In 1989, as the Cold War was coming to a close, Francis Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy represented the “end point of mankind's ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government.” It constituted, he asserted, the “end of history.” With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Westerners concluded that there were no longer viable alternatives to capitalist democracy. To its advocates, this system, manifest in a combination of consumer capitalism and thin political democracy, “resolved all of the contradictions of life for which, through the course of history, individuals have been prepared to fight.” Yet within a mere dozen years, the United States, which had been the world's leading proponent of this ideology, took on a leading role in a global war on terror. American presidents, pundits, and citizens confronted an uncomfortable new reality characterized by entrenched military engagement in the Middle East and a shift of economic power from the West to the Far East.

Prisoners of Reason suggests that this unsatisfactory conclusion to the Cold War in part resulted from seeds sown from within that gave rise to neoliberal capitalism. The price of winning the Cold War was not only a vast nuclear arsenal and budget deficit but also the transformation of individual autonomy and collective sovereignty. By the close of the twentieth century, the free markets and democratic governance alluded to by Fukuyama had become unmoored from their classical liberal ideals and refashioned according to the strategic rationality of game theory.