General Systems Theory

Last update: 04 Jan 2025 08:55
First version: 15 May 1997

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"Lord, I disbelieve; help Thou my unbelief."

An off-shoot of cybernetics, with (so far as I can see) far less to recommend it. This is not to say that none of its advocates ever produced anything worthwhile, just that the credit for it should not go to the verbiage which passed for "approaches to a general theory of systems" (query --- why is that phrase much more respectable than "theory of things in general"?). Its hey-day was in the '60s and '70s, when my father was studying planning, and took a course or three in it from C. West Churchman (see below); it seems to have become extinct by now, though some of the survivors have tried to hitch it to complexity. It is not to be confused with dynamical systems theory in mathematics, still less systems of equations, though I've seen philosophers and science-studies people do both.

After-thoughts, December 2024

This needs to distinguish a lot more clearly between at least 4 strands of work which were popular in the 1960s and 1970s:

1. What people in what people in control engineering, signal processing, automata theory, etc., were doing at the time and calling things "systems analysis", "system identification", etc.;
2. The engineering practice of building big information-processing systems for NASA, the Pentagon, etc., etc.
3. The ventures into social science / social engineering of people originally trained in (1) or (2), which had a lot of over-lap with operations research (a topic that probably deserves its own notebook).
4. The wooly-minded philosophizing that I was complaining about in the 1990s.

See also:
• Control Theory and Control Engineering
• The Cold War
• Complexity
• Cybernetics
• Decision Theory
• Planned Economies
• The Role of Experts and Science in Democracy
• Social Science Methodology
• Social Engineering

Recommended:
• C. West Churchman, The Systems Approach [A gentle, almost folksy approach which wisely put the idea of taking everything relevant into account before the mathematical appratus; but this fails to distinguish the systems approach from the rational approach in general, especially as Churchman is frank about the difficulties of deciding what is relevant, and how little the mathematics actually added.]
• Yakov Feygin, "Dreaming of a 'New Planning': Development and the Internationalization of Economic Thought in Late Soviet Reformist Politics", Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 12 (2021) [Thanks to Dr. Feygin for a reprint. A revised version appears as ch. 6 in Dr. Feygin's book, Building a Ruin; I haven't compared the two in detail.]
• John Gall, illus. R. O. Blechman, Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail (a.k.a. General Systemantics)
• The Society for General Systems Research used to (and for all I know still does) put out an annual journal, General Systems, which at least in the early issues had many interesting articles, especially some papers by Ashby, but nothing remotely resembling a general theory of systems. The decline in its scientific quality was, however, steady and perceptible, and even the least fastidious must have written it off after about 1980.

Not sure, in retrospect, whether I do recommend:
• David Berlinski, On Systems Analysis: An Essay Concerning the Limitations of Some Mathematical Methods in the Social, Political, and Biological Sciences [I've seen my own writing described as "Panzer assaults," but this made me blanche. This is fire-bombing. What makes me uneasy about recommending it, in the retrospect of almost 30 years, is that while there are times I think Berlinski's criticisms are absolutely on target and fully deserved, there are others where I have come to think he is being unfair, or even simply mis-understanding those he critiques. For what it's worth, my memory suggests the worst parts are tangents from the main lines of attack, but I would no longer pass the book on to a student, or a colleague, without re-reading it first, and perhaps writing a very long critical note of my own. --- This un-ease is, of course, connected to Berlinski's subsequent career as an advocate for intelligent design creationism, which says bad things about his scientific taste and powers of judgment.]

To read:
• Brian D. O. Anderson, Michael A. Arbib and Ernest G. Manes, Foundations of System Theory: Finitary and Infinitary Conditions
• Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Feedback: Ecological Thinking in Seventies America
• Guy Beneveniste, The Politics of Expertise (1972)
• John Biggart et al. (eds.), Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Systems Thinking in Russia
• Robert Boguslaw, The New Utopians: A Study of System Design and Social Change (1965)
• C. West Churchman, The Design of Inquiring Systems: Basic Concepts of Systems and Organization [Commentary by Maxim Raginsky]
• Robert L. Flood, Liberating Systems Theory
• Ida R. Hoos, Systems Analysis in Public Policy: A Critique [I think this is just the revised edition of Systems Analysis in Social Policy: A Critical Review...]
• Hunter Heyck, Age of System: Understanding the Development of Modern Social Science
• Agatha C. Hughes and Thomas P. Hughes (eds.), Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After
• Stephen B. Johnson, The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs
• Jennifer S. Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America
• Robert Lilienfeld, The Rise of Systems Theory: An Ideological Analysis
• N. Luhmann, Social Systems
• H. H. Pattee
• Eglė Rindzeviciutė, The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World