H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-13 on Rindzevičiūtė, The Will to Predict64 min read

In her new signal history that spans early modern science, the positivism of the Russian Revolution, Cold War cybernetics, and ends with the post-Soviet period, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė has accomplished something extraordinary, as is affirmed by this roundtable of experts and scholarly specialists. In The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future through Science, she outlines a serious history and theory of Soviet scientific prediction. Her book is both an alternative genealogy as well as work that is uncomfortably resonant with the current late modern epistemic condition. Her seven chapters on the Russian twentieth-century history of scientific prediction led her to what she describes in her response as “a pervasive feeling of the inadequacy of human knowledge to confront the existential uncertainties of social, political, and geophysical futures.” As this roundtable which involves close readers of the Soviet century makes clear, The Will to Predict brings into close relief what Peter Brown calls “a sense of the salutary vertigo” in the differences between then and now, even if this sense is itself an uncertain fiction that likely stems from the fractal differences embedded within any historical moment.[1] It also offers a cautionary similitude between the Russian scientific tradition of prediction and the presentist artificial intelligence (AI) moment. Behold scientific prediction, an unsettled and unsettling positivist pharmakon.

H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum

Roundtable Review 16-13 

Eglė Rindzevičiūtė. The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future Through Science. Cornell University Press, 2023. ISBN 978-1-5017-6977-1 (hardcover, $56.95).

15 November 2024 | PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt16-13 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo

Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Seth Offenbach
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Bethany Keenan

 

Introduction by Benjamin Peters, The University of Tulsa. 2

Review by Teresa Ashe, The Open University. 7

Review by Ivan Boldyrev, Radboud University. 14

Review by Ksenia Tatarchenko, Singapore Management University. 20

Response by Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, Kingston University London. 24

In her new signal history that spans early modern science, the positivism of the Russian Revolution, Cold War cybernetics, and ends with the post-Soviet period, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė has accomplished something extraordinary, as is affirmed by this roundtable of experts and scholarly specialists. In The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future through Science, she outlines a serious history and theory of Soviet scientific prediction. Her book is both an alternative genealogy as well as work that is uncomfortably resonant with the current late modern epistemic condition. Her seven chapters on the Russian twentieth-century history of scientific prediction led her to what she describes in her response as “a pervasive feeling of the inadequacy of human knowledge to confront the existential uncertainties of social, political, and geophysical futures.” As this roundtable which involves close readers of the Soviet century makes clear, The Will to Predict brings into close relief what Peter Brown calls “a sense of the salutary vertigo” in the differences between then and now, even if this sense is itself an uncertain fiction that likely stems from the fractal differences embedded within any historical moment.[1] It also offers a cautionary similitude between the Russian scientific tradition of prediction and the presentist artificial intelligence (AI) moment. Behold scientific prediction, an unsettled and unsettling positivist pharmakon.

It is hard not to see the relevance of this history behind the current headlines: with every chart foreseeing the changing consequences of the climate, the transmissibility of COVID-19 as a determinant of global excess deaths and attending growth curves of world population, the muscular astrology of public opinion polls in election seasons, the endless speculative forecasting of stock markets, and so many others, Rindzevičiūtė’s interest in the uneasy art, artifice, and science of modern-day prediction is clear. Perhaps no element of public life has become at once as ubiquitous, poorly understood, and totemic of modern-day unease as the scientific prediction—and its step-siblings, risk and rationality. Together the three blur the lines between the description and projection of what was and is into what might and even ought (not) to be. Here The Will to Predict assembles and critically reassesses the Soviet historical ballast in which to anchor an understanding of how prediction sciences, precisely in the act of seeking legitimacy behind the mask of formal rigor, become informal and political in the thick scrum of institutional histories and their interests. As every model becomes a model both of and for the future, perhaps we may observe kazhdoe predskazanie, predlozhenie (every prediction, a suggestion).

Rindzevičiūtė, building on her previous book, The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World, offers several banner suggestions herself. She argues that the meaning of scientific prediction is orchestrated in the thick of the institutions that complexly build, interpret, and use them.[2] Arguably the winning strategy for creating these systems, from the Soviet century to artificial intelligence today, is a term borrowed from Georgii Petrovich Shchedrovitskii: “prospective reflexivity” (122), or the reflexive alignment of meaning-making where groups of stakeholders, who can never know the future, may nonetheless develop self-reflexive and self-examining behaviors that would right that group’s practical management. Here the boundary between object and subject in a system blurs, as the subject becomes aware of their objecthood, and objects become reflexive subjects. Thus, a prediction blurs into a performance, since, in predicting something, a system becomes a self-conscious system that is in thick relations with other systems that are trying to first make up the meaning of that very analysis.

It is a staying irony of Rindzevičiūtė’s thesis, and a classic point in pragmatism, that in the modern prediction sciences, which are the very genre that is meant to give meaning before the fact, meaning still arrives late. I am not alone in reading The Will to Predict as joining a sophisticated and serious bookshelf of historical epistemological exercises, ranging from Schrödinger’s Cat to Sebastian Vehklen’s Zootechnologies, in how the modern world came to not just not know, but to not know itself well. Much postmodern theory has the unfortunate tendency to express this reflexivity through navel gazing and unclear prose: there is little of that here. The Will to Predict is rendered in admirably plain and forceful prose; the book is abundantly clear about how hard it is to be clear about the future. In most cases, the fuzzier the future predicted, the higher the resolution of its discussion; it is a minor triumph to have historically situated unstable theory so clearly.

What else might the twentieth-century encounter with predskazanie, predvidenie,prognoz, predlozhenie, and perhaps even prorochestvo, all of which are Russian variations on “prediction,” have to teach a decolonizing twenty first century? In the roundtable that follows, Teresa Ashe, Ivan Boldyrev, and Ksenia Tatarchenko, experts in their respective fields of the history of environments, philosophy, and science and technology, weigh in on Rindzevičiūtė’s book.[3] Each reviewer offers a thumbnail sketch of each chapter before critically weighing or applying the book’s contribution elsewhere, and the author responds to their interventions with characteristic style. As is appropriate for this book, the result is a guiding constellation of insights for future work precisely in the refraction of the different lights the reviewers cast. May the book attract many more lights.

