Norbert Wiener's politics and the history of cybernetics

Abstract

International audience ; Cybernetics is a by-product of the Second World War, a discipline that tries to unify different fields of research and different engineering cultures under the universal term of information processing. From this position, it extends towards the life and social sciences. Cybernetics describes a kind of alliance between some applied mathematicians, some engineers and biologists during and after the war. The history of cybernetics gives us a remarkable opportunity to isolate the different levels of interaction between political commitment and constitution of a scientific discipline.