Rational Choice in Love

I WANT TO FOCUS ON A SINGLE WORK OF LITERATURE. It is not directly concerned with war among states, though its author, Choderlos de Laclos, was in fact a soldier, an artillery officer, and an expert in fortifications. It deals with other kinds of war. My goal today is to consider the place of reason—of rational choice in the commonsense version of this term—and, specifically, of rational choice theory, as they play out in the realms of unreason. In order to narrow the field, I have picked love as my example. Within the unreasonable realm of the passions, love is, if not necessarily the most irrational, at least the most often subject to attempts at regulation by theoretical and practical reason. Among the works of literature I study, the one that has struck me as most apt in its juxtaposition of love and rational choice as strategy has been Les liaisons dangereuses, the scandalous novel of 1782 by Choderlos de Laclos. At its turning point, the novel’s two chief characters declare war—another medium in which reasoned strategy, gaming, and the passions meet.