Aside from all mentioning Russian President Vladimir Putin and the ongoing decolonial project of any study of Russian-language materials, the reviewers approach the historiographic knot that is central to the book from different approaches: Ashe, for example, considers how the centrality of the Cold War in framing the emergence of Western climate change discourse has tended to contradictorily overlook both the specificities of the Russian experience—a nontrivial portion of any global environment analysis—as well as the complex, reflexive relationships between science and governance on which Rindzevičiūtė focuses her analysis. Boldyrev, who also raises questions about how the book’s focus on prediction also brokers previously sidelined conversations about risk and uncertainty within institutional and political contexts, considers the book’s fit, and occasional openings for further consideration, within a larger critical historiography of philosophy. Some of these include the development of reflexivity, particularly the varying theories and charismatic profiles of Soviet sociologist Igor Bestuzhev-Lada, Soviet system-thinking methodologist Georgii Shchedrovitskii, Soviet-American mathematical psychologist Vladimir Lefebvre, and Soviet mathematician Nikita Moiseev. Together, these profiles spell out a second-order cybernetic contribution to prediction as at once attempting to analytically transcend, institutionally embed itself, and thus stabilizing prediction practice into the tumultuous institutional demands of a cold war global conflict. Boldyrev notes that prediction appears, in the author’s phrasing, as “stabilizing devices: they focus attention, mobilize agency, and synchronize collective action”: she stresses how prediction has less to do with realizing the future as much as checking reality here and now. The author Rindzevičiūtė notes in her reply here that “scientific predictions are best understood as cogs rather than complete machines of knowledge. I have tried to show in my book that such cog-like scientific predictions in effect moderate the modern cultural desire to obtain a perfect – or actionable – knowledge about the future” (my emphasis). Predictions which are enacted in the present thus crucially limit the foreseeing of the future. As Faxe, one of Ursula Le Guin’s characters in the Left Hand of Darkness quips, “the only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.”[4]

Finally, Tatarchenko’s excellent review rounds out the roundtable by emphasizing how the rocky misfit between speculative prediction sciences and the practical and informal institutions that house them opens new historiographical opportunities for reconsidering the traditions of Soviet cybernetics. She notes that the Soviet cybernetics that Rindzevičiūtė charts vary productively from the received histories to date, marking out previously unseen continuities between the late Soviet period and what eventually became what Putin calls the russkii mir (Russian world) as well as fruitful comparisons with China. The curious effect of these recommendations, as I see them, is that by closely framing analysis around institutional practices within the state, and not the rise and fall of any state itself, Rindzevičiūtė has helped refresh a potentially sustainable decolonizing approach to Eurasian history and the philosophy of science and technology, even as the West often draws out that same literature along its own colonizing and colonized lines. Science, we are reminded—and particularly the science of prediction—is not limited to mere epistemology and technical practice, but unfolds reflexively across sociohistorical instability in the near-constant scrum of political power, cultural systems, and cognitive geopolitics.

The assembled reviews of The Will to Predict substantially engage with questions such as: “What is scientific prediction, and how did it come to be,” “What are the epistemic and institutional implications of the sciences of foreseeing the future,” “How is foreseeing the future institutionally and informally orchestrated into the past and present tenses,” “Whence positivism, cybernetics, and institutionalist pragmatism in the making of the future across the Soviet century,” and, among other comparisons and analogies across the rising Eurasian century, “How might this story inform and illuminate transnational histories of reflexive (cf. back-propagated) machine learning and longer tradition of governance by states and statistics”? The roundtable assesses The Will to Predict for its signal contributions to how not just the last century came to know itself in, and then mistake itself for, its reflections in its prediction sciences.

 

Contributors:

Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, PhD, is Associate Professor of Criminology and Sociology in the Department of Criminology, Politics and Sociology, Kingston University London, UK. She is the author of The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World (Cornell University Press, 2016) and The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future through Science (Cornell University Press, 2023). Dr. Rindzevičiūtė is the Principal Investigator of the international research project “Nuclear Spaces: Communities, Locations and Materialities of Nuclear Cultural Heritage (NuSPACES),” funded as part of the European Union’s Joint Programming Initiative for Cultural Heritage, 2021–2024. Dr. Rindzevičiūtė’s current research interests involve the intellectual history and sociology of governance of complexity, particularly the emergence of global environmental governance and the digitality, the shifting forms of scientific expertise in public policy, as well as material culture of Cold War science and technology and its heritagisation.

Benjamin Peters is the Hazel Rogers Associate Professor and Chair of Media Studies as well as affiliated faculty at the School of Cyber Studies at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. He is the author and editor of several books including the widely reviewed, prize-winning How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (MIT Press, 2016) and at work on projects on Soviet AI and, with Marijeta Bozovic, Russian hackers. He is also an affiliated fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.

Teresa Ashe is a Staff Tutor (Lecturer) in Economics at the Open University in the UK. She manages economics teaching, teaches in economics and environmental geography and her scholarship focuses on the power of expert knowledge in international relations. Her research areas include the history of climate change, anti-environmental movements and environmental journalism and communication. Her research particularly looks at the similarities and differences between environmental thought in the US and Russia during and after the Cold War. Recent publications include Teresa Ashe and Marianna Poberezhskaya “Russian Climate Scepticism: an understudied case” in Springer’s Climatic Change (2022),; Nelson Ribeiro, Barbie Zelizer, Sonia Livingstone, Teresa Ashe, Media and Uncertainty. (Center for Media at Risk, 2021); and “Introduction” in Marianna Poberezhskaya and Teresa Ashe, eds., Climate Change Discourse in Russia: Past and Present (London, 2019).

