The study of Society as a Chaotic System

Systems approach in Sociology is a baggage that the social sciences have carried owing to their connection with other sciences such as biology. The organismic analogy of Durkheim and later Parsons seems to be the foundation on which the systems theory in Sociology could build its edifice. Elements and their myriad configurations seem to be the building blocks of a system. Thus there could be three types of system-deterministic, random or chaotic based on the various states of the system determined by the configurations assumed by constituent elements. Human society could be considered as one such system with its normative structure providing us with a somewhat reliable model of analysis. At the same time, the complexity encountered leads us to look at it as a chaotic system. The argument receives a challenging counter-argument from Per Bak (1996) who tried to distinguish between a complexity theory and chaos theory and ruled out the possibility of explaining human society from a chaos theory perspective. This article seems to review a section literature that seeks to establish the validity of chaos theory in the study of human society.