DEMOCRACY & NATURE: The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY Vol. 6, No. 3 (November 2000) Systems theory and complexity: a potential tool for radical analysis or the emerging social paradigm for the internationalised market economy? TAKIS FOTOPOULOS Abstract: The aim of this paper is to critically assess the claims of systems theory and complexity in the analysis of social change and particularly to examine the view that ―if certain conditions are met― both could potentially be useful tools for radical analysis. The conclusion drawn from this analysis is that, although systems theory and complexity are useful tools in the natural sciences in which they offer many useful insights, they are much less useful in social sciences and indeed are incompatible, both from the epistemological point of view and that of their content, with a radical analysis aiming to systemic change towards an inclusive democracy. Introduction It was almost inevitable that the present demise of Marxism would bring about a revised form of functionalism/evolutionism, which had almost eclipsed in the sixties and the seventies, particularly in areas like the sociology of development where it had been replaced by neo-Marxist and dependency theories. The new version of functionalism/evolutionism is much more sophisticated than the original Parsonian functionalist paradigm and incorporates recent developments in “hard” sciences to produce a new “general” theory of social systems. A primary example of such an attempt is Niklas Luhmann’s Social Systems[1] which we shall consider in this paper. My aim will not be to assess the undoubted significance of systems theory within the “orthodox” social sciences paradigm but to examine, instead, whether systems theory and complexity (or parts of it) may constitute a useful tool of radical analysis, as some thinkers in the Left suggest.[2] My contention is that the emerging systems theory and complexity paradigm, far from constituting a useful tool of radical analysis of the present society, may easily become the dominant social paradigm[3] of the present internationalised market economy. The overall aim of Luhmann’s work is to develop a new “general” theory of social systems that would fully utilise the conceptual resources of modern science and particularly the principles of self-organization, whose use in a great number of different disciplines signals a fundamental paradigm shift in the sciences —a “scientific revolution” in the Kuhnian sense.[4] The rationale behind such an attempt is to transcend the postmodern predicament and show that the end of metanarratives does not mean the end of theory. The intermediate target, which functions also as means to achieve this aim, is to link social theory to recent theoretical developments in scientific disciplines as diverse as modern physics, information theory, general systems theory, neurophysiology, and cognitive science. As Eva Knodt points out in her foreword:[5] “Social Systems does not present a sociological analysis of modern society or a theory of society but elaborates the general conceptual framework for such a theory. It supplies the instruments for observing a variety of social systems —societies, organizations, and interactions— not primarily such observations themselves” (…) But unlike Kant —and here Luhmann parts company with transcendentalism and all forms of foundational philosophy— systems theory turns away from the knowing subject to a reality that consists solely of self-referential systems and their “empirically” observable operations. (It goes without saying that the self- referential operations of theory are part and parcel of that reality.) The observations of systems theory are both situated and interested observations. They focus on a specific problem —the problem of social complexity from within one of society’s particular subsystems, science. The Kantian question of how a subject can have objective knowledge of reality thus gives way to the question: How is organized complexity possible? It is therefore obvious that the epistemological issue plays a crucial role in Luhman’s work and it is consequently a good starting point in assessing this work. We shall continue with a critical assessment of systems theory and complexity, as well as of their political implications and we shall conclude with our assessment of the usefulness of this theory as a radical tool of analysis, i.e. a tool of anti-systemic analysis aiming at an inclusive democracy. 1. Social systems and the epistemology of systems theory and complexity The liberatory project and the traditional epistemologies One way to assess the epistemology of Luhmann’s theory as a radical tool of analysis is to consider its applicability with respect to the inclusive democracy project. As I tried to show elsewhere,[6] the liberatory project for an inclusive democracy can not and should not be based on the “objectivism” of the main epistemological traditions, i.e. either empiricism/positivism and rationalism, or the alternative dialectical tradition. Such an objectivism I argued there is not feasible as regards social phenomena, nor is it desirable. It is not feasible because a society based on a market economy and representative democracy is a divided society in which political, economic and social power is concentrated in a few hands: those of the various elites which control the economic or political process, the mass media and so on. This implies that the analysis of social systems can never achieve the degree of intersubjectivity that characterizes natural sciences, whose object of study — unlike the object of study of social sciences— is not characerised by “class” divisions which inevitably affect the former. Equally non-feasible is the project of deriving a general theory of social “evolution”, on the basis of an “objective” interpretation of social or natural History, as dialectical materialism and dialectical naturalism have respectively attempted to do. And it is not desirable because any claim to “objectivity” in justifying a liberatory project would almost inevitably lead to hierarchical divisions within the liberatory movement between those “who know” the “laws” of social movement and can therefore derive the necessary strategic and tactical conclusions and those at the other end who simply have to implement the policy prescriptions drawn by the “theory experts”. The Marxist case is an obvious example of such a hierarchical division created within the pre- revolutionary movements —a division that was later institutionalized when these movements took over power. The conclusion I derived from this analysis was that the liberatory project for an inclusive democracy can only be based on a democratic rationalism, which transcends both the modernist “scientism”/“objectivism”, as well as the postmodernist subjectivism and relativism. But, let us see the major differences between the main epistemological traditions so that we may meaningfully assess the epistemological claims of systems theory and complexity. The major difference between these traditions was the one referring to the criterion of truth. Thus, rationalism reflects a coherence theory of truth,[7] according to which the criterion of truth is coherence with other propositions or judgments, something consistent with the deductive method of analysis. Empiricism, on the other hand, reflects a completely different theory of truth, a correspondence theory, according to which the criterion of truth is correspondence with fact, although, as modern versions of the theory have shown, it is certainly not always the case that every statement can be correlated with a fact.[8] Logical Positivism, which claimed that it had created a synthesis between the two epistemological traditions, that is, between, on the one hand, the deductive and a priori rationalism and, on the other, the inductive and a posteriori empiricism, also failed to produce “objective” criteria of truth, as Popper, Lakatos[9] and others have shown, ending up not as an objective methodology, but rather as an ideology “inhibiting the growth of knowledge and serving the interest of the status quo”. [10] It was the arrival of the “Kuhnian revolution”[11] which brought the power relation into orthodox epistemology through the adoption of the relativistic position of “truth by consensus”. What is “scientific” or “objectively true” becomes now a function of the degree of Intersubjectivity, that is, of the degree of consensus achieved among the theorists in a particular discipline. The Kuhnian “paradigm” concept implied the non-existence of objectivity, either in the sense of tradition —independent truths, or in the sense of tradition— independent ways of finding truths.[12] The dialectical analysis, usually used by radical social theorists to justify the needs for an alternative society, claimed to be able to see the contradiction between the parts and the whole in knowledge (the parts can only be seen through the whole which envelops them, whereas the whole can only be seen through factual knowledge of the parts) the contradiction between individuals and society (individuals can only be seen through society, whereas society can only be seen through knowledge of individuals), as well as the contradiction between the real given and the possible, uniting, through the social praxis, Theory and Practice, the individual and the community. Therefore, the concept of objectivity in dialectics takes on a very different meaning from the traditional notion of objectivity in empiricism/positivism.