Ivan Boldyrev is currently Assistant Professor of History and Philosophy of Economics at the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He is a philosopher and an historian of ideas with wide-ranging interests including the history and philosophy of recent economics, German idealism, and critical theory. Representative publications include three books: Hegel, Institutions and Economics: Performing the Social (with Carsten Herrmann-Pillath) (Routledge, 2014); Ernst Bloch and his Contemporaries: Locating Utopian Messianism (Bloomsbury, 2014); Die Ohnmacht des Spekulativen: Elemente einer Poetik von Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes (Fink, 2021); and three edited collections: Economic Knowledge in Socialism, 1945–1989, co-edited with Till Düppe (Duke University Press, 2019), Enacting Dismal Science: New Studies on the Performativity of Economics, co-edited with Ekaterina Svetlova (Palgrave, 2016), and Interpreting Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Expositions and Critique of Contemporary Readings, co-edited with Sebastian Stein (Routledge, 2021).

Ksenia Tatarchenko (PhD in History, Princeton University, 2013) is Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the College of Integrative Studies in The Singapore Management University. She recently coauthored a two-part article on computing and mathematical logic: Ksenia Tatarchenko, Anya Yermakova, and Liesbeth De Mol, “Russian Logics and the Culture of Impossible. Part I: Recovering Intelligentsia Logics,” and “Part II: Reinterpreting Algorithmic Rationality,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (2021), and coedited a special issue, “The Lives of Late Soviet Science,” Cahiers du Monde Russe (2022), with Gregory Dufaud. Her new essay, “Algorithm’s Cradle: Commemorating al-Khwarizmi in the Soviet History of Mathematics and Cold War Computer Science” came out in Beyond Craft and Code: Human and Algorithmic Cultures, Past and Present, Osiris 38 (2023): 286-304. Her book SCI_BERIA: Novosibirsk Science City and the Late Soviet Politics of Expertise is forthcoming in 2024.

Eglė Rindzevičiūtė’s book “examines the history of scientific prediction as both a concept and a form of practice as it developed in the quintessentially future-oriented country of Soviet Russia” (2). Its close reading of the specifically Russian experience of epistemological, scientific, and political issues surrounding the enterprise of prediction does much to decolonize and decenter Western experiences of the science/policy interface. Additionally, the scientific enterprise of prediction examined is so pervasive, that the book is pertinent to a range of issues with global economic, environmental, military, and philosophical implications. It is thus a book that is remarkable both for its focused engagement with an understudied area and for its wide significance, which makes it hard to overstate the range of areas in which this book should have an impact. The book draws on a range of literatures in epistemology,[5] science and technology studies (STS),[6] published works on psychology,[7] governance,[8] biology,[9] economics,[10] geo-science,[11] and publications of specific Russian thinkers.[12]

After introducing the book’s aims and the Russian case study, Rindzevičiūtė begins her book with a chapter exploring the nature of scientific prediction in pre-modern, modern, and late modern periods. This chapter shows that prediction came to be placed “at the very heart of modern scientific knowledge and practice” (20) through the positivist traditions, which distinguished science from “mantic” traditions of prediction (divination) by the aim to find rules of prediction. Rather than foretelling what would happen next from a parade of signs and symptoms, such as in astrology, early medical diagnosis, or augury, good science was that which discerned the underlying rules and laws that govern the studied phenomena and thus predicted accurately.

Chapter 2 looks at the emergence of the prediction culture in Russia and the work of economist Nikolai Kondrat’ev in the 1920s–1930s. It makes clear that Russian statistical forecasting was influenced by French positivism, but that in “Russia, positivism developed alongside mathematics and statistics in a symbiosis with what would become a modern state apparatus and industrial economy,” (39) and it thus created a unique culture of prediction. The chapter explains the institutionalization of forecasting in early Soviet planning and the career of Kondrat’ev, who viewed prediction as a part of science, but unlikely to be precise in areas of complexity like economics. Rindzevičiūtė shows that in “postrevolutionary Russia there were diverging approaches to what is a proper scientific prediction in state governance” (55). Kondrat’ev critiqued central planning as giving a spurious sense of control and scientific authority through an outpouring of statistics in Russian governance, but did not feel that these statistics were predictive: “the positivist thrust of management science propagated “illusory” predictions which did not meet even the positivist epistemological criteria as science, but which nonetheless were legitimized as scientific” (56).

Chapter 3 considers the 1940s and the global turn towards cybernetics, with mathematician Norbert Wiener’s insights shaping scholarship in diverse fields of science. Wiener’s idea of cybernetics focused on goal-oriented, course-correcting action and impacted a wide range of activities, from management to the natural and social sciences of the 1960s. While the idea was criticized from a range of quarters as potentially dehumanizing and controlling, Wiener himself considered “feedback-based prediction as the driver of open-ended, adaptive behavior rather than the deterministic mechanism of an automaton” (62). Rindzevičiūtė argues that servomechanisms, which integrate self-reflexivity and course correction into goal-oriented functioning, make cybernetics different from positivist prediction, because its aim is action, not knowledge of rules. She emphasizes that “the cybernetic notion of prediction is performative: it is based on process tracking which is plugged into feedback loops enabling an organism or machine to adjust to its environment” (73). For example, a hound can follow the trail of a fox with little sense of the fox’s perception of the pursuit, but a cat and mouse chase involves both participants’ intentions interacting and anticipating each other in order to determine the outcome (62-3). For this, rule-governed approaches are less agile than heuristic patterns. Rindzevičiūtė notes that the idea of prediction as pattern recognition led Andrew Pickering “to go as far as declaring that cybernetic sciences are a case of nonmodern science” (36).[13]

Chapter 4 looks at forecasting and the cybernetic sensibility in Russia, which draws on the “idea that individual and organizational behavior should be based on informational processing, predictions, and feedback” (73). This chapter shows how positivist and cybernetic epistemologies of prediction became entwined. It considers the history of forecasting in the Soviet economy and how, after initially being banned, the idea of cybernetics became important. Recognizing thinkers such as Genadii Dobrov, a pioneer of computer science; Aleksei Kosygin, Chair of the Council of Ministers from 1964 and supporter of the State Commission for Electrification of Russia (GOELRO); Dzhermen Gvishiani, an influential Westernizer and East-West trade architect; Igor’ Bestuzhev-Lada, the Soviet face of forecasting internationally; and Anatolii Zvorykin, historian of science and technology, she shows that cybernetics was important in shaping the Soviet will to predict. The cybernetic sensibility was significant in evidencing scientificity in this enterprise, but actual cybernetic prediction was not facilitated, due to the nature of totalitarian regimes. The opacity of the society, siloing of information, lack of access to data, and unwillingness to have economic planning responsive to real-time feedback meant that any hope of prediction that involved reflexivity and course correction was constrained.

