ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the complexity inherent in the very notion of systemic organization. Many of the traditional concepts used by the students of politics are too unrefined to express the puzzling and manifold implications of complexity. Complexity comes from the existence of what Georgescu-Roegen calls a zone of "penumbra" between the concept and its opposite; it is in the interstice that discontinuous and irreversible qualitative changes take place. A large number of randomly interacting entities, which nevertheless display orderly properties, give rise to problems of unorganized complexity; these can be solved through the techniques of probability calculus. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers trace the origin of a science of complexity and of the concomitant evolutionary paradigm to the discovery of entropy. A more sophisticated definition refers to stochastic processes and equates entropy with disorder. Complex organized open systems produce negative entropy, or "negentropy.".
