The Power of Systems

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 coproduced 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.

Eglė Rindzevičiūtė is Associate Professor in Criminology and Sociology at Kingston University, London. She is the author of The Will to Predict and coeditor of The Struggle for the Long-Term in Transnational Science and Politics.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Loren Graham, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, co-author of Science in the New Russia:

In this deeply researched book, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė tells the story of a unique Cold War institution, the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, located in Laxenburg, Austria. Here scientists and political leaders from the Soviet Union and the United States met in the years after 1972 to discuss, in the framework of the new field of systems analysis, such problems as acid rain, nuclear winter, the impact of technology on society, and the possibility of 'neutral' mathematical modeling of civilization’s problems. Was it a naïve and doomed effort? Rindzevičiūtė gives us a sophisticated answer to this question.

David C. Engerman, Ottilie Springer Professor of History, Brandeis University, author of Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts:

In The Power of Systems, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė offers a compelling account of the convergence of American systems analysis and Soviet cybernetics in a picturesque Austrian castle. Using a wide range of rarely cited archival materials as well as revealing personal interviews, she shows how Cold War scientific diplomacy produced real and influential results. Attuned to ideas and institutions, to personalities and most importantly to power, Rindzevičiūtė provides a model for historical scholarship on late Soviet science and on East-West connections in the Cold War.

Stephen Fortescue, University of New South Wales, author of Russia's Oil Barons and Metal Magnates:

The Power of Systems provides a compelling summary of the rise of the systems approach globally. Egle Rindzevičiūtė describes the Soviet component of that rise and Soviet-Western cooperation in the field and provides a new level of detail through extensive and informative interviews. Rindzevičiūtė makes a strong case for the view that the cooperation was not just diplomatic puffery, but a serious phenomenon that had real effects on Soviet–Western relations and the way the two sides saw and behaved in the world.