  The concept of complexity appears in virtually all areas of knowledge. Its
intuitive meaning shares similarities across fields, but disagreements between
its details hinders a general definition, leading to a plethora of proposed
measurements. While each might be appropriated to the problems it addresses,
the lack of an underlying fundamental principle prevents the development of a
unified theory. Here it is shown that the statistics of the amount of symmetry
broken by systems can be used as such unifying principle. A general methodology
is outlined and explicit expressions are given for cases in which it can
capture the behavior of the two main groups of complexities currently in use.
The presented results demonstrate that statistical asymmetry is an appropriate
foundation for characterizing the general concept of complexity.