The rest of the book goes on to consider Russian thinkers who developed ideas of prediction in Russian governance. Chapter 5 discusses the contributions of Georgii Shchedrovitskii, whose work aimed to bridge the gap between the goal setting of the Soviet state and the messy reality of opaque, interpersonal informal fixing that allowed the economy to run. Through the work of the Moscow Methodological Circle, he developed an idea of “prospective reflexivity” that shifted the notion of scientific forecasting from an input-output model to a reflexively coproduced idea of the future, which could be created through active participation and “projecting the self reflexively into the future” (122). Rindzevičiūtė makes clear that “Shchedrovitskii’s genius was to lend a formal, scientific methodology to confer an aura of legitimacy on informality, wedding it to the formal planning of the future in Soviet enterprises and administrations” (107).

Chapter 6 considers Vladimir Lefebvre and his work on the epistemology of deception and “reflexive control,” which considers interactions where awareness of one’s own and one’s adversaries’ subjectivity is an element of the conflict. A trained mathematician and psychologist who emigrated to America, Lefebvre’s work is notable for his real-world influence on Cold War interactions, but Rindzevičiūtė also points out theoretic similarities to the work of George Soros in addressing financial deception, in which Soros “claims that the awareness of reflexivity guides his investment decisions” (143) and allows him to make money through the successful manipulation of the perceptions of other investors.[14] Rindzevičiūtė also considers the claims of US military analyst Timothy Thomas that “reflexive control” characterizes post-Soviet military engagement. For example, Thomas “suggested that Russia’s informational warfare operations in Ukraine achieved their objective because the Russian government managed to maintain plausible denial of involvement for a considerable time, simultaneously minimizing the threshold of violence so as not to prompt an international reaction” (146).

Chapter 7 charts developments from cybernetic sensibility and reflexivity to an awareness that goal setting, reflexivity, and prediction are not viable in solving problems of great complexity over long timelines, such as in addressing climate change, manipulating the global economy, or anticipating the impacts of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The chapter recognizes “what is probably the most challenging task for scientific prediction—to generate knowledge about extremely complex, large-scale, and long-term phenomena, knowledge that would be faithful to reality and, at the same time, actionable, useful for collective decision-makers” (150). It recognizes that it is unachievable, but that the effort to achieve it is still valuable because it involves an “orchestration” of the future.

One great value of this book is simply that it sheds light on the Russian experience of a fascinating twentieth century scientific enterprise that cuts across social, economic, and natural science. It recognizes the synergies between different disciplines and between Russian thought and other regions, yet also captures the specificity of the Russian experience. However, in my own research, which focuses on the history of environmental thought and particularly climate change knowledge, the culmination of the argument in chapter 7 is of particular significance, because it addresses a notable gap in the Anglophone literature.[15] There has been so much to say about the development of climate change discourse in Western Europe and America that other regional experiences have been somewhat neglected.[16] The decolonization of the often Western-centric narrative is thus highly welcome, both in itself and because, in the Cold War context, the asymmetries in the study of the two superpowers have limited this area of scholarship.

I argue in my forthcoming book that in the United States the process of climate research saw a coproduction of both new science and new understandings of the relationship between science and society. At the start of the pivotal period from the 1950s–1970s, the hopes of climate control and weather modification were an important part of the way that US climate research was funded.[17] In an era of what Paul Edwards calls “mutual orientation,” “military funders did expect that at least some of the work they paid for would ultimately lead to weaponry or to other forms of strategic advantage, including useful practical knowledge.”[18] In Oceanography the study of carbon dioxide was presented as “basic science” and achieved less successful institutionalization than the meteorological studies of climate using computers, which were framed by John Von Neumann, the Hungarian-American polymath, as part of a research program that would have inherent military possibilities: “most constructive schemes of climate control would have to be based on insights and techniques that would also lend themselves to forms of climatic warfare as yet unimagined… useful and harmful techniques lie everywhere so close together that it is never possible to separate the lions from the lambs.”[19] Yet the question of how Soviet scientists were engaging with climate science and weather modification and weaponry is less clear.

The centrality of the Cold War in this period has always fascinated me and raised questions about the corresponding experience in Soviet Russia. Through the 1960s and 1970s, research undertaken in computer modelling in the US led to an increasing awareness of complexity, uncertainty, and the fragility of nature in the face of human activity. Drawing on the work of scholars like Paul Edwards and Antoine Bousquet, I argue that climate science and environmental thought co-produced each other in this period.[20] As scientists began to frame their research less as a step towards the Promethean control of the weather and more as a cause for wariness and concern, they affected the nascent environmental movement’s understanding of the relationship between nature and society that made this reframing possible. Computer modelers played an important role in querying existing conventions for understanding the relationship between nature and society and between science and the state. Critiquing Cold War policy, such as the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983, meant that by the 1980s they were no longer aligned and mutually oriented to the Republican understanding of America’s Cold War role.

The question of whether Russia experienced the same kind of renegotiation encouraged my engagement with literatures on the history of environmental thought, Russia’s involvement in environmental regimes and climate research in Soviet Russia.[21] While there is a sizable literature on this topic, Rindzevičiūtė’s work is the first I have discovered that directly considers the impact that climate modelling had on the wider relationship between science and governance. It situates this in a longer history of that epistemological change that comes with the recognition of a shift from an epistemology based on mechanistic worldviews to one embracing complexity and reflexivity. Attempts to chart the history of climate change as a scientific and political issue are very successful in understanding the American experience.[22] Yet, I would argue, they are incomplete without also engaging with complementary texts like Rindzevičiūtė’s, which provide the “Soviet-eye view” of some of these events. Chapter 7 is therefore of particular interest and value in this research area.

