GENERAL SYSTEM THEORY
The notion of a system may be seen as simply a more self-conscious and generic term for the dynamic interrelatedness of components.Von Bertalanffy
Ludwig Von Bertalanffy was a Hungarian biologist educated in Vienna, a member of the famed "Vienna School." He fathered an organismic approach to biology as a reaction to the vitalism-reductionism arguments that were rampant in his day. More important for the purpose of this thesis, he founded the science of "General System Theory". The idea of the whole as more than the sum of its parts is as old as Aristotle, but that there are characteristics of systems that are homologous to all systems simply because they are systems can be traced directly to Von Bertalanffy.
Von Bertalanffy explained that he thought of the idea of General System Theory back in 1936 but hesitated until 1948 when the intellectual climate was more receptive. However, William Johnston showed that the basic elements were in his mind as far back as the twenties,
A forgotten episode in Von Bertalanffy's apprenticeship is the culture-criticism which he wrote during the 1920's. Where the seeds of General System Theory are already visible. In reviewing books by the Viennese art historians, Josef Strzygowski and Max Dvorak, Von Bertalanffy lauded Oswald Spengler for having interpreted culture as an integrated system, wúithin any culture, ideas and artistic forms interact with one another and with social institutions to simulate a common style. It is this process of interaction rather than its separate components which a historian of culture must study, For Spengler and for Strzygowski, a culture is what Von Bertalanffy would later call an "open system", digesting influences from without while undergoing interactions among its various levels.
Growing as it does, out of the reductionist-vitalist arguments in biology, Von Bertalanffy's greatest emphasis was on the meaning of life, on the differences between organisms and purely physico-chemical processes. In theoretical biology, he proposed a general model of an "open system" to describe the contradiction between the thermodynamics of living organisms and the second law of thermodynamics. As he put it "an open system that imports free energy or negative entropy from the outside can legitimately proceed toward states of increasing heterogeneity and order. From this he elaborated in another paper, "we must conceive living systems as systems of elements in mutual dynamic interaction, and discover the laws that govern the pattern of parts and processes," The concepts of organization, non-summative wholeness, control, self-regulation, equifinality, and self-organization, he said, are as valid in the social and behavioral sciences as they are in the biological. This led Von Bertalanffy to postulate a new discipline called, "General System Theory," its subject matter being the formulation and derivation of those principles which are valid for systems in general. In the words of systems philosopher, Ervin Laszlo:
Thus, if one can show that the schemes are isomorphic in regard to the basic underlying invariances then these invariances (or uniformities) can be held to "signify a unity of the observed universe and hence of science. Their presence does not mean that all areas of reality are reduced to a single level, e.g., that of biological or sociological organized complexity, but that the various levels of reality, ranging from the atomic to ecological nature are "vertically" interrelated by means of properties lending themselves to isomorphic models, i,e., those which exhibit fundamental invariances of basic constructs, conserved throughout a range of transformations. It is not the analogy of phenomena, nor yet the identity of properties, which signifies the possibility of General System Theory, but the isomorphy of invariant constructs, such as laws of development, structure and self-maintenance, occurring in differentiated form in the manifold realms of nature.
The term "system", "systems approach", and "systems theory" are all currently recognized as legitimate scientific concepts, We must be sure we do not construe these disciplines as part of the subject of this thesis, We are interested in theories of complex systems as subdisciplines of General System Theory. As Mesarovic put it, "General System Theory uses the weakest mathematical structure which is compatible with the intuitive meaning of the concept." This is opposed to "Systems Theory", which is a deductive principle of mathematics.