Cybernetics views humans as complex functional mechanisms that are not fundamentally different from machines. From the beginning, it defined itself as a new unified science. Initially limited to a small group of avant-garde scientists, it became a scientifically and socially effective tool for work, organization, and interpretation by the mid-1950s. Ultimately, it introduced mathematical and technical thinking into the human sciences, thereby profoundly changing the understanding of the social, political, and economic realms, of the psychological, the arts, and even of thought itself. This volume reconstructs the key stages of its historical development in science.