Where else have you written about the rand corporation?
Nowhere, just mentioned it in this thread twice. You can start with Soldiers of Reason by Alex Abella, though—it’s really rather biased against RAND, but has plenty of info.
There’s also an interesting-sounding title in the Wikipedia links, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism, but I haven’t read that one yet. Looks like it’ll be more helpful for my argument, judging by the name and the summary.
In Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy, S. M. Amadae tells the remarkable story of how rational choice theory rose from obscurity to become the intellectual bulwark of capitalist democracy. Amadae roots Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy in the turbulent post-World War II era, showing how rational choice theory grew out of the RAND Corporation’s efforts to develop a “science” of military and policy decisionmaking. But while the first generation of rational choice theorists—William Riker, Kenneth Arrow, and James Buchanan—were committed to constructing a “scientific” approach to social science research, they were also deeply committed to defending American democracy from its Marxist critics. Amadae reveals not only how the ideological battles of the Cold War shaped their ideas but also how those ideas may today be undermining the very notion of individual liberty they were created to defend.
Nowhere, just mentioned it in this thread twice. You can start with Soldiers of Reason by Alex Abella, though—it’s really rather biased against RAND, but has plenty of info.
There’s also an interesting-sounding title in the Wikipedia links, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism, but I haven’t read that one yet. Looks like it’ll be more helpful for my argument, judging by the name and the summary.
Oh, looks like its first 180 pages are on Google Books.