Political Applications of Systems Theory in the Twentieth Century: From Cybernetic Control to Spontaneous Emergence

This dissertation is a realist intellectual history of systems theory in the second half of the twentieth century. Systems theory can be defined as the study of the informatic patterns that are found within a variety of complex phenomena, both natural and social. The science behind systems theory emerged from wartime engineering projects, and was promoted by major philanthropic organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation. Theoretical concepts from the nascent systems sciences, including the subfields of information science, cybernetics, and systems biology, migrated into social science fields including political theory and economics. The social applications of systems theory were heavily promoted by major figures within both America's counterculture, and America's neoliberal revolution. Systems theory injected strong elements of political thinking and political reasoning into natural and social scientific fields alike. The integration of systems theory into natural science fields such as biology was paired with an expanded understanding of the purposes of science. These purposes ranged from the attempt to capture sophisticated, systemic mechanisms of control within life processes, to the attempt to describe the spontaneous, creative, and free self-organization within living systems. Likewise, in economics and the social sciences, systems theory provided an apt conceptual terminology to imagine human society as either an intricately interwoven system of control and coercion, or as a spontaneously organizing source of human freedom. Systems approaches to economics rejected simplistic descriptions of human motivation and behavior, and emphasized the importance of collective processes that do not follow central direction. While Friedrich Hayek is the most well-known economist to utilize systems theory, other less known figures such as Kevin Kelly and George Gilder played a major role in the development of systems based, informatic approaches to social and economic thought. Hayek is often blamed for the development of speculative, systems approaches to economics that minimize the importance of material reality. Contradicting this consensus, I argue that Kelly and Gilder are better exemplars of this speculative rejection of materiality. I also challenge the dominant consensus within political theory scholarship that argues that systems theory can only be understood as a tool and modality of control. Instead, I show that freedom and control co-exist ambiguously in systems theory discourses, and that the lasting appeal and uptake of systems theory within American culture must be interpreted in this light.