In this thoroughly researched study of the role of Cold War systems analysis, political sociologist Egle Rindzevičiūtė turns an eye for policy analysis to the history of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), a complex analysis think-tank in Vienna that began in the early 1970s as a Soviet-American collaboration before blossoming into its current status as a global institute with over twenty member nations. Combining a policy analyst's sensitivity to practical politics and a historian's instinct for contingency and context, Rindzevičiūtė argues that Cold War technoscience collaboration cannot be understood from any single perspective: in particular, with IIASA as little-known emblem, it is the east-west scientific collaboration, even more than Soviet-American militarized competition, that sped the transition from a bipolar Cold War analytic frame to the contemporary complex global—and especially environmental—system perspective. While inviting debate about the concepts collaboration and competition, this optimistic argument is admirably focused in scope, given its deep engagement with the IIASA archives and command of the scholarship on Cold War cybernetics. Namely, the book diagnoses how the scientific co-production of universal problem analysis, such as the computer modeling of the nuclear winter and climate change, championed a global cybernetic systems approach between the 1970s and the 1990s. That approach, in turn, by taking on systems that both served and exceeded east-west tensions, also challenged those Cold War frames, especially the notions of linear control that Soviet governance both operated on and contributed to system analysis. Perhaps one may read this as a veiled tale about how the Soviet system undid itself by the international runaway success of its own understanding of itself—and much else—as a special system.

While often wonky turf, systems analysis is easy to understand in principle: it is a type of problem solving that analyzes the component pieces and procedures in a system for optimal performance. That promise of optimal system design, Rindzevičiūtė demonstrates, powers a lion's share of the technocratic dreams and ideals of Cold War governance, whether the technocrat Robert McNamara, the IIASA director and Harvard business professor Roger Levien, or Premier Aleksei Kosygin, who drove the effort to establish IIASA from the Soviet side. This broader trend in latter-twentieth-century governance Rindzevičiūtė names, somewhat clunkily, “system-cybernetic” (1), although her argument, I think, rises to its best in describing the many contextualized ambiguities that attended Cold War technoscience: it is true that operations research and systems analysis can serve any master, whether liberalizing or authoritarian, although, as she argues, the results of systems analysis cannot be separated from the specific process, time, and place with which such a master—or in this case, many masters—do systems analysis. In her analysis we hear a timely reminder that there is perhaps nothing as subversively political as the technocrat's claim that his—and, here, it is almost always a his—preferred approach to power is neutral.

Overall, in seven chapters and an epilogue, The Power of Systems adds a granular transnational history to the recent literature on twentieth-century global systems thought, whose leading lights might include Hunter Heyck's intellectual history Age of System (2015) and Paul Edwards’ history of climate change science, A Vast Machine (2010), whose well-known first book, The Closed World, this book's subtitle responds to. Nonclassified world problems occupied the efforts of IIASA scientists: food, water, energy, agriculture, and especially the environment—and the concluding chapters on the computer modeling of nuclear winter and acid rain stands out for their readable storytelling and dramatic action. In all, Rindzevičiūtė has provided a rare glimpse through the lens of a boutique institutional history of a time and place—in a refurbished mansion outside of Vienna—where east and west fashioned in person an analytic view so global it eventually overshadowed, at least on occasion, their own distinct worldviews. In this hopeful glimpse of the past, the book's limitations are more than matched by its multilingual strengths.