The idea of orchestration is developed through a focus on the developments in Earth system science and governability and the research of the 1960s and 1970s, which led its scientists to become “convinced that the rigid, positivist notion of prediction could not cross the threshold of high complexity, in terms of both knowledge and action” (151). The chapter looks particularly at the work of Nikita Moiseev, of the Moscow Physics-Technical Institute, and his bringing together of cybernetics and systems analysis with different modes of governance. The chapter considers the way that the computer modelling of earth systems led to a shift of epistemological frameworks and of notions of governance “from purposive control to guidance through milieus” (151). Milieu is used as a notion of ceasing to try to control individuals in a prescriptive manner, but to recognize and shape the material arrangements surrounding them to guide them in a generally desirable direction. It is a “shift to embrace the collective, synchronizing role of scientific prediction as it goes beyond cognitive operation as in logical empiricism and beyond target-seeking processes of adaptation in cybernetic behaviorism” (151). Rindzevičiūtė shows that “Nikita Moiseev’s call to orchestrate multilevel predictions in order to create governance as guidance through milieu, represent[s] original and timely intellectual innovation” (184).

Another area in which this book is important is science communication, which has hitherto focused particularly on “risk” and “uncertainty” in exploring the gap between public perceptions of science and expert pronouncement. Rindzevičiūtė’s provocation to add “prediction” to this scrutiny is an important one. By focusing on prediction, she provides a genealogy of what scientific knowledge is expected to do in a particular society as it changes over time. As Rindzevičiūtė makes clear, “[s]cientific prediction is at once technical, political, social and institutional” (1). Since accurate predictions demonstrate and constitute power under a positivist epistemology, it has strong implications for power:

scientific prediction is commonly understood as an estimate made by presumably best-informed experts and which can be confidently evaluated as either right or wrong. In turn, the success of scientific predictions is judged in a somewhat naive way: when scientific predictions appear to be right, they are taken as proof of the power of science to deliver knowledge and certainty. When scientific predictions are not confirmed by the actual turn of the events, they are dismissed, perhaps undermining the status of the organizations or individuals involved, or perhaps undermining the power and legitimacy of science more generally (2).

Through her discussions of Russian thought and thinkers Rindzevičiūtė shows how the ideas of cybernetics disrupted the positivist tradition of prediction and thus impacted many different areas of thought, eventually shifting into a new “era of orchestration.”[23] This orchestration involves leadership in a world that ontologically accepts complexity, yet public discourse may still rely on positivist or cybernetic evaluations of prediction. Reflecting on prediction may be a key area for changing expectations at the policy interface in a range of areas.

Overall, the book is a delight, because it sheds light in so many directions at once. From anticipating economic change, understanding the role of AI, and addressing climate change, to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, many contemporary issues are illuminated by this ostensibly narrow focus on prediction in Russian thought. This is largely because the deeper topic of this book is not Russian thought, but the nature of knowledge and power in a world that is no longer imagined as mechanistic and rule-governed. Recognizing complexity and interdependence is both the topic being delineated and also the context in which the reader recognizes the importance of this thought in the real world.

The Will to Predict is an important contribution to the history of policy sciences in the twentieth century, focusing on prediction, both as a concept and as a set of institutionalized practices. It rethinks the Nietzschean drive—the will to power—in a new context, the Cold War, with a particular (but not exclusive) focus on Soviet contributions. In this, it draws on—and adds decisively to—the historical literature of the last decade (including the author’s previous book[24]) that explores the social sciences in the socialist world.[25] Overall, the book is commendable for its immense erudition, both theoretical and historiographical; for the masterful ways it draws on archival research as well as Russian-language literature; and for the insightful analysis of scholars and institutions that, for the most part, are absent from the histories of recent social sciences.

The idea that the unknown future must be accounted for epistemologically was present at the very beginning of Western science. While The Will to Predict points at Cicero, I would even start with Aristotle’s De Interpretatione with its famous sea battle argument: we cannot attach a truth value to the proposition that “tomorrow there will be a sea battle” unless tomorrow actually comes. Here, the importance of prediction is already fully recognized. Of course, for a contemporary reader, some further implications emerge: that uncertainty is unavoidable, that we still have to develop tools (such as probability theory) to deal with it, that these tools, too, remain limited, and the foundations of our knowledge have to be revised in view of this uncertainty.

Why do Cold War cultures of prediction matter? Once we recognize, on the one hand, the ever-increasing importance of policy expertise for the global challenges and uncertainties of today, including the climate crisis and the ubiquity of probabilistic prediction accompanying our everyday lives, and, on the other hand, the new Cold War that began in 2014 with the Russian annexation of Crimea, the relevance of this project becomes apparent. Building on this and taking prediction as an entry point, Rindzevičūtė’s historical work is a contribution to understanding the complexities of modern governance and the pitfalls of the (inescapable) politicization of technical expertise.

The book is organized chronologically but begins with a very helpful and extensive theoretical discussion detailing the premodern (conjectural), modern (positivist), and late modern (cybernetic) theories of prediction. Already in the pre-modern conjectural hermeneutics, Rindzevičūtė argues, there is a performative assemblage of predictions and practices/techniques, so that it helps “orchestrate, especially synchronize, reality” (19). It was the nineteenth-century French positivist Auguste Comte who made prediction a key element of science, while twentieth-century German philosophers of science Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim associated prediction with explanation. Rindzevičūtė traces the shift from a simple “linear” idea of prediction to the more open-ended future-driven cybernetic notions of feedback loops and “circular causality” (31), with empirical data being a source of error correction (34).

