Value, sign, and social structure: the ‘game’ metaphor and modern social science

Abstract

This exploratory paper, part of continued work on the history of game theory, seeks to illustrate certain links between von Neumann's theory of games and contemporaneous ideas in other fields. In particular, we claim that the emergence of the analytical metaphor of the ‘game’ in economics can be viewed as part of a general reconceptualization of theory in a range of disciplines. That methodological reconstitution may be described as the emergence of a Structuralist view, an approach to theorizing which treated its object – be that a text, a kinship arrangement, or an economy – as a self-contained system, with its own internal logic, subject to its own ‘laws’. In particular, individual texts, or observed social and economic arrangements, are now viewed as variations on an underlying logical theme, on a structural invariant. The latter is to be uncovered, in the case of linguistics, through the analysis of phonemes; in kinship analysis, through the rules governing the exchange of women because of the incest taboo; in von Neumann and Morgensterns game theory, through the possibilities for equilibrium coalition formation, based on the stable set. There thus emerged a tendency, across the intellectual spectrum, towards seeing things in combinatorialterms. Theoretical coherence was to be found in examining how objects ‘held together’ rather than analysing where they ‘came from’: nineteenth-century concerns with history, evolution and individual psychology give way to a distinctly modern emphasis on synchronic, formal structure, on analogical reasoning. Atomism gave way to holism, and formal elegance superceded immediate empirical content. Recourse to the metaphor of the ‘game’ was constitutive of this shift, which we examine by referring to Saussures General Course in Linguistics, to Formalism in mathematics and literary analysis, to Lévi-Strauss's analysis of kinship and myth, and to von Neumann and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour.