Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

History of Science and Medicine

First Advisor

Coen, Deborah

Abstract

This dissertation is a history of the interdisciplinary field of systems theory from the perspective of Central European scientists and intellectuals who migrated to North America during the 20th century. It is a story about how people, ideas, and techniques circulated in new ways across a period of global upheaval, about how the philosophy of science became a stage for urgent political questions, and about how scientists tried to grasp the whole without surrendering authority over its constituent parts. This project reveals how European interwar debates were encoded into technical practices of control and communication in the postwar United States, so that studying socio-technical systems required engaging contested ideas about freedom and knowledge. It shows how utopian spiritual longings were reframed in the language of technology, and how systems theory was translated and retranslated between Europe and the United States during a century of dislocation and crisis. Narratively, this story plays out through the life and career of the biologist and systems theorist Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972). Following a single figure as he moved across disciplinary and national boundaries, I show the significance of “system” as an organizing concept in the histories of science, technology, and philosophy in the 20th century. To pursue to history of systems theory, this dissertation draws on methods from the history of science and intellectual history, informed by material from personal archives, institutional archives, professional publications, and popular writing. I show that systems theory was not just a tool for managing the new man-machine systems that emerged out of wartime research. Rather, I argue that systems theory offered a form of “pragmatic holism” that allowed researchers to transcend the contradictions of the modern world, often by reformulating socio-political problems as technological problems in 20th century. Tracing the uses and abuses of systems theory across the 20th century, I find that the achievement of systems theory was not (primarily) knowledge production but ignorance management. Following Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s mistranslation of Nicholas of Cusa, systems theory was a science of not knowing. This project argues that “systems” are not natural or self-explanatory things, but that they have a history, that there have been serious debates over how to define them, and that the politics of thinking in systems is radically malleable. The dissertation begins with two chapters which argue that Bertalanffy’s approach to “thinking in systems” emerged in the context of intellectual debates about knowledge, biology, and the organization of science – as well as conflicting political imperatives – in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s. The next two chapters examine a series of fraught encounters between European philosophy of science and American cybernetics as Central European émigré researchers worked to translate their research for new audiences. I show how both cybernetics and its critics were shaped by the institutional imperatives of the postwar university. The final two chapters follow Bertalanffy’s general system theory through a series of Cold War institutions, including the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Society for General Systems Research, and the Menninger Foundation. I argue that, despite the universalizing tendencies of systems theory, it was taken up (or not taken up) for diverse reasons due to the situated idiosyncrasies of individual institutions. The conclusion traces the legacies of systems theory in American counterculture and 21st century techno-utopianism.

Download

Share

COinS