Richard Jung: Experience and Action: Selected Items in Systems Theory

Echoraum of Vienna has recently published Experience and Action: Selected Items in Systems Theory by Richard Jung (1926), a man with a remarkable personal and professional life. Already in his early youth he participated in an anti-fascist resistance. He was consequently deported to the Little Fortress concentration camp at Terezín. Later, in post-war Czechoslovakia, he was also politically active as a representative of the youth movement. Already during his high school and university studies he provided himself with a wide multidisciplinary background for his later professional life. After graduating from agricultural school, he studied law at Charles University (1945-1948). At the same time, in 1947 he began to study political science and social anthropology at the London School of Economics. During his stay in England, he also had an opportunity to study philosophy and ethics at the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre. His interest in these subjects led him in the same year to Paris to study Indian philosophy at the Ramakrishna Mission. In 1948, he emigrated to Finland and thereafter to Norway. While making his living by doing various jobs he managed to continue his studies, first at the Graduate School of Political Science and Social Work in Helsinki, where he pursued political science and later at the University of Oslo, with a specialisation in political science and sociology. In 1954, he moved to the USA where he studied at the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. He completed his university training at the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University (1955-57), where, in addition to sociology, he also studied social and clinical psychology and social anthropology. At Harvard, he got a PhD in social relations under the supervision of T. Parsons. Jung also worked as Parsons’ assistant for some time. He reflected upon this in his biographic study on Parsons (Jung 2006). During his long and fruitful life, he also worked at other prestigious American universities, such as Pittsburgh, Cornell or Rutgers University and Vassar College. Apart from the USA, he worked also at the University of Alberta in Edmonton (where he is a professor emeritus) as well as at universities in Amsterdam, Augsburg, and Duisburg, Brunel University (now renamed University of East London), El Colegio de Mexico, the University of Hawaii and finally also at the Charles University in Prague. The multi-disciplinarity of his education was evident in his teaching. He lectured not only in the fields of psychology, sociology and political science, but also in communication, cybernetics, and the comparative theory of animal behaviour. Most importantly, he had a life-long engagement in the area of systems analysis and cybernetics, for which he was awarded in 2008 by the American Society for Cybernetics the Norbert Wiener Gold Medal. The award especially highlights his role as a founder of the Center for Systems Research at the University of Alberta as well as in Kutná Hora. After 1989, R. Jung took the opportunity to move back and settle down in the country of his origin which allowed him (as a scholar and university professor) to actively participate in its postcommunist formation. Currently, he lives in Kutná Hora as an active local citizen. Throughout his rich life, R. Jung had unique opportunities not only to meet but also to cooperate with renowned sociologists such as Robert Merton, Paul Lazarsfeld or Talcott Parsons. He worked together with Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the author of the general systems theory, and was a friend with many other highly regarded social scientists. He consistently refers to these colleagues with respect and gratitude. His book is thus a profound recognition of his friends and colleagues and a special recollection of the most important outcomes of his scholarly work so far. The fact that this book is retrospective predetermines, to a certain extent, the book’s genre. Although it is a collection, the title Experience and Action transforms the book into a monograph. Nevertheless, considering the quality of each chapter, the significance of the themes and the erudition of the author, the book can be regarded as a set of mini-monographs. The chapters present the author’s main papers written throughout a half a century (starting in 1957). Due to their encyclopaedic character they give the impression of perfect literary units. Reading the thirteen closed mini-monographs is not a light matter -which Ranulph Glanville commented on in the foreword to Jung’s book, as did Jiří Musil in the Czech Sociological Review. Contemplating the subject of the book, one gets an impression of respect towards the author’s solemn approach to his theme, but one might also get an impression of esotericism. Reading Jung’s book might leave the reviewer somewhat hesitant. In order to competently review this kind of book, one