Chapter 2 considers Soviet forecasting as a series of political gestures—requiring more transparency, challenging and changing existing epistemic and social infrastructures, and revealing possible flaws of the planned economy. The hypothetical, skeptical theory of prediction espoused by Nikolai Kondrat’ev is analyzed as a precursor of a cybernetic notion of prediction and as proposing an alternative to deterministic equilibrium thinking (in fact, Kondrat’ev’s approach to equilibrium analysis was probabilistic). Kondrat’ev’s elaborate theory, coupled with common sense, made him a staunch opponent of voluntarist, arbitrary, top-down approaches to Soviet planning that lacked both theoretical support and empirical justification. His own vision was, I would suggest, much closer to what would later become the French approach to planning, with plans as flexible “guiding directives” (54), and not exact prescriptions. I believe that it was—among other, more political, reasons—this Soviet faith in performative governability that led to the demise of Kondrat’ev and his approach in the 1930s. Indeed, in chapter 4 we encounter Soviet planners’ impatience with the French practice of prognosis that “does not command anyone” (76).[26]

The next chapter analyzes the cybernetic idea of prediction and emphasizes its open-ended, pragmatist, and teleological character. Its major protagonist, Norbert Wiener, unlike the positivists, “did not believe that societal development is lawful” (65). Prediction, in this setting, becomes an element of an interactive system that helps adapt and deal with uncertainty by assembling and mobilizing human and non-human actors. An element, but a crucial one, for “[i]n the spirit of cybernetics, society predicts itself into being” (69).

Chapter 4 turns to Soviet forecasters of the 1960–1980s and their “cybernetic sensibility,” which strikes me as a very helpful concept for capturing important tendencies of these decades. The chapter shows how a technoscientific enthusiasm led to the emergence of social forecasting, with Igor Bestuzhev-Lada as the main protagonist. Bestuzhev-Lada was very active in his organizational attempts to integrate the forecasting of social tendencies in the policy making process, but his own scholarly contributions remained quite limited and superficial.[27]

Chapter 5 then turns to the more unusual, but arguably also more significant, ideas and practices of late Soviet period: that is, to Georgii Shchedrovitskii’s “prospective reflexivity.” The group of “methodologists” founded by Shchedrovitskii is indeed an extremely interesting phenomenon, and its historicization is one of the book’s great merits. (The comparison of Shchedrovitskii’s ideas with those of social forecasters [103] seems a bit far-fetched though: their starting points, approaches, problems, and social milieus were quite different.) The performative nature of prediction is very well captured in the “activity games”: numerous interactive efforts at collective sense-making and coordinating group goals organized by Shchedrovitskii in the 1970s and 1980s at various Soviet organizations and enterprises. “Prediction, in this case, is an effect of social, reflexive alignment of meaning-making” (116). In his exercise in pragmatist practical philosophy, in which the subject and the object are not strictly separated (120), Shchedrovitskii tried to achieve this alignment by estranging Soviet managers from their routines and using their informal horizontal relations.

Another concept, “reflexive control,” introduced by Vladimir Lefebvre, is the focus of the sixth chapter. This element of non-cooperative strategic interaction is, in fact, a technique of deception and manipulation that involves “shaping the interpretive frames of the opponent in such a way that the opponent’s reality and choices narrow down and their behavior becomes predictable” (123). Lefebvre, who I’d hesitate to call a game theorist, was a broad-minded psychologist with a penchant to logic and formalization, “dreaming about creating a logical machine of deception” (133).

In fact, Rindzevičūtė shows that Lefebvre was critical of game theory and developed his own alternative one to study human conflict. His co-authored Algebra of Conflict (1968) reads like a Soviet response to a Cold War classic: Schelling’s Strategy of Conflict (1960),[28] that was only translated into Russian in 2005. The chapter provides a fascinating account of Lefebvre’s reflexive games, which were used as a very practical theory of conflict situations. This theory, in Rindzevičūtė’s reading, was not about finding an equilibrium and generally not about understanding the structure of optimal interactions, but rather about winning the game. For that, sharing information with the opponent or, crucially, imposing on them one’s own logic became the Soviet Cold War counterpart of empathy. Rindzevičūtė argues that both the standard game theoretic and the reflexive visions of strategy could be seen as “social phenomena that perform a symbolic organizational function” (145).

What is remarkable in Lefebvre’s story is that he seems to have found an eager and supportive audience and to have had a real influence on both sides of the Iron Curtain, first among Soviet military strategists in the 1960s (136) and then, after his emigration in the 1970s, among the US diplomats of the Ronald Reagan era (138-139). It is not fully clear why this was the case (and whether the influence was indeed as huge), but one thing remains clear: this type of idea may help legitimize deception.

The final chapter of the book discusses prediction in the context of “extremely complex, large-scale, and long-term phenomena” (150), such as climate change. The way to do that—what is called in the book “governance through milieu”—was essentially to consider various types of predictions as pertaining to the various levels of complexity and to focus on the contexts of decision-making rather than on its precise goals. The major proponent of this approach, Nikita Moiseev, is credited with creating “a Soviet version of Earth system governmentality” (154) following up on Vladimir Vernadskii’s idea of noosphere, or extension of the biosphere due to the transformative influence of human societies (which could be seen as anticipating the concept of Anthropocene). Moiseev re-functioned “Vernadskii’s geophysical philosophy into an applied policy science” (155). Armed with computer modelling, this policy science suggested stability, rather than accelerating growth, as an aim of global governance (169).

Moiseev is shown to have had some affinity with Friedrich von Hayek and other neoliberals, especially in his belief in limits both to the capacities of optimizing government and to the ability of mathematical modelling to fully capture the complexities of real societies. It was fascinating to read about Moiseev’s talks at Yale University in mid-1970s, which were invited by no other than Tjalling Koopmans (161), about the ungovernability of economies. Note that this happened in the very moment when macroeconomics was experiencing its ungovernability moment, in the form of the rational expectations revolution, that, along with other neoliberal ideas, forged a new consensus on the limits of macroeconomic governance.[29] In his idea of global policy, Moiseev suggested focusing on limits, or boundaries, of mankind’s survival. This amounted to countering complexity not with a false precision, but rather with a flexibility and awareness of the fundamental uncertainty that is inherent in the dynamics of the global Earth system and with the new expertise infrastructure (but without a fully democratized participation of all the stakeholders). The presentation of Moiseev’s ideas in the book is lucid and engaging. It is less clear, however, whether his ideas on global modelling really “transformed the Soviet governmentality” (179), as the book says.

