Game Theory May Properly Be Considered an invention of the twentieth century. It cannot usefully be separated from statistical analysis and probability theory, which arose in the last decades of the nineteenth century, along with the industrialization of the European societies whose study they aimed to promote. Game theory, therefore, takes its place alongside other theories of behavior and society that are preeminently modern, if the defining attribute of modernity is taken to be contingency, as the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann1 and others have argued. Contingency, according to Luhmann, is anything that is “neither necessary nor impossible” (45), that is, anything that is governed by the idea that an outcome could always be other than it is. Contingent views about self and society can be traced back to the paradigm shift in human understanding suddenly felt across a range of areas of human thinking and endeavor at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. The older paradigm that lost relevance in what Luhmann calls “old European” society was conditioned by essentialist views based on an assumption about the coincidence of thought and being in the world. Such a coincidence had long given grounds for views of a religious nature that assumed a divine presence in the world. Although the coming of contingent understanding that displaced these views has a long genesis in European thinking, it does not significantly predate the sixteenth century, and it is closely associated with the important eighteenth-century thinkers, the Scottish skeptic David Hume and the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant, according to his own testimony, indeed, was awakened from a “dogmatic slumber” as a result of Hume’s critique of rational precepts. Another who was similarly awakened, although not by Hume in the first instance, was the writer Heinrich von Kleist, who also went through a conceptual shift of a significant dimension in his early twenties after a protracted encounter with the philosophy of Kant.