Gray Area Grand Theater: Cybersentics Book Club – August 2026: Ghastly Marionettes

Have you ever wondered what would have happened if a government adopted principles of the “study of control and communication” as its operating logic? Would it result in a homogeneous crowd of optimized man-machines? Let’s talk about this uncomfortable twist of cybernetics…. This Month’s Reading: Carr, D. J. Z. (2020). ‘Ghastly marionettes’ and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and the origins of totalitarianism. History of the Human Sciences, 33(1), 147-174. This month, we turn to Danielle Carr’s essay arguing that cognitivism’s triumph over behaviorism as psychology’s dominant theory of mind was driven by “cognitive liberalism,” a strand of early Cold War political philosophy that placed human freedom in the spontaneous capacities of cognition and language. Along the way, the piece traces how Hannah Arendt’s account of totalitarianism framed it as a form of behaviorist control, linking Cold War anti-behaviorism to earlier Progressive-era critiques of industrial labor and to attacks on behaviorism circulating at the time.