Throughout the book, some general tendencies are discernible. Theoretical innovation in the prediction research has most often come from recognizing the multi-layered nature of reality —and policy knowledge trying to account for this reality. This is clear both in the discussion of complexity in second-order cybernetics (32-33), in the analysis of reflexivity (125-130) and in the chapter on Moiseev’s governance through milieu.

Historically, the Cold War remains the major frame for the book’s narrative. Thus, the scholars discussed in the book, such as Bestuzhev-Lada and Moiseev, were quite active in explicitly addressing the topics of nuclear war and disarmament,[30] while Lefebvre’s theory was a direct response to the challenges of global conflicts. Their scholarly effort was thus linked to these international political realities.

Finally, the topic of the book that I found quite fascinating, and the one having deeper methodological consequences, is the focus on temporality. Apart from an engaging discussion of early Soviet work on the temporal organization of labor (54-56), it also connects prediction to the synchronization of action in organizations (192). The idea of linking planning and associated forms of social scientific knowledge in the socialist regimes to temporality does not seem to be very widespread among intellectual historians and definitely deserves more attention.

The general lesson of the book is the idea that predictions are performative: like conventions,[31] they are “stabilizing devices: they focus attention, mobilize agency, and synchronize collective action” (184). In the wake of Michel Foucault with his idea of dispositive, or apparatus (7), and Bruno Latour, with his actor-network theory,[32] it shows very well that any epistemic project in the policy sciences is at the same time an institutional project, and always implies some institutional critique. A great example of this entanglement of infrastructural, institutional, and epistemic change is the creation of the All-Soviet electricity grid GOELRO (52). In fact, these constellations are ubiquitous.

For this reviewer, the book’s shortcomings are less associated with the story told there—it is told in a remarkably accurate way[33]—but rather with the untold, that is, with the directions in which its argument could be developed. For example, the philosophical background of early Russian debates in statistics, discussed in chapter 2, was shaped by the work of Alexander A. Chuprov, and this context (that adds neo-Kantianism to positivism) would be worthy of further discussion. The links between Shchedrovitskii’s methodology, discussed in chapter 5, and the informal practices in the Soviet economy is something that also remained at the background of the book and that would be interesting to explore further.

One final critical note: at times, it seems that the concept of prediction is too narrow for this book, and that what it actually explores is not only risk, but the more general patterns of rationality in decision and policy sciences. The last two chapters in particular convey this impression.

All in all, the book is a great addition to the literature and a very helpful source for anyone wishing to know how scholars of policy sciences in the Soviet world struggled to understand and to plan the future.

The Will to Predict is a timely book in more ways than one. Amidst the senselessness of the Russian war in Ukraine, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė’s work is inspirational and hopeful. Exploring ideas of thinkers associated with the Soviet system, it demonstrates that scientific prediction may inspire collective action. The book’s audience, however, stretches far beyond the groups of researchers whose areas of expertise are Russian economic and cybernetic thought or the Cold War. Although History and Science and Technology Studies (STS) might be home to many of the book’s potential readers, Rindzevičiūtė’s main argument is not a historical observation, but an epistemic and political statement that is intended just as much for the community of modelers and practitioners who are dealing with scientific predictions on a daily basis: political scientists, security officers, managers, and climate scientists.

While the challenges to both scientific certainty and coordinated action in relation to forecasting are too many to list, the climate crisis is the paradigmatic example of our failures.[34] By restoring a sense of plurality to the techniques and approaches of scientific prediction, Rindzevičiūtė brings history and the sociology of the future into conversation with the present. Her proposition is to rethink the context and practices of scientific prediction. The recovery and the inventory of different types of predictions ground her epistemic arguments, which are simultaneously a call to refocus scholarly discussion, to draw it away from the failure of prediction and rather embrace prediction as a practice of “democratic orchestration of different forms of knowledge and agencies (193).” The importance of this proposition is marked by the book’s subtitle, “Orchestrating the Future through Science.”

This proposal, which is the most ambitious and largest of the book’s interventions, is the result of remarkable scholarship combining two intellectually distinct accomplishments. The first of the two produces a historical synthesis of the evolution of prediction techniques and their epistemic status over centuries, a synthesis encompassing a wide-ranging historiography preoccupied with temporalities. The second feat takes the form of an astute analytical reading of the works of particular Soviet thinkers. The book is remarkable not only for its non-Western focus and long chronological frame; it stands out from the narratives of the mechanization of knowledge and the evacuation of judgment enabled by the predictive powers of the key Cold War technology: the computer.

For instance, best-selling American historian Jill Lepore crafts her 2020 If Then: How the Simulmatics Invented the Future as a parable of seemingly well-intentioned technocrats who fell under the spell of the profit of the computerized prophecy and compromise both knowledge and democracy in the America of the 1960s.[35] The reader eager to look beyond the established genre of a cautionary tale should follow the steps of Rindzevičiūtė’s inquiry. However, although the book’s arguments do not depend on a mathematical understanding of statistics, they demand a certain level of intellectual curiosity to engage with the knotty epistemic questions and the more technical aspects of prediction.

Different modes of prediction organize the seven chapters of the book, which opens with a question, “What is scientific prediction?”, and closes with a chapter reflecting on scientific prediction of a global scale: “Global Prediction: From Targeting to Orchestration.” For the sake of the overview, I distinguish three segments that structure The Will to Predict. The first two chapters establish a longue-durée perspective. Both chapters highlight the continuity of ideas, for instance between medieval prognosis as a reading of signs and statistical forecasting understood as a form of testing of both methods and data. While the first chapter overviews the epistemic status of prediction in Western thought (including its ties to ancient mantic wisdoms and its changing status in positivism and logical empiricism), it also introduces the reader to relations between prediction and uncertainty and to distinct predictive operations in statistics such as interpolation (i.e., inference from the observed phenomenon that may concern present or future events) and extrapolation (i.e., learning from something not explicitly stated from existing information or in the context of the absence of routine observations). In Chapter 2, “Visibility, Transparency, and Prediction,” we see how the ideas and practices of forecasting were acculturated in the context of Imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union, starting with Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler and culminating in the work of Nikolai Kondrat’ev (1892–1938). Kondrat’ev headed the Conjuncture Institute that was inspired by the US National Bureau of Economic Research and is remembered for his writings on long economic cycles. Rindzevičiūtė sheds light on the Soviet economist’s theoretical reflections on scientific prediction, especially his 1926 “On the Problem of Foresight,” and his arguments about managing a planned economy.[36]

