Erich Jantsch (8 January 1929 – 12 December 1980) was an Austrian system-theorist, philosopher, astrophysicist, engineer, educator, author,[1] consultant and futurist, especially known for his work in the social systems design movement in Europe in the 1970s.

[3] As consultant to OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development); prepared studies on the world food problem, technological forecasting, higher education, etc.

[5] For the last few years of his life, Jantsch was without a job and lived in an "apartment in Berkeley: dark and depressing room, with massage parlours above and below; a typewriter, a plant, and scattered copies of his favourite newspaper, Neue Zürcher Zeitung".

[7] Jantsch's Gauthier Lectures in System Science given in May 1979 at the University of California in Berkeley became the basis for his book The Self-Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution, published by Pergamon Press in 1980 as part of the System Science and World Order Library edited by Ervin László.

The book deals with self-organization as a unifying evolutionary paradigm that incorporates cosmology, biology, sociology, psychology, and consciousness.

It was extensively cited in Ken Wilber's integral philosophy book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution.

[8] Magoroh Maruyama wrote in a eulogy: Jantsch succumbed at the age of 51 to the material and physical hardships that worsened progressively during the last decade of his prolific and still young life.

... Let us face squarely the fact that Jantsch was given no paid academic job during a decade of his residence in Berkeley—a town considered to be a foremost spawning ground of scientific and philosophical innovations."