Abstract
Nothing is more in keeping with the spirit of Niklas Luhmann's work than to entitle this article with an apparent paradox: the simultaneous presence of ambition and modesty. What Luhmann offers is a theory of society, a 'grand theory' in the European tradition, but one which runs directly contrary to the claims for universal competence and exhaustive accounts of reality associated with 'grand theories'. It is a theory which acknowledges modestly that it cannot answer many of the important questions that face modem societies. In his introduction to a glossary of his theoretical terminology,2 Luhmann places his theory in an historical context. He writes:
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