Systems Theory According to Niklas Luhmann: Its Environment and Conceptual Strategies

Abstract

Readers who encounter systems theory for the first time may find that an understanding of this theory seems to lie behind a string of forbidding barriers, together forming a near-impenetrable bramble hedge. The first of these barriers is due to the fact that the term has acquired so many negative connotations as to cast an evil spell on the open mind. No doubt, the term has forfeited its good name by falling into bad company with associations and concepts of dubious repute, such as rigidity, constraint, impenetrability, insensitivity, inhumanity, and other villainous elements in the fields of semantics with which one invariably associates a requirement to view one's own spontaneity as a fairly insignificant part of some evil mechanism. For our purposes, we shall have to rehabilitate the term by purging it of any traces of compactness and compulsiveness. A system must not be regarded as a structure that appropriates free-floating elements from the outside; rather the system and its elements come into being simultaneously via the reproduction of the system's internal differentiations. There is no system without difference. The fact