On Amazon.com, a reader of my book Luhmann Explained wrote: “Niklas Luhmann was a student of Talcott Parsons, from whom he apparently learned only how to write impossibly vague and convoluted prose. I have found reading Luhmann extremely soporific, so I thought perhaps this book [Luhmann Explained] might be refreshingly lucid and penetrating. Perhaps, I thought, if I could only stay awake, I could learn a lot from Luhmann. Alas, such does not appear to be the case.” The review concludes with some practical advice: “If your teenager is bad, don’t ground him; make him write an essay on the sociological theory of Niklas Luhmann.”1
I sympathize with this reader’s views. Having read texts by Luhmann for about twenty years, I have increasingly asked myself why, even though I find the theory very appealing, its inventor did not manage to express it in a reasonably enjoyable manner. Sometimes, particularly in his later works, Luhmann’s irony and humor interrupt his otherwise extremely dry, unnecessarily convoluted, poorly structured, highly repetitive, overly long, and aesthetically unpleasing texts. The irony and humor are refreshing, but do not suffice to rescue most of his books and many of his articles from being, generally speaking, “extremely soporific” reading material. I readily admit, the material sometimes made me fall asleep.
I have been able to come up with several explanations as to why Luhmann was such a bad writer—at least in comparison with, in my view, the brilliance of his theory. All of these reasons, I stress, are explanations, not excuses.
The inherent reason for Luhmann’s bad writing is the peculiar way in which he actually produced his texts. Luhmann’s published oeuvre is enormous. Not only are his books exceptionally numerous, they are also usually very long, often exceeding five hundred pages. Luhmann’s prolificacy was quite methodical. He not only spent most of his time writing,2 but also developed a sort of mechanics of production by making use of a huge note cabinet (Zettelkasten) that he had been assembling throughout his life. He made short notes of ideas, thoughts, quotations, and references to the literature he read. Then he arranged these notes according to a self-developed numerical ordering system that included “links” from one note to others. He could thereby trace his way through the notes in various ways. He spent more time organizing and composing the note cabinet than writing actual texts. The books and articles had only to be extracted from the cabinet. Luhmann said: “I first make a plan of what I am going to write, and then take from the note cabinet what I can use.”3
One effect of this way of writing was, as Luhmann himself admitted, the lack of a clear narrative development. He stated: “I can move from any number to any other number in the note cabinet. Thus, there is no linearity, but a spider-like system that can be started anywhere.” And he added: “This technique, I believe, explains why I do not at all think in a linear way, and why I have trouble finding the right chapter sequence when writing books, since, properly, any chapter should reappear in any of the others.”4
The nonlinearity of Luhmann’s texts makes them not reader-friendly. On the one hand, materials reappear a lot throughout his writings. Even short papers on specific topics typically include passages about Luhmann’s general theory that are hardly comprehensible for the uninitiated reader. In most of his works, Luhmann presents the reader with an assemblage of new remarks about a particular issue along with lengthy repetitions of information about his theoretical framework. While Luhmann was right in stating that a reader can start more or less anywhere in his books, it is also true that one cannot really begin anywhere.5 There is no beginning or gradual initiation to his books—and far less so with regard to the whole theoretical project. Reading Luhmann is therefore frustrating at the beginning, given that the reader is confronted with unknown and unexplained terminology and slightly chaotic shifts between ideas, remarks, and themes. It takes a lot of practice before one can understand how Luhmann uses his idiosyncratic theoretical terminology (which appears to be incoherent at first, since it is borrowed in part from a number of highly diverse sources). And even after one has gained a basic understanding of this terminology, one’s initial frustrating experience is only replaced with another one, namely that of tiring repetitions and interruptions in Luhmann’s often all too lengthy writings.
A second factor contributing to the forbidding nature of Luhmann’s style is what could be called the intellectual heritage that he chose to continue. Luhmann explicitly aimed at constructing a “supertheory.”6 He was therefore willing to connect with the ambitions of the grand theoretical systems of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German idealism and, in particular, its two main representatives, Kant and Hegel. Not only are these two philosophers often referred to in his writings, but it is quite obvious that Luhmann followed them in trying to develop a novel scientific system, which, by being a new theoretical conceptual terminology, had to be sufficiently technical and abstract in order to be applied to an analysis of, basically, anything. On the one hand, this meant the creation of an idiosyncratic vocabulary in the sense of crucial expressions and words that were either neologisms or used outside of their normal meaning. On the other hand, it also led to the vagueness criticized by the aforementioned Amazon.com reviewer, namely, a lack of concrete definitions for the core terminology.
