Luhmann's Sociology Research Articles

What Society? Invisible Machines, Control, and Niklas Luhmann's Theory of Society

What Society?Invisible Machines, Control, and Niklas Luhmann's Theory of Society Cristina Iuli (bio) The ubiquity of notions of communication and control is a reflex of the success that the discourse of Cybernetics as a regime of signification gained from the second half of the twentieth century, when an epistemology based on the systemic relation between information, function and communication spread across heterogeneous disciplinary domains and eventually became an epistemological dominant. The emphasis on communication, in the specific declination that followed a well-known trajectory in the history of post-World War II first and second order cybernetics,1 is crucial to Niklas Luhmann's theory of society, which addresses modern society not in the conventional terms of classical sociology, as an organization of groups, individuals, or communities, but as a plurality of interdependent, self-organizing, and self-propelling functional systems whose operations consist of communications, and which process and manage their environment through their own communication. Modern society, in Luhmann's view, exists and is organized by the interactions of a series of functionally autonomous, specialized subsystems—politics, law, science, art, education, etc.—that establish themselves autologically by applying self-referential codes carrying the principle of selectivity by means of which they organize and reproduce themselves, their own organization and their own elements recursively, as communication, from an environment that—to paraphrase Ludwig Von Foerster—knows no communication. The two fundamentals of this theory are that the functional distinction between system/environment replaces all ontological binarisms inherited by the metaphysical tradition (subject/object; body/mind; culture/nature; individual/society), and that the relation between any system and its environment is always asymmetrical because the principle of selectivity deployed by systems to define their relation to the environment is by [End Page 133] definition limited by their specific self-referential code; consequently, any system is always less complex than its environment. Following these two axioms, Luhmann's sociology reconceptualizes the relation that classical sociology establishes between subjects, objects and social space as a relation of systems, environments and communication, and redefines communication itself as "the specific operation whose autopoietic process leads to the formation of social systems in corresponding environments"2 (2012, 41). In this view, society surfaces as a complex "network of communication" (1990, 100) that bootstraps and recursively reproduces its own organization as communication in the context of overwhelmingly complex environmental conditions. In this perspective, communication clearly means something very different from the "transference" of meaning or information between a sender and a receiver, or from the process of encoding and decoding of signs. Similarly, meaning indicates something very different from a quantity of mental or ontologically given content to be exchanged between minds or people. Reconfigured through the language of information theory and second order cybernetics, meaning is conceptualized as the medium through which social and psychic systems—societies and minds—process their difference from the environment and from each other. This difference is then observed and "re-entered" into the system by the system as a form that presents simultaneously the difference between what is actualized and what is excluded. The inclusion/exclusion dynamics paradoxically keeps available for future reference what is excluded by the very act of selection as reference to other, not actualized possibilities. This is why Luhmann defines meaning as the two-sided form of the contingent difference between what is actual and what is potential, and argues that each meaning, which "exists only as meaning of the operations using it, and hence only at the moment in which it is determined by operations, neither beforehand, nor afterward," always means "itself and other things" (2012, 18, 20).3 This excursus on meaning is important in our discussion of the reproduction of society, as we will see, because meaning is the adaptive, universal medium through which psychic and social systems have co-evolved by integrating the difference between information, utterance and understanding and by deploying it to continue their autopoiesis as either consciousness [End Page 134] (in the case of mental operations) or communication (in the case of social operations). Through meaning, these systems have evolved by developing increasingly sophisticated, time-constituting structures to build their internal complexity in order to better adapt...

Repeated Reinterpretation of Civil Society: On the Intellectual Context of Niklas Luhmann's Sociological Theory

This article explains the intellectual context of Niklas Luhmann's sociological theory. Although Luhmann's theory is well known for its highly abstract features, this does not mean that the theory results from his references to the latest general systems theory, which has been the primary focus of previous literature. That said, no social theory is produced in a vacuum. Even if a theorist attempts to construct a general sociological theory to explain every social phenomenon, that theory is necessarily influenced by the theorist's prejudices. Therefore, social theory must be contextualized both to estimate its biases and to limit its scope. This study shows that Luhmann's systems theory is constructed through a struggle with the issues of his day. First, it notes that the question of how to conceptualize modern civil society was widely shared by German intellectuals from the late 1950s to the 1970s and that the question created a certain discourse field. Second, Luhmann's theoretical conception is contextualized in that field of discourse, and the central role of both the concept of functional differentiation and the concern with border maintenance in his theory‐building is explained in comparison with the work of contemporary intellectuals. To deepen our analysis, this article reconstructs Schmitt's interpretation and criticism of civil liberalism and describes Luhmann's struggle with it. Finally, by analyzing the Gesellschaftswissenschaften of Robert von Mohl, one of the founders of civil liberalism, this article argues that Luhmann's sociology can be characterized as an attempt to rehabilitate civil liberalism.

