Unencumbered by a depth of knowledge, the European Enlightenment seems an unlikely source for the idea a systems world view. The traditional image of the Enlightenment, despite countless revisions and reevaluations, is of a movement whose major intellectual impulses may be categorized as: critical, analytic, scientific, mechanistic, and anti-metaphysical. While more conventional appreciations of the Enlightenment have with good reason emphasized its positivist and mechanicalist thrust, an opposing countercurrent was also apparent in Enlightenment thought. Indeed, in the works of Spinoza through to Kant and boldly evident in Hegel and Marx one may detect a holistic discourse. These authors are, in Nietzsche's phrase, the “Knight of totality.”
The background of this history is crucial enough for us to linger with it for some time. Yet it would be unwise to attempt herein a comprehensive history of the concept of totality and holism in European thought; not only would such an account tax the reader's patience, but it might also convey the misleading impression that a unified and coherent history of holism could be written with coevolutionary political economy as its telos.
With our more limited agenda in mind let us follow Robert Unger for whom “there is no single tendency in the history of modern social thought more remarkable in its persistence or more far-reaching in its influence than the struggle to formulate a plausible version of the idea of totality.”(57) The concepts of “totality" and “holism" have enjoyed a prominent place in the discourse of the Cultural West motivated perhaps by a Hellenic nostalgia for a primal unity and a stubborn attraction to its implicit reliance on holistic associations, as opposed to the Cartesian primacy of the simple. Suffice to say that there are other, more rigorous motivations....