as being purely social in character. In a previous post, I observed that Schabas makes the argument well, but that it remained unclear that nature was ever central to economic thought, and thus it was unclear why a shift away from nature should be a key concern in assembling a history of economics.
I think the best case to be made is that Enlightenment-era political economy attempted to establish explanations for a diverse set of perceived phenomena, which would attribute them to the interplay of basic processes. As Chris’s posts on this blog illustrate so nicely, this project continued through the 19th century in literatures spanning political economy, history, ethnography, and biology. However, the analysis of constrained but precisely defined economic phenomena as products of patterns of human thought and choice branched off from this project in a process playing out from David Ricardo (1772-1823), to the analyses of Léon Walras (1834-1910) and William Stanley Jevons* (1842-1924), to the revolt of the social science of Max Weber and others (1864-1920) against the German “Historical School”. What Schabas calls the “denaturalization of the economic order” is certainly a part of that process, but it is far from its defining characteristic.
Schabas does not go into great depth about her reasons for placing the question of nature at the center of her story, but she does offer some brief hints. (more…)
Margaret Schabas on the Concept of Nature in Economic Thought June 6, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Book Club, History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Adam Smith, Carl Linnaeus, Christopher Lawrence, David Hume, David Ricardo, Francois Quesnay, John Stuart Mill, Margaret Schabas, Maurice Dobb, Montesquieu, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, Victor Mirabeau
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In my first post on the need for historical studies of the relationship between scientific and economic thought, I was greatly remiss in not discussing a scholar who has done a great deal to develop and organize work in exactly this area: Margaret Schabas of the UBC philosophy department. Thankfully, a quick reference by Tiago Mata over at History of Economics Playground set me aright. For a first pass through the existing literature, I’d like to take a look at her book, The Natural Origins of Economics (2005).
The book is a critical-intellectual history. As an intellectual history, it sticks to an analysis of the published works of (mainly) canonical authors. Where a straight intellectual history might recount the arguments that historical authors explicitly made, critical-intellectual histories draw out continuities and breaks over time in authors’ lines and methods of argumentation. Like many intellectual historians, Schabas is mindful of detailed arguments in the secondary literature, and does a good job of acknowledging, consolidating, communicating, and building on the gains of that literature.
Schabas argues that where 18th-century philosophers of political economy understood their subject to connect deeply to nature and natural philosophy, economics began to explicitly frame itself as a science of peculiarly social phenomena following John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848), the rise of the idea of “the economy” as an object of study, and the rise of neoclassical economics in the late-19th century.
Going SEESHOPping June 1, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Andrew Pickering, Bruno Latour, Harry Collins, Rob Evans
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When I first started EWP in 2008, I labored under the misapprehension that historians of science were not only interested in the details of arguments taking place in other areas of science studies, but that those details actually played a large part in setting historiographical priorities. In that spirit, I did an eight-part Q&A with Harry Collins and Rob Evans over their new “third wave of science studies” project, Studies of Expertise and Experience (SEE).
I first encountered the early SEE papers when I was finishing up work on my dissertation. Then and now, I have found traditional science studies models to be unhelpful in untangling the methods and sources of legitimacy in the “sciences of policy” that I study. SEE seemed to be closer to the mark. I would not go so far as to say that I have ever been particularly invested in the SEE program, or that I use its ideas actively. It has a lot of components — such as debating the use of “hawk-eye” technology in tennis, or playing “imitation games”, or developing a deep well of analytical concepts — that are beyond the pale of what I do as a historian. However, I do view SEE as compatible with my historical work, and was therefore eager to do a bit of promotion, since I still thought if historians were not very united by interlinking their research projects, they were united by conceptual concerns that informed their research and writing.
I now believe that historians’ interest in conceptual debates is not actually very deep either. These debates seem to play a vaguely inspirational role, more a matter of footnotes and casual conversation than real engagement. To my mind this isn’t a huge tragedy, because I believe it is a lack of synthetic work rather than a lack of conceptual resources that most constrains historical work today. Still, I remain intrigued by the lack of any real historical component to the SEE program. And so I am currently typing up a paper on this subject to present at the Fifth International Workshop on Studies of Expertise and Experience (SEESHOP5) in Cardiff, the weekend of June 10.
Will Thomas
Christopher Donohue
