¹ Signal exceptions include Guilhot, Nicholas, After the Enlightenment: Political Realism and International Relations (Cambridge, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bell, Duncan, “Writing the World: Disciplinary History and Beyond,” International History 85/1 (2009), 3–22Google Scholar.

² Scarry, Elaine, Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing between Democracy and Doom (New York, 2014)Google Scholar; Tuck, Richard, Free Riding (Cambridge, MA, 2009)Google Scholar.

³ Schelling, Thomas C., The Strategy of Conflict, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA, 1980)Google Scholar. See also, for a pithy definition, Binmore, Ken, Rational Decisions (Princeton, 2009), 25Google Scholar.

⁴ For a general introduction to the problem of common knowledge see Dupuy, Jean-Pierre, “Common Knowledge, Common Sense,” Theory and Decision 27/1–2 (1989), 37–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The canonical statement is Lewis, David, Convention (Oxford, 2002), 52–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ For historical background see Moscati, Ivan, “How Economists Came to Accept Expected Utility Theory: The Case of Samuelson and Savage,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 30/2 (2016), 219–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Feduzi, Alberto, Runde, Jochen, and Zappia, Carlo, “De Finetti on Uncertainty,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 38/1 (2014), 1–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Savage, L. J., The Foundations of Statistics, 2nd ed. (New York, 1972)Google Scholar.

⁷ Bicchieri, Cristina, Rationality and Coordination (Cambridge, 1993), 8Google Scholar.

⁸ All of these assumptions are, of course, contestable. On the difficulties faced by the treatment of preferences in rational choice theory see Mandler, Michael, “A Difficult Choice in Preference Theory: Rationality Implies Completeness or Transitivity but Not Both,” in Millgram, Elijah, ed., Varieties of Practical Reasoning (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 373–402Google Scholar. On a critique of the assignment of numerical probabilities to events in decision making under uncertainty see Ellsberg, Daniel, Risk, Uncertainty, and Ambiguity (London and New York, 2001)Google Scholar.

⁹ On Newcomb's problem and the dispute between “causal” and “evidential” versions of decision theory see Nozick, Robert, Socratic Puzzles (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 45–84Google Scholar; Lewis, David, “Causal Decision Theory,” Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (New York, 1986), 305–37Google Scholar. The shunting aside of the question of causation in standard decision theory is of a piece with the attempted neutralization of the problem of oligopoly in neoclassical economics. Neoclassical theorists cling to the model of perfect competition because it allows them to treat prices as exogenous variables facing an actor in the marketplace. Whereas the problem of oligopolistic competition is necessarily indeterminate—as is true of many strategic situations—the assumption of perfect competition allows for formal modeling of equilibrium conditions in markets. Eventually, political scientists cottoned on to the benefits of this sleight of hand, and imported the assumption of perfectly competitive conditions into their treatment of collective action. For the full story, and a philosophical critique of this move, see Tuck, Free Riding.

¹⁰ Heyck, Hunter, Age of System: Understanding the Development of Modern Social Science (Baltimore, 2015)Google Scholar; Thomas, William, Rational Action: The Sciences of Policy in Britain and America, 1940–1960 (Cambridge, MA, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Ellsberg, Daniel, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (New York, 2017)Google Scholar.

¹² Erickson, Paul, Klein, Judy L., Daston, Lorraine, Lemov, Rebecca, Sturm, Thomas, and Gordin, Michael D., How Reason Nearly Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (Chicago, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ von Neumann, John and Morgenstern, Oskar, The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, sixtieth-anniversary edn (Princeton, 2007)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 83–118.

¹⁵ In Strategy of Conflict, Schelling presented an example of how a mixed game, involving elements of cooperation as well as conflict, has an unstable solution that can lead to a dramatic breakdown. A homeowner hears a noise at night, grabs her gun, and heads downstairs, where she encounters a burglar, who is also armed. Each prefers that the burglar withdraws with no shots fired: this is much preferred to either getting shot oneself (obviously) or having to shoot someone. Homeowner and burglar have a common interest in a peaceable solution. Will they achieve their common goal? Here the rationality of the agents would seem to militate against the preferred outcome. For suppose that the burglar thinks that the homeowner wants to shoot. Given that the results of a surprise attack are so catastrophic, the burglar therefore has a strong incentive to shoot first in “self-defense” (in scare quotes here because he has not been attacked, and never will be if he is first on the trigger). By the same token, however, the homeowner will be aware that the burglar may reason in this way, and so, even though the homeowner does not want to shoot, she now feels that she must strike first, also in “self-defense.” But in turn, the burglar will know that the homeowner may reason in this way, which means he must shoot because he thinks that the homeowner thinks that he thinks that the homeowner will shoot. And so on, without end. Here the fact that it is common knowledge among the homeowner and burglar that their choices are interdependent seems to give each of them infinitely many reasons to believe that the other will decide to shoot—and so good reason to shoot first.

¹⁶ For more detail see Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 207–54.

¹⁷ Ibid., 232.

¹⁸ Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine, 39.

¹⁹ Elster, Jon, Solomonic Judgements: Studies in the Limitations of Rationality (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar; Ostrom, Elinor, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bowles, Samuel and Gintis, Herbert, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution (Princeton, 2011)Google Scholar; Bowles, Samuel, The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens (New Haven, 2016)Google Scholar.

²⁰ Tuck, Free Riding, 19–29.

²¹ A point forcefully made in Bicchieri, Rationality and Coordination.

²² Amadae, S. M., Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago, 2003)Google Scholar.