Abstract
Thomas Schelling and Erving Goffman: who influenced whom, when and to what effect? Was there “influence” at all or, as Tom Burns suggests, independent discovery and convergence? These are the questions that this paper is meant to answer. Using available archival material and historical and textual analysis, the paper takes a fresh look at Goffman’s interest in and contribution to game theory. It charts the important first meeting in the late 1950s, their subsequent dialogue through publications, and the critical 1964 conference on “Strategic Interaction and Conflict,” where Goffman encountered an assembly of defense and nuclear strategists associated with the RAND Corporation. These include Daniel Ellsberg, who was a sharp critic of Goffman’s conference presentation, Albert Wohlstetter and, of course, Tom Schelling. During the heated discussion that accompanied Goffman’s presentation, the session chairman gave Goffman the sobriquet sorcerer’s “apprentice.” Ever the ally, Schelling said that he was sympathetic to Goffman’s “style of
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Notes
The author is most grateful to Dr. Winkin for sharing this letter (Schelling 1991).
See Schelling (1980 [1960]: 115-16n20, 128n8, and 149n22).
In his survey of sociology and game theory, Richard Swedberg (2001: 315) identifies Jessie Bernard as a “pioneer” in the field and Goffman as someone who had offered “scattered but lively discussions” of game theory in his works.
For a discussion of the conversation that took place during the session on “The Concept of Rationality,” see (Erickson et al. 2013: 16–26).
Goffman’s phrase “massive interdependence” offered an unfortunate echo of John Foster Dulles’s principle of “massive retaliation,” a cornerstone of the Eisenhower-era nuclear strategy that had been rejected by the defense intellectuals attending the 1964 conference. In Strategic Interaction, Goffman (1969: 136) changes the phrase to “full interdependence.”
Balderston’s precise words were, “Can we get Erving to make a magnificent peroration and then have a discussion (Archibald 1966: 208)?
Goffman gave Robert Jervis a prepublication copy of Strategic Interaction and Jervis keeps it in his Columbia University office with his other books by Goffman directly across from his desk. The author thanks Professor Jervis for showing me this and other books in his personal library.
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Acknowledgements
The author thanks Yves Winkin and Paul Erickson for encouragement and counsel during formative stages of writing this paper. The author also thanks Robert Ayson for critical reading of the paper and Robert Jervis for sharing his remembrances of Schelling and Goffman during his years at UC Berkeley and Harvard. Material from the Mike Keen Papers is quoted with permission of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
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Jaworski, G.D. Erving Goffman as Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Am Soc 50, 387–401 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-019-09418-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-019-09418-z