We suppose that the tidal disruption of star clusters can be described by a stochastic process, and formulate the problem in terms of the theory of stochastic processes. This method has several advantages. As an example we consider a spherically symmetric cluster with uniform mean density, and calculate the rate of increase in energy of a test star to second order in the interaction strength in terms of the autocorrelation tensor of the stochastic process. The results of this new approach are compared with previous work.