The Power of Systems
How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Cornell University Press
Publishing:15th Mar '25
£21.99
This title is due to be published on 15th March, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£47.00(9781501703188)
In The Power of Systems, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė introduces readers to one of the best-kept secrets of the Cold War: the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), an international think tank established by the US and USSR to advance scientific collaboration.
From 1972 until the late 1980s, IIASA was one of the very few permanent platforms where policy scientists from both sides of the Cold War could work together to articulate and solve world problems. A rare zone of freedom, communication, and negotiation.
East-West scientists co-produced computer simulations of the long-term world future, using global modeling to explore the possible effects of climate change and nuclear winter. Their concern with global issues also became a vehicle for transformation inside the Soviet Union. The Power of Systems explores how computer modeling, cybernetics, and the systems approach challenged Soviet governance by undermining the linear notions of control on which Soviet governance was based and creating new objects and techniques of government.
The Power of Systems is a first-rate monograph, best suited for graduate students, scholars of Soviet Russia and the Cold War, and scholars of the history and sociology of science.
* American Historical Review *Combining a policy analyst's sensitivity to practical politics and a historian's instinct for contingency and context. Rindzevičiūtė has provided a rare glimpse through the lens of boutique institutional history of a time and place.
* SLAVIC REVIEW *The Power of Systems is a masterful study of a complex network of institutions and individuals—many of which were previously unregistered in the Anglo-American historiography—that made the international science of systems analysis possible.
* Technology and Culture *Perhaps the most powerful aspect of The Power of Systems is the question it raises about the relationship between the history of ideas and the shape of contemporary politics.
* Journal of the History of Ideas *In her new book, The Will to Predict, Rindzevičiūtė examines the history of scientific prediction in the context of late modern governance using the example of Soviet Russia. While the focus on an individual country might seemingly limit general conclusions, she hopes this example serves as an instructive one for broader trends and developments in liberal context as well.
* Dějiny – teorie – kritika (History – Theory – CriticisISBN: 9781501782206
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 21mm
Weight: 454g
306 pages