New Books in Systems and Cybernetics

Listen to this interview of Aaron Clauset, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder and in the BioFrontiers Institute. Aaron is also External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. We talk about what the science of science can contribute to your career in research.

Aaron Clauset : "In science, having good ideas is, in the end, the most important part. You can go a long way, in terms of surviving in the ecosystem of scientific research, on the basis of having really good ideas. Because those ideas can help you get to a good, resource-rich institutional environment. Your ideas can help you cultivate a rich, productive collaboration network that will enable you to be successful over time. For example, a paper that I wrote, looking at the composition and size of collaboration networks and how, once you control for differences between men and women in the way they construct and maintain these different kinds of collaboration networks, productivity differences and impact differences essentially go away. I mean, that's kind of fascinating — that the social network that underlies science ends up being the thing that creates many of the disparities that we superficially see in the ecosystem of scientific research."

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In this episode I spoke with Magnus Ramage, co-author of Systems Thinkers (Springer, 2020). This second edition provides an update to Ramage’s and co-author Karen Shipp’s earlier exploration, and presents an enlightening—often inspiring—biographical history of the field of systems thinking. Systems thinking is necessarily interdisciplinary; as such, the people highlighted in the book come from a wide range of areas such as biology, management, physiology, anthropology, chemistry, public policy, sociology and environmental studies among others.

Systems Thinkers examines the life and work of thirty of its major thinkers—some, like Gregory Bateson, only today becoming well-known outside systems circles, others less-known and in Ramage’s view, underappreciated. The book explores each thinker’s key contributions, and the way their contribution was expressed in practice and the relationship between their life and ideas. This discussion is supported by an extract from the thinker’s own writing, to give a flavor of their work and to give readers a sense of which thinkers are most relevant to their own interests. The thinkers are usefully categorized into six groupings ranging from ‘Early Cybernetics’ to ‘Learning Systems’.

A significant aim of the book is to broaden and deepen the reader’s interest in systems writers, providing an appetizing ‘taster’ for each of the 30 thinkers, so that the reader is encouraged to go on to study the published works of the thinkers themselves. Ramage describes Systems Thinkers as a “collective love letter to some of most remarkable people in academia and professional practice over the past century”. His passion for these thinkers comes through in his writing and in our conversation. It is a passion shared by others who stand on the shoulders of these thinkers.

Kevin Lindsay is a 25+ year Silicon Valley software product strategist and marketer, and graduate student at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

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Twenty-eight years after Francis Fukuyama declared the “end of history” and pronounced Western-style liberalism as the culmination of a Hegelian narrative of progress, pundits and academics of all stripes find themselves struggling to explain the failed prediction that China’s increased activity in international markets would inevitably lead to increasing political and social liberalization in that country.

With his ground-breaking book, Network Origins of the Global Economy: East vs. West in a Complex Systems Perspective, out from Cambridge University Press in 2020, Hilton L. Root takes a road less-traveled in contemporary economics and brings the analytical tools of systems theory to bear on this perplexing question, believing that a study of network structure might be able to shed more light than the traditional tools of economic analysis. This clearly argued and eminently readable book accounts for much of the current state of affairs by tracing the contrasting historical evolution of Europe as a Small World Network constituted by the dense connectivity of dynastic marriages between the continent’s royal houses, and China as a Hub and Spoke Network with communications flowing outward through the branches of its vast and robustly structured bureaucracy from a primary central node. Other networked social factors under consideration are the development of Europe’s blend of Germanic custom and Roman law, and China’s tradition of the ideal Confucian gentleman and its deep commitment to merit rather than birthright as the condition for ascending the ranks of administrative power structures. Emerging from this thoughtful and well-researched study is a compelling explanatory narrative of Europe’s ongoing capacity to adapt to rapid change and China’s pattern of long stretches of stability, sudden collapse, and subsequent resurrection of largely unchanged network structure. This adventurous scholarly work simultaneously opens new theoretical doors for economists and provides systems scholars with access to new dimensions of application.

Tom Scholte is a Professor of Directing and Acting in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia located on the unceded, ancestral, and traditional territory of the Musqueam people.

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In 1975, Jerry Fodor published a book entitled The Language of Thought, which is aptly considered one of the most important books in philosophy of mind and cognitive science of the last 50 years or so. This book helped launch what became known as the classical computational theory of the...

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Our contemporary political condition is obsessed with immunity. The immunity of bodies and the body politic; personal immunity and herd immunity; how to immunize the social system against breakdown. The obsession intensifies with every new crisis and the mobilization of yet more powers of war and police, from quarantine to border closures and from vaccination certificates to immunological surveillance.

Engaging four key concepts with enormous cultural weight – Cell, Self, System and Sovereignty – The Politics of Immunity: Security and the Policing of Bodies (Verso, 2022) moves from philosophical biology to intellectual history and from critical theory to psychoanalysis to expose the politics underpinning the way immunity is imagined. At the heart of this imagination is the way security has come to dominate the whole realm of human experience. From biological cell to political subject, and from physiological system to the social body, immunity folds into security, just as security folds into immunity. The book thus opens into a critique of the violence of security and spells out immunity’s tendency towards self-destruction and death: immunity, like security, can turn its aggression inwards, into the autoimmune disorder. Wide-ranging and polemical, this book lays down a major challenge to the ways in which the immunity of the self and the social are imagined.

In this interview, I spoke with Mark Neocleous about his fascinating and wide-ranging book The Politics of Immunity. We also spent time discussing his previous work on security and police power, the personal context informing this work, and connections with the ongoing UK undercover policing controversy (discussed in my previous interview with the authors of Deep Deception).

Content warning: between 43-45 minutes into the podcast, there is a brief discussion of suicide in the context of Mark's forthcoming work.

Mark Neocleous is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University in London, and is well-known for his influential work on police power and security. His recent books include The Universal Adversary: Security, Capital and 'The Enemies of All Mankind' (2016); War Power, Police Power (2014); and the newly-reissued A Critical Theory of Police Power: The Fabrication of Social Order (2021).



Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. She can be reached by email or on Twitter.

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