Prisoners of Reason argues that neoliberal capitalism and governance reflect a new theoretical rationale that was initially developed and applied to prosecute the Cold War through exercising credible military threats, many of unimaginably devastating nuclear destruction. Policy analysts and social scientists came to accept strategic rationality as the epitome of human reasoning, thus rendering obsolete formerly accepted perspectives on intelligible action. Most prominently, in its orthodox operationalized form, strategic rationality only permits agents to pursue outcomes in competition with others over scarce, instrumentally salient resources. This book's primary goal is to render clearly how this new understanding of rational action sustains neoliberal markets and government in direct contradiction to classical liberalism.

Noncooperative game theory adopts a stance toward action that accepts actors’ preferences as given; models action choices descriptively, normatively, or prescriptively depending on the context; and seeks solutions or equilibrium outcomes that will obtain assuming that actors maximize expected utility with varying attitudes toward risk. In John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's original articulation, this science of choice claims to be an exhaustive treatment of rationality in all decisions involving more than one individual. Therefore, it offers to agents the imperative to comply with its principles of choice, tacitly linked to survival and success, or to suffer the fate of irrationality and loss.