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Paul Erickson , Judy L. Klein , Lorraine Daston , Rebecca Lemov , Thomas Sturm and Michael D. Gordin , How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality . Chicago and London : The University of Chicago Press , 2013. Pp. viii + 259. ISBN 978-0-226-04663-1 . £24.50 (hardback).
How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind is a collaborative effort of six authors, with its origins in a workshop held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin in 2010. The book is dedicated to tracing Cold War rationality as a specific intellectual formation in a distinct historical context represented by specific actors. The volume sets out to understand the Cold War as a distinct period in the history of science, specifically 'a chapter in the long history of reason' that was characterized by the prevalence of a distinct form of rationality (p. 7).
How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind is a jointly authored book comprising consecutively numbered chapters rather than being presented as a collection of individual contributions. As the volume's main aims are to write the biography of Cold War rationality and to show how this specific style of thinking became persuasive and pervasive in a wide range of scientific disciplines, the chapters mainly focus on situating individual scientists, their...