Appendix: Niklas Luhmann

Summary

ALTHOUGH NIKLAS LUHMANN (1927–98) is seen in Germany as one of the most important figures not only in the history of sociology, but also philosophically, he continues to be less well understood in the English speaking world. After a brief period in the 1980s when his work was commented on by David Wellbery and Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, interest in Luhmann has been marginalized by the increasing turn, especially in America, toward the Foucault-inspired “happy positivism” of New Historicism or Geertzian cultural anthropology. Luhmann was a latecomer to an university career: after a study of law and ten years' work as an administrator in Hanover, he went to Harvard in 1962 as the student of Talcott Parsons, and was then appointed professor of sociology at the then newly founded University of Bielefeld, where he would remain for the rest of his life. Luhmann's early work remained inspired by Parsons (the only major sociological figure who did not come in for sharp criticism in his writings), although he would later revise Parsons's structural functionalism with borrowings from the autopoietic biology of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Luhmann's interest in cybernetic models of explanation has its predecessor in Parsons's own work. So does his constant stress on “differentiation” of society, meaning the functional distinction of society into distinct subsystems such as law, economy, art, religion or education. “System” in Luhmann thus means, on one level, these social subsystems, which can no longer be subordinated to any one overarching system of meaning (as in older, stratified social models, where religion or politics could dominate other systems).