It was the Cold War, 1950s America, and scientists in several disciplines were excited about a new area of study made popular by a book written by a MIT mathematician and computer scientist named Norbert Wiener and titled Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. The new area of study was known as systems theory, and it promised to explain how systems—a robot, a forest, the market economy—create order out of chaos by taking in information and making appropriate adjustments or corrections.
But the popularity of systems theory or cybernetics was not confined to the scientific community. As Hannah Glasson, a 2024-25 HOPE Center Visiting Scholar, explains, systems theory worked its way into popular culture as well—especially in the realm of politics.
“The systems concept was attached to very specific political visions that inspired the public imagination,” Hannah says. “Grandiose pronouncements about interdisciplinary collaborations, the utopian promises of new technology, even explorations of new forms of consciousness—they all carry clear traces of political ideologies that came together through systems theory.”
Hannah, who recently completed her PhD at Virginia Tech, became interested in systems theory through the work of the economist and social philosopher Friedrich Hayek, who is famous for his discussions of so-called spontaneous orders. “I was fascinated by the concept of spontaneous orders and the fact that social processes follow a direction that no one designs.”
As an example, Hannah points to prices in a market economy. “No one sets prices. Instead, prices are always adjusting in response to a constant stream of information arising from the complicated interplay of millions of consumers and producers.”
Most scholars who have written about systems theory look at it only in the context of a particular discipline or cultural development. Hannah is instead writing about the rise of systems theory itself, treating the subject as worth studying in its own right and taking a big-picture view that reveals just how broadly influential the theory has been.
Systems theory has been seen as a system of control—and as a path toward freedom. “The theory is elusive because it isn’t quite either of those but a little of both,” says Hannah, who has a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and a master’s degree from Chicago. “Because scholars look at only one aspect of problem, they fail to see that.”
Most critical political theorists have a negative view of systems theory, regarding it as a neoliberal tool of control, one used to lock people into accepting and following the capitalist system. “And there is some truth,” Hannah points out, “to the notion that faith in spontaneous orders can be an excuse for social apathy.”
On the other side, a small number of scholars have a rosy, romanticized view of the countercultural element of systems theory, especially as it relates to human consciousness: if humans had only taken the transformation of consciousness seriously, we would have acquired far more agency than we have at present. But as Hannah explains, “The countercultural movement of the 1970s was far more closely intertwined with the so-called neoliberal revolution than most people realize. These intersections are clearly evident, for example, in the cultural milieu that shaped the formation of Silicon Valley. ”
While at Duke, Hannah is looking into the Hayek papers and benefiting from the conversation and collaboration that come with being a part of the community of visiting scholars at the HOPE Center. On top of that, the papers at the Friday sessions have dealt with subjects that intersect in all kinds of fruitful ways with systems theory.
Hannah will be in Durham through the spring of 2025.
