Luca Rebolino, 2025-26 HOPE Center Visiting Scholar

In 1948, a new word, cybernetics, entered the language, thanks to the MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener, whose book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine explained how intelligent machines and living organisms adapt by learning from experience. 

It wasn’t long before cybernetics made its way into the social sciences, and that process—the process by which cybernetics dramatically captured the attention of economists, political scientists, and the like—is at the heart of current work by Luca Rebolino, a 2025-26 HOPE Center Visiting Scholar.

“Cybernetics has fundamentally changed the way we think of certain systems, such as the economy,” Luca says. “In good cybernetic fashion, markets take in information such as changes in supply and demand and use that information to adjust to new conditions.”

Cybernetics, Luca explains, offers a way to understand systems that are evolutionary rather than mechanical.

“Think of a clock, which is designed to be regular and predictable. Newtonian physics might be ideal for understanding Big Ben, but not for understanding the human body or something as complex as a society.”

One figure who engaged with cybernetics was the Nobel Prize–winning economist Friedrich Hayek. Luca, who is a PhD student in history at the University of Bologna, is using Hayek as a case study of how cybernetics affected the social sciences in the postwar period.

“We see Hayek drawing on cybernetics as early as 1952, in his book The Sensory Order. In Hayek’s view, the market society is best seen as a garden. We can’t fully predict or control the outcome. But we can at most provide an environment that will enable it to thrive.”

For Hayek, that meant abandoning the modern idea that we can, in essence, overcome nature. 

“Ever since the Age of Revolution, there’s been this notion that we can change society, that we can use our powers of reasoning, along with our collective agency, to create our own version of order. Yet some things create their own order, and often the best we can do, Hayek says, is to limit our action and let them work out their own way forward.” 

Or, as Luca puts it more succinctly, “Cultivation, not control, is usually what Hayek advocated.”

While at Duke, Luca, who grew up in a small seaside town in Liguria, near Genoa, has been going through the Hayek papers, which are on microfilm in the Rubenstein Library.

He says that when doing archival work, he has been learning to stay open to whatever one might find.

“You never know when you’ll come across the unexpected, some hidden gem that casts a whole new light on your subject.”

As a young scholar, Luca says that the community of faculty and fellow visitors at the HOPE Center has been central to his experience while at Duke.

“The Friday paper presentations and getting that practice of making comments in a public forum really help you grow as a scholar.”

Having grown up next to La Superba, Luca is a big fan of Genoa CFC, which stands for Cricket and Football Club. 

Wait, cricket?

“Well, as the oldest club in the country, it could only have been founded by an Englishman, trading at the port,” Luca explains.

Luca will return to Bologna in May.