Systems Analysis in Politics and its Critics

Abstract

An age may often be defined by the great new ideas that sift into all the varied crevices of thought of a given civilization. Regardless of where these ideas may have their start, whether in the natural or the social sciences or in the humanistic disciplines, it is testimony to their compelling strength that as these ideas are exposed to ever widening areas of knowledge, the older ways of thinking give way to the new. Yet as these new ideas leave their original grounds and move into strange fields seldom do they retain their pristine meaning. Each succeeding host discipline kneads and molds them to its own special purposes. But once again the power of the new ideas may be such that regardless of these shifts in meaning, some part of the original sense is retained. This part succeeds in transforming the way men think about their traditional problems and gives birth to whole generations of new ones. Newtonian mechanics and Darwinian evolution were two such universal solvents of traditional ways of thinking about nature, both physical and social.