Michael Perelman wrote:
> The tie in to game theory is not direct, but it suggests a parallel
> trajectory in which liberal for social democratic people began to
> identify
> with power and the Pentagon.
Do you mean Arrow? This is connected to Lange and through this to the socialist calculation debate, no? I've argued before that this has nothing to do with the idea of planning implicit in Marx's conception of a community of "universally developed individuals". For one thing Marx's idea of the "good" life can't be captured by the idea of maximizing a "utility function"; Bentham, for Marx, is "a genius in the way of bourgeois stupidity. (Capital, vol. 1 [Penguin ed.], p. 759)"
A psychological connection to "game theory" is provided by the idea of a "plan" as a central planner completely controlling everything with a view to maximizing all individual "utility functions". (I believe their are modern ideas of "planning" in this sense which point to modern computer technology as making the ideas practicable.) This, I would have thought, was an expression of a psychologically rooted need to exercise omniscient, omnipotent control. As Mirowski points out, it's characteristic of many "machine dreamers" e.g. John Nash.
Ted