As I have several times mentioned, I have been working with the Society for Philosophy and Culture in Canada, and in particular with Michael Hemmingsen, a doctoral student at McMaster, to convert some of my books into e-books and make them available on Amazon.com and other sites. I thought it might be a good idea to offer my early unpublished book, The Rhetoric of Deterrence, in that format, and yesterday I spent most of the day proofreading the text, correcting a number of typos, and in general getting it ready. When I got past the first part of the book, which is not at all bad, I discovered to my dismay and embarrassment that the rest of it what I had written is really rather jejune and unimpressive. Much humbled, I decided to cancel the project, and move on to other titles. The principal problem is that when I wrote that book, in the summer of 1962, I knew very little about the formal development of Game Theory, and hence wrote a whole lot of stuff that I would not now want to put my name to.
The central idea of the book is, I think, correct, viz., that putatively value-neutral modes of formal argument in the social sciences often play an ideological role, covertly advancing substantive [and suspicious] policy proposals in the guise of rigorous objective analysis. I have returned to this insight a number of times, in my critiques of Nozick and Rawls and in my reading of the central arguments of Marx. But it would do me no credit and lend very little weight to that thesis to offer so unsatisfactory an exposition of it as I found in the second half of my long-forgotten manuscript.
Oh well, sic transit gloria mundi.
