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7 - Core Wars

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Philip Mirowski
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame, Indiana
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Summary

INHUMAN, ALL TOO INHUMAN

“Freedom of the will” – that is the expression for the complex state of delight of the person exercising volition, who commands and at the same times identifies himself with the executor of the order – who, as such, enjoys also the triumph over obstacles, but thinks within himself that it is really his will itself that overcame them. In this way the person exercising volition adds the feelings of delight of his successful executive instruments, the useful “under-wills” or under-souls – indeed our body is but a social structure composed of many souls – to his feelings of delight as commander. L'effet c'est moi. What happens here is what happens in every well-constructed and happy commonwealth; namely, the governing class identifies itself with the successes of the commonwealth.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Once the nascent postwar neoclassical orthodoxy had divaricated out-ward from Cowles and Chicago and MIT to the rest of the nation and beyond, the garden-variety negative reaction to these doctrines was that they were too “methodologically individualist,” too solipsistic, or, if you happened to be put off from the rhetoric surrounding the formalism, too “selfish.” On any given Saturday night, so the scuttlebutt went, it would invariably be the neoclassical economist who would be the last to offer to pay for a round of drinks, and the first to insist that everyone get separate checks. Many postwar economists wore these epithets as badges of honor, testimony to their thick skins and their though-minded attitudes toward the bitter truth. They had learned a thing or two from RAND about “thinking the unthinkable.”

Type
Chapter
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Machine Dreams
Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science
, pp. 437 - 516
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2001

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  • Core Wars
  • Philip Mirowski, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
  • Book: Machine Dreams
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511613364.007
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  • Core Wars
  • Philip Mirowski, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
  • Book: Machine Dreams
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511613364.007
Available formats
×

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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Core Wars
  • Philip Mirowski, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
  • Book: Machine Dreams
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511613364.007
Available formats
×