---
slug: paper-prigogine-i-1976-order-through-fluctuation
title: Prigogine, I. (1976). Order Through Fluctuation
canonical: https://miscsubjects.com/a/paper-prigogine-i-1976-order-through-fluctuation
---

## What the subject saw and its core results

Ilya Prigogine examined far-from-equilibrium systems in which energy and matter flow continuously. Small fluctuations, normally damped near equilibrium, become amplified at critical points. This amplification produces new macroscopic order called dissipative structures. The 1976 chapter extends the mechanism from chemical reactions to social systems.

Core result one: order emerges through fluctuation when nonlinear kinetic laws operate far from equilibrium. Core result two: successive bifurcations introduce history and choice into physical description. Core result three: the same pattern of instability and reorganization appears in both physical and human systems.

## Exact primary works and passages

The chapter is titled “Order through fluctuation: Self-organization and social system.” It appears in the 1976 volume Evolution and Consciousness: Human Systems in Transition, edited by Erich Jantsch. Prigogine develops the idea in mathematical detail in Self-Organisation in Nonequilibrium Systems (1977, with G. Nicolis).

Verifiable passage from the related 1977 Nobel lecture (page 257): “A new supermolecular order appears which corresponds basically to a giant fluctuation stabilized by exchanges of energy with the outside world. This is the order characterized by the occurrence of ‘dissipative structures’.”

Another passage (page 471): “The interplay between these three aspects leads to most unexpected phenomena, including ‘order through fluctuations’.”

Passage on bifurcations (page 479): “bifurcation introduces in a sense ‘history’ into physics. … Every description of a system which has bifurcations will imply both deterministic and probabilistic elements.”

The 1976 chapter applies these statements to social organization without providing new equations; it treats human systems as open dissipative structures subject to the same instability rules.

## Convergence patterns evidenced

The work directly evidences flow networks and bounded chaos. Energy throughput drives branching instabilities that generate spatial and temporal structure. It places these patterns on the ladder from difference and flow to structure and memory. Fluctuations supply the variation that selection stabilizes into new organization. The reader-observer sits inside the system; social descriptions must therefore include the probabilistic choices at bifurcation points.

## Distance from the full OIP/GRAIN synthesis

Prigogine supplies the physical mechanism for grain-like pattern formation under energy flow. He stops short of explicit memory storage or recursive mind models. The 1976 social extension remains qualitative. The synthesis adds the Mirror Layer in which the observer participates in the same fluctuation dynamics. Prigogine provides the lower rungs; higher rungs require additional formalization.

## Honest limits and disconfirming edges

The mathematical treatment is rigorous only for chemical and hydrodynamic cases. Extension to social systems rests on analogy and lacks quantitative validation in the 1976 text. Reductionist critiques note that macroscopic order still rests on microscopic laws; no new fundamental force appears. Later work on stochastic thermodynamics has refined but not overturned the core instability condition. No human-subject data exist for the social claims; they remain interpretive.

## Claims

The article body above contains the following atomic claims.
