Jervis: System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life

Jervis, R., 1997. System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life, Princeton University Press.

“We are dealing with a system when (a) a set of units or elements is interconnected so that changes in some elements or their relations produce changes in other parts of the system, and (b) the entire system exhibits properties and behaviors that are different from those of the parts” (6).

Jervis begins the book with a quote about double hulled ships, and a claim that this will surely decrease oil spills. He makes a general point that the results of double-hulling a ship are to some degree unknown (unknowable?). His point carries over to WWI and deals with causation: the reason countries engaged in war was not singly faceted but complex. “As these cases show, it is difficult to know what will happen in a system, but at minimum we can say that a change at one point will have wide ranging effects” (9).

“The phrase ‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts; can call up images of metaphysical ‘holism’ and organic metaphors. That is not what I have in mind. If we are dealing with a system, the whole is different from, not greater than, the sum of the parts. Reductionism—seeking to understand the system by looking only at the units and their relations with one another—is not appropriate. Many academic disciplines have come to this conclusion, although often using different terminologies. Economics rests in part on an understanding of the ‘fallacy of composition.’ Biologists who study entire organisms see the world differently than their colleagues who work on the level of cells of molecules. Interactional psychology rests on the parallel sense that what seem to be immutable personality traits are in fact formed by the interaction between the individual and her surroundings, including, if she is in therapy, the behavior of the therapist, which in turn, is influenced by her” (13-4).

However, Jervis does not see emergence as representing the core of his analysis, but rather interconnection. Interconnection represents the overdetermined nature of the relationships between various variables at different levels of analysis. The interconnected nature of all variables in an open system makes it neigh impossible to forecast future events and the results of future interaction.

While this chapter read almost nihilistic/relativist in its approach to understanding the outcomes from these systems, this is clearly not the scope of the remainder of the book. The second chapter deals with system effects, something that I greatly need to read about, but not at this moment.