Ascertaining the Normative Implications of Complexity Thinking for Politics

Central to representing the world as a complex dynamical system is understanding it as pertaining to an interdisciplinary approach to nonlinear processes of change in both nature and society. Although complexity research takes its origins from its applications in physics, chemistry, mathematics, and the “hard” sciences, undergoing its formative development in the 1970s, during the last two decades it has exerted an effect on the social sciences as well. Today complexity research is generating what Stuart Kauffman (2008, Preface) calls a “quiet revolution” in both the physical and social sciences