BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

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INVISIBLE HAND: a systemic reappraisal 3)5)

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Adam SMITH's invisible hand was a dubious – if not gross – presystemic simplification.

In words of P.M. ALLEN: "Because of the fallacious analogy with the approach to equilibrium of an isolated physical system, in some way, there was an "invisible hand" guiding the evolution towards the equilibrium state, and hence in some sense that "governments" or "planners" had only to alleviate marginal areas of socially unacceptable inequality or hardship while events moved inevitably towards the best solution… Our new (i.e. irreversible thermodynamics) perspective tells us that this is not the case, that a choice of futures may indeed exist, and that these possible futures are of different "optimalities", some being more "efficient" for certain points of view than others" (1980, p.279).

This, of course, complicates enormously the governance of economic, social and political systems, as it introduces subjective – that is controvertible and frequently contradictory – evaluations (which of course, were always present, if not acknowledged).

The "invisible hand" in fact, proposed a homeostatic model of economy and society, ignoring instabilities, threshold crossings, emergence and chaos. Such a concept is still implicit even in Keynesian economics and, of course in many technical tools used by economists.

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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