Although not the most voluminous of the book, Chapter 3, “Cybernetic Prediction and Late Modern Governance,” deals with cybernetics, a notoriously challenging topic which engenders a significant body of scholarly literature that is enmeshed in the debates about the intellectual roots and the heritage of the field.[37] This chapter is key to the central argument of The Will to Predict, as it introduces the cybernetic roots of the notion of “orchestration” (67). It is also a chapter in close dialogue with Rindzevičiūtė’s 2016 The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened up the Cold War World, and elaborates upon the themes of scientific governance and system thinking.[38] The chapter takes on the pivotal move of dethroning the “anti-aircraft predictor,” which considered to be the principal military technology of prediction associated with cybernetics since Peter Galison’s classic essay “The Ontology of the Enemy.”[39] Galison connects the core of cybernetic thought to the context of the Second World War, when Norbert Wiener worked on the “anti-aircraft predictor,” a device calculating the location of the enemy aircraft at a given moment and extrapolating the most likely trajectory moments in the future. Shifting the epistemic focus out of the battlefield and uncoupling calculation and control, the chapter stresses an internally heterogeneous and “humbling” epistemology of cybernetics, embracing uncertainty and limited determinism. “To predict the future cybernetically, for Wiener, is not only to employ abstract reason to master the world and time,” explains Rindzevičiūtė. “It is rather to combine human and nonhuman actors, people and machines (68).” Contextualizing cybernetic prediction in neurophysiology and psychology, Rindzevičiūtė foregrounds the role of orchestration as a form of coordination and synchronization in order to counter accusations of inherent authoritarianism and militarism of the cybernetic thought. She employs “orchestration” as an analytic category that allows to stress the empowerment of both adaptive and political actions. Chapters 4-7 present the reader with Soviet case studies that illustrate how the new, post-World War II prediction collectives pioneered not only the new forecasting techniques but also the new forms of the social.

Chapter 4, “Forecasting and Cybernetic Sensibility,” delves into the contradiction between the realities of Soviet planning and the emergence of novel epistemic norms of what it means to govern. At the heart of this gap were the new communities of experts localized at new organizations such as TsEMI (The Central Institute of Mathematical Economics, 1963) and IKSI (The Institute of Concrete Social Research, 1968). The new experts were not only mathematical economists but also social forecasters, such as Igor’ Bestuzhev-Lada, the face of Soviet forecasting in the Cold War international community of future studies. Chapter 5, “Predictive and the Opaque: Prospective Reflexivity,” and Chapter 6, “Predictive Control,” both shed light on the late Soviet philosopher-turned-management-guru Georgii Shchedrovitskii and his pupil Vladimir Lefebvre. While Shchedrovitskii made the Moscow Methodologist Circle famous for its emphasis on the collective and transformative character of the act of thinking, Lefebvre further elaborate these ideas in the context of military strategies and his preoccupations with the formalization of reflexivity before emigrating to the United States in the 1970s. The work of the late Soviet mathematician, modeler, and public intellectual Nikita Moiseev takes center stage in the closing, seventh chapter of the book. This chapter emphasizes the notion of orchestration in relation to governance redefined as guidance through milieus, and to prediction as social practice.

It is important to highlight the consequential historiographic revisions concerning scientific expertise under late Socialism that operates in the pages of these last four chapters of the book. Although they are structurally subsumed into arguments about the typology of scientific prediction, these revisions offer important insights to the historians of the Soviet system of knowledge production and complicate the received narrative of the inherent dichotomy opposing the state and the Soviet experts. The focus on the history of ideas also enables Rindzevičiūtė to productively bypass debates about the late Soviet periodization, engaging instead with the striking continuities between late Soviet and post-Soviet intellectual developments: Rindzevičiūtė touches upon the now infamous concept of “russkii mir” (Russian world) that Russian President Vladimir Putin advocates and the contemporary role of cognitive operations in post-Soviet informational warfare. Similarly, stepping out of institutional, disciplinary, and technological constraints to focus on cybernetic sensitivity, Rindzevičiūtė’s description of cybernetics differs from the rise-and-fall story of the Soviet discipline of cybernetics in Slava Gerovitch’s classic From Newspeak to Cyberspeak.[40]

As many ambitious works do, this book also leaves some of its own questions unanswered, all while raising new ones. The biggest issue left without closure upon reading the book does not concern a specific discipline or chronology but rather involves historical versus epistemological methods. It is not clear whether “orchestration” (7) is limited to its status of actor and analytical category, or whether it also shapes forms of historical craft? The biographical sketches of Bestuzhev-Lada, Shchedrovitskii, Lefebvre, and Moiseev are striking stories of charismatic authority, intellectual dominance, and scientific masculinity. This leads one to wonder whether the particular forms of late Soviet institutional and social structures explain the ongoing circulation of their ideas across disciplines, formal and informal circles, and internationally.

Finally, decentering the histories of the future from the West and into the Russian and Soviet context, Rindzevičiūtė posits that a similar study should be possible for China. Such a study would no doubt be particularly fruitful in its own right but also for another perspective on Soviet thought and scientific sociality. Famously, the traditional game of go, or Weichi, although not involved in scientific prediction, is a form of foresight and of control through milieu, encapsulating the masculine virtue of seizing initiative and encompassing both the adaptation to and the manipulation of the environment and men.[41] In sum, offering a story covering both the Western and Soviet approaches, The Will to Predict is a welcome challenge for future historians of scientific prediction to tie its abstractions even closer to concrete bodies and locations as well as to expand its conceptual and geographical map even further.

Response by Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, Kingston University London

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