Lawyers as Sanctifiers: The Role of Elite Law Firms in International Business Transactions

Globalization has fundamentally accelerated and altered business transactions. The search for low labor costs and cheap raw materials has led to a proliferation of international transactions, and large, international law firms are called on to participate in complex transactions helping business tap into sources of finance around the world for investment. This article first examines the theoretical underpinnings of international legal practice, taking into account the historiography of U.S. and U.K. law firms. Part II describes the economic and political factors behind law firms' rise. Part III analyzes the success of the common law, as expressed through contract, at the expense of civilian codes. Part IV examines how international law firms have capitalized on their growth and success. Part V draws upon Luhmann's sociology of law to begin to explain how law firms achieve their aims by creating supporting and enabling structures for business. Part VI highlights a case study of the creation of a legal investment device, the U.K. Pfandbriefe. The conclusion suggests some ways of bringing these diverse strands together that explain law firms' roles in international business transactions through the management of uncertainty and stabilization of expectations.

Luhmann, Habermas and the theory of communication

In his critique of Luhmann's sociology, Habermas (1987) argued that individuation and socialization are possible on the basis of linguistic structures. This critique touches the blind spot of sociological systems theory as a meta-biology. Whereas the paradigm shift from action theory towards communication theory was fully reflected in Luhmann's sociology, the difference between the self-organization of social systems and the autopoiesis of biological systems remained underspecified. Social systems allow for communication about observations from within the system and/or from another perspective. Observers are able to participate both in the variation and in the selection; Giddens (1976) introduced in this context the metaphor of a ‘double hermeneutics’. Through language the distinction between uncertainty and meaningful information is communicated reflexively, and the consequent codification may be changed without becoming confused. The implied communicative competences can be specified from the perspective of communication theory. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

La religion comme système de sens. Introduction à la sociologie de la religion de Niklas Luhmann

Niklas Luhmann's principal contribution to German sociology of religion, a book entitled Funktion der Religion (1977), has yet to be translated into French. Its precise but abstract language is not easily accessible without a preliminary introduction. In this article, the author attempts to provide just such an introduction. As an entry into Luhmann's sociology of religion, he has chosen the notion of meaning. In evaluating Luhmann's sociology of religion, the author limits himself to characterizing it relative to his underlying image of humankind.

Science as system vs. science as practice: Luhmann's sociology of science and recent approaches in science and technology studies (STS)—a fragmentary confrontation

The last twenty years not only saw the development of a distinctive systems theory by Niklas Luhmann, but also the emergence of a transdisciplinary field called science and technology studies (STS), which emanated from the older sociology of science. This contribution is dedicated to a basic confrontation of theoretical approaches in “new” STS with Luhmann's sociology of science as a part of his theory of society. On the one hand, I want to depict some similarities between both approaches, i.e. the linguistic/semiotic turn, relativism and reflexivism. On the other hand, in the second section, I try to show some of the major differences between recent STS theories and Luhmann's autopoietic systems theory. Basic distinctions are identified with regard to the perception of science (closed system vs. “seamless web”) and the different scope of the theories. This finally leads to the modest conclusion that these conceptualizations can hardly be integrated and thus reflect the complexity of contemporary science - both as “subject” and “object”.

“Structure”/“Action” Contingencies and the Model of Parallel Distributed Processing

L'A. aborde la fonction de la structure sur l'action et le phenomene de reproduction et de reformation de la structure par les agregats d'action. Son etude du couple « structure »/« action » se caracterise par l'analyse de quatre modeles existants de « structure »/« action » en sociologie, dans lesquels l'acteur et ses interets occupent une place essentielle

COMPLEX ORGANIZATION AND NIKLAS LUHMANN'S SOCIOLOGY OF LAW

Niklas Luhmann's sociology of law is a description of the emergence of legal structures as the development of congruent reactions to the disappointment of norm expectations in a society of individuals faced with an excess of possibilities. The criteria for the selection of such laws is the enhancement of norm congruency. Differentiation and self-reflexivity when they are complimented by the complex concepts of hierarchical order and constraint meet the three requirements for an evolutionary system, a source of variety, a mechanism for selecting from among the variety, and a mechanism for fixing the choice. The concept of congruency communications as developed by Luhmann determines the criteria for the validation of the legal system. Finally, Ronald Dworkin's theory of legal principle is examined as a hierarchical control system which limits the possible range or valid law to those activities which can achieve some sense of congruence in the society.

Beyond Good and Evil? A Study of Luhmann's Sociology of Morals

Beyond Good and Evil? A Study of Luhmann's Sociology of Morals