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Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory: From Chess to Social Science, 1900–1960, Robert Leonard, Cambridge University Press, 2010, x + 390 pages

Von Neumann and Morgenstern’s landmark 1944 book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, has long proven enigmatic. As is well known, the book’s immediate impact on economic theory was minor, yet it has been widely cited as the inspiration for game theory as it has infiltrated economics since the 1980s. Yet as game theory’s star rose in economics, its founding text became increasingly submerged, to the extent that game theory as it is taught in economics departments today bears vanishingly little resemblance to von Neumann and Morgenstern’s original conception. Their book is now rarely cited, and probably even more rarely read – hence, the relationship between this brilliant yet increasingly obscure work and the modern success of game theory in economics is a perennial source of puzzlement. In Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory, Robert Leonard presents a painstakingly researched and vividly narrated account of the origins of Theory of Games in the intellectual culture of interwar Europe. The book opens with a fascinating exploration of the theory and practice of chess in the opening decades of the twentieth century, noting how these discussions formed a key part of the backdrop against which mathematicians including Emile Borel and von Neumann would begin to consider the general mathematics of games. Chapters 2–4 recount the early career of von Neumann as he moved through the world of European mathematics, from Budapest to Göttingen, where, as a student of the famed David Hilbert, he produced his first paper on the subject of ‘games’ in 1928. Next enters Morgenstern, coming of age in the political tumult of interwar Vienna and falling under the intellectual spell of a series of