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Niklas Luhmann

Source: Niklas Luhmann - Wikipedia

Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist, philosopher of social science, and a prominent thinker in systems theory, who is considered one of the most important social theorists of the 20th century.

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Inventor of Zettelkasten Note Taking System

Luhmann was famous for his extensive use of the “slip box” or Zettelkasten note-taking method. He built up a Zettelkasten of some 90,000 index cards for his research, and credited it with making his extraordinarily prolific writing possible.

It was digitized and made available online in 2019. Luhmann described the Zettelkasten as part of his research into systems theory in the essay Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen.

Systems Theory

Luhmann’s systems theory focuses on three topics, which are interconnected in his entire work.

  1. Systems theory as societal theory
  2. Communication theory and
  3. Evolution theory

The core element of Luhmann’s theory pivots around the problem of the contingency of meaning and thereby it becomes a theory of communication. Social systems are systems of communication, and society is the most encompassing social system. Being the social system that comprises all (and only) communication, today’s society is a world society.

A system is defined by a boundary between itself and its environment, dividing it from an infinitely complex, or (colloquially) chaotic, exterior. The interior of the system is thus a zone of reduced complexity: Communication within a system operates by selecting only a limited amount of all information available outside. This process is also called “reduction of complexity”. The criterion according to which information is selected and processed is meaning (in German, Sinn). Meaning being thereby referral from one set of potential space to another set of potential space. Both social systems and psychic systems (see below for an explanation of this distinction) operate by processing meaning.

Works

Luhmann wrote prolifically, with more than 70 books and nearly 400 scholarly articles published on a variety of subjects, including law, economy, politics, art, religion, ecology, mass media, and love. While his theories have yet to make a major mark in American sociology, his theory is currently well known and popular in German sociology, and has also been rather intensively received in Japan and Eastern Europe, including Russia. His relatively low profile elsewhere is partly due to the fact that translating his work is a difficult task, since his writing presents a challenge even to readers of German, including many sociologists. (p. xxvii Social Systems 1995)

Much of Luhmann’s work directly deals with the operations of the legal system and his autopoietic theory of law is regarded as one of the more influential contributions to the sociology of law and socio-legal studies.

Luhmann is probably best known to North Americans for his debate with the critical theorist Jürgen Habermas over the potential of social systems theory. Like his erstwhile mentor Talcott Parsons, Luhmann is an advocate of “grand theory”, although neither in the sense of philosophical foundationalism nor in the sense of “meta-narrative” as often invoked in the critical works of post-modernist writers. Rather, Luhmann’s work tracks closer to complexity theory broadly speaking, in that it aims to address any aspect of social life within a universal theoretical framework — as the diversity of subjects he wrote on indicates. Luhmann’s theory is sometimes dismissed as highly abstract and complex, particularly within the Anglophone world, whereas his work has had a more lasting influence on scholars from German-speaking countries, Scandinavia and Italy.

Luhmann himself described his theory as “labyrinthine” or “non-linear” and claimed he was deliberately keeping his prose enigmatic to prevent it from being understood “too quickly”, which would only produce simplistic misunderstandings.

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