Since its conception in the mid-nineteenth century, entropy has been a resource for social thought. The dire prophecy of heat death and the inescapability of inefficiency have been invoked to unify theories of human bodies with those of the body politic through a rigid logic of energetic scarcity. In the twentieth century, social theories of entropy have imbued the informatic measures of cybernetics, notions of value in ecological economics, poststructuralist literary theory, and the much-hyped complex sciences. By equating physical decay with their specific theories of social decay, these thinkers invoked entropy to naturalize a politics of value and waste.
This project follows the history of entropy from the end of World War I to the turn of the twenty-first century to historicize how physical order became valued as a social good. Drawing on archives across Europe and the United States, it traces a transition from the moralization of the physics of work during the nineteenth century to the moralization of order in the twentieth century as natural scientists, social scientists, and bureaucrats turned to the laws of physics to find the laws of society amid a plurality of mid-century crises—increasing pollution, growing income inequality, stagnating economic growth, or limited resources. This new dialogue centred the spontaneous emergence of order, rather than the laborious ordering of the world, as the basis for a critique of, and a framework for what might come after, high-modernist thought.