Below are some interesting books I’ve read in 2021. Despite having a slow reading year (which we’ve probably all had), I’ve come up with a handful of suitable recommendations. The Open Society and Its Complexities argues that moral diversity can be socially beneficial. A Man of Misconceptions profiles a 17th century polymath caught between magical thinking and early scientific philosophy. Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy is a critical look at the origins of rational choice theory and its applications in the moral and social sciences.

Before getting to the list, I want to point you to Frank Ramsey, A Sheer Excess of Powers by Cheryl Misak which I reviewed earlier this year.

The Open Society and Its Complexities

Author: Gerald Gaus

Published: 2021

This book is an introduction to a view on complexity and moral diversity that Gaus calls New Diversity Theory. In a nutshell, this book (and New Diversity Theory in general) argues that genuine moral disagreement within bounds is socially beneficial. In some sense, this view is the moral and political analogue to Scott Page’s well-known work on diversity and problem solving. Or as Gaus puts it:

“Diversity, far from being the enemy of a society with a shared morality, can be an engine for it.”

This introduction is framed around analyzing “unsettling theses” about the (im)possibility of maintaining an open society put forth by Friedrich Hayek. To address these challenges, Gaus considers a wide range of evidence from anthropology, evolutionary theory, game theory, network science, moral and political philosophy, and so on.

Two arguments characterize the flavor of this book well. The first is that humans have not evolved to fit a particular sort of society. To support this, Gaus points to recent research from paleoanthropology suggesting that human evolution is much more complex than a move from egalitarian hunter-gatherer tribes to inequitable individualist societies. For instance, evidence from primates suggests that apparent egalitarianism may be masking more complex collections of social norms.

The second is that greater variance in willingness to cooperate with others when agreeing to moral norms can increase convergence. Gaus explores this with a multi-agent utility model where agents have preferences over both candidate moral norms and agreement with one or more peer groups. Through simulations, he finds that increasing diversity among conditional cooperators leads to faster and greater norm convergence. There is surely much more to explore with this model (see this article from last year’s list).

A few criticisms are worth noting. The breadth and variety of evidence can be a bit overwhelming. Additionally, it isn’t always clear on what the author intends by the open society, wavering between various notions. With regard to the physical copy, the OUP printing leaves much to be desired with its thin, translucent pages.

A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change

Author: John Glassie

Published: 2012

This book is a biography of Athanasius Kircher, a 17th century Jesuit priest that was somewhere between a boastful charlatan and an original, revolutionary thinker. Glassie follows Kircher’s autobiography as his main guide though providing much needed context along the way.

Throughout his long life, Kircher made numerous contributions to areas as far flung as music, medicine, magnetism, and theology. For instance, he posited that the plague was caused by microorganisms after observing “little worms” in the blood of those afflicted. Additionally, Kircher was a great synthesizer creating a (sometimes in-) coherent whole from disparate and often ancient sources. This sort of syncretism alongside his boastful nature led to outlandish claims and conjectures interspersed throughout his work (e.g. in Egyptology).

Kircher became the center of Jesuit scientific communication, a sort of counterpart to Marin Mersenne’s network. Kircher is also well known for many inventions such as the megaphone and operating a museum of curiosities in Rome. Like many of his time outside the circle of the new mechanical philosophy, Kircher was drawn to the esoteric and the occult such as natural magic and magnetism in particular.

Beyond being interesting in his own right, the book portrays Kircher as a thinker caught between the magical thinking of the past and the early scientific/mechanical thinking of the future. Importantly, these perspectives are not presented as a stark contrast but an interwoven transition (see here for more). Familiar faces such as Rene Descartes mocked Kircher on the one hand but often sought after and read his latest volume on the other. Glassie succeeds in keeping Kircher’s story interesting and entertaining while fairly portraying this period in the development of science.

I stumbled across this book while browsing Second Story Books in Washington DC.

Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism

Author: S. M. Amadae

Published: 2003

This book is a critical history of rational choice theory and its applications. Amadae argues that rational choice theory is the intellectual underpinning behind American public policy i.e. what others loosely refer to as neoliberalism or the Washington consensus.

Amadae identifies two origins of rational choice theory that intermingle in the post-war era. The first is operations research and systems analysis as it was developed and practiced at the RAND Corporation. In the 1950s and 1960s, RAND’s techniques were immensely influential and became heavily utilized by the Pentagon, the civil service and, soon after, much of corporate America.

The second is the debates around capitalist and socialist economic systems in the 1930s and 1940s. These debates raged over questions such as whether or not there are different economic laws for socialist systems than capitalist systems and whether or not there was a scientific or objective way to measure the “public good” or similar concepts used in welfare economics. Social choice theory was developed as a language for expressing any collective decision making whether market or committee, and Kenneth Arrow’s Impossibility theorem showed that there is in general no public utility function representing the public good.

Amadae traces these origins as they were adopted in academia and public policy such as public choice theory in political economics, positive political theory in political science, and various social contract theories in political philosophy. Each topic receives a comprehensive survey of its intellectual roots and themes rather than a technical presentation of its material. For a more math-focused survey, see Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on political philosophy as it focused on the work of John Rawls and the subsequent revival of social contract theory which largely was developed in the language of rational choice theory.