James Madison, Game Theorist

My post today at Law & Liberty

I wrote a short response over at L&L to a critique of game theoretic analyses of the Constitution:

At least since Edmund Burke, the right has looked askance at mixing mathematics and politics. The French revolutionaries and philosophes, with their elegantly geometric counties and their 10-hour days and their Year Zeroes, were trying to squeeze the unruly contours of human nature into their godlessly oversimplified concepts. But out of the crooked timber of humanity, many conservatives insist, nothing precise was ever calculated.

Recently in these pages, Professor David Schaefer repeated this argument while critiquing a new book, Neil S. Siegel’s The Collective-Action Constitution. He concluded his critique with a biting aside: “We should indeed feel grateful that [the Constitution] was designed not by devotees of game theory, but by men whose experience and education had equipped them with a realistic understanding of human nature.” I politely protest. We game theorists have long been proud to claim James Madison as one of our own…

You can read the whole thing at Law & Liberty.