One of the lecturers who introduced Hegel during my first semesters at university frequently had to respond to complaints by students about the unintelligibility of the Hegelian terms. Students often said that they did not know how to mentally represent (vorstellen) the meaning of these words—they did not know what to concretely think of when Hegel wrote in his conceptual manner. The lecturer would explain that Hegel’s intent was to prevent his readers from having any concrete mental representations. Concepts or ideas are meant to be purely conceptual—just as one begins to think mathematically when one no longer has to imagine, let’s say, three fingers or three apples when the number three is mentioned, but understands the concept of three as such without recourse to a concrete image. Even though Luhmann is not an idealist, the terminology of his supertheory often, out of necessity, escapes concrete definitions. Terms such as “distinction” or “observation” are extremely formal. They can be applied in the analysis of nearly limitless concrete (social) phenomena, but cannot be concretely defined—only formally (and this with equally formal terminology).
Luhmann not only inherited the formality of his conceptual vocabulary from philosophers like Hegel and Kant, but also their monumental approach. For these thinkers, a scientific supertheory had to be “supersized.” None of them considered brevity a virtue. In order to be considered serious, a scientific philosophical system of their time had to be large. Such projects as a “phenomenology of the spirit” or a “critique of pure reason” were so encompassing that they simply had to materially consist of hundreds of pages. One could also write shorter, more “popular” treatises (such as Kant’s Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics was supposed to be), but the system itself had to impress through its sheer volume. I think that since Luhmann saw himself as continuing the heritage of “supertheoreticians” like Kant and Hegel (or Marx or Weber in social theory), he also aspired to produce an oeuvre that, in a library, would look at first sight just as impressive as theirs.
It was not only mere quantity, of course, that constituted the heaviness of the systems of the traditional supertheorists, but also their difficulty. Science (in the sense of the German term Wissenschaft, which encompasses all academic disciplines including natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities) had to be esoteric, not “straightforward.” Again, this may be explained by an anecdote from German academic philosophy. A friend of mine, Günter Wohlfart, himself a former German philosophy professor, obtained his Ph.D. in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Frankfurt under the supervision of Adorno and Habermas. Günter once missed a presentation by a visiting lecturer and later asked another student who had been there if it had been any good. The student replied enthusiastically and in all seriousness: “It was awesome—I did not understand a word!” The greatness of a philosophical, scientific, and theoretical book was, within the science and education systems in Germany, measured by, among other indicators, its inaccessibility. The time and mental effort that one had to invest in order to understand a philosophical or theoretical book was considered to be an effect of the quality of the work itself. The more difficult it was to penetrate, the more penetrating the author was supposed to be.
Luhmann was perhaps aware of the difference between German (as well as Continental European as a whole) and North American attitudes toward academic, and, in particular, philosophical and theoretical literature. It may be for this reason that he, somewhat apologetically, though no doubt proudly, and perhaps even somewhat conceitedly, began his preface to the English translation of Social Systems (published in the United States by Stanford University Press) by stating: “This is not an easy book. It does not accommodate those who prefer a quick and easy read, yet do not want to die without a taste of systems theory.”7 In North America, writers and lecturers, including those in an academic setting, are normally assumed to attempt to make themselves understood to their audience. This is considered reputable. In Germany, however, at least since the times of Kant and Hegel, academic audiences are supposed to appreciate the uncompromising intellectual rigidity of a professor who demonstrates his (or, nowadays, also her) competence by not making any attempt to satisfy populist demands. In fact, in an academic context, speakers and writers might well demand that the audience prove itself worthy of the ones addressing it-- just as Luhmann did in his preface to Social Systems.
A third reason for Luhmann’s unappealing and, from my perspective, often clumsy writing style is closely related to the second, namely the German academic discourse and intellectual heritage of which he was a part. In other words, Luhmann (or rather, his writing) suffered from being too closely associated with the German academic elite at the time. Other great philosophical or theoretical writers were lucky enough to enjoy a certain distance from the German language academia and were therefore much less (if at all) infected by the disease of bad writing that had plagued it for a long time. I think of such authors as Marx, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. Unlike those men, Luhmann wrote his texts in an environment of academically pretentious and soporific authors equal to those of his theoretical nemesis Jürgen Habermas.
The widespread cultural revolution of the late 1960s took on a very specific shape in Germany. It was a highly theoretical affair—more so, I believe, than, for instance, in the United States (with the civil rights movement, draft dodging, etc.) or Italy (with its workers’ strikes) where much more practical issues were at stake. In Germany, the revolution was largely academic, and the language used by the academic revolutionaries on the left was just as grotesquely elitist as that of the traditional elites against whom they were revolting. The “progressive” academic authors in Germany were certainly not a stylistic avant-garde. Perhaps one of the reasons that, despite the huge ideological and theoretical disparities between Luhmann and leftist social thinkers like Habermas, a dialogue between the two sides was actually possible, was that they shared a jargon (to borrow Adorno’s famous expression). This jargon has been uniting the German academic world, as far as I can tell, until today—and, at the same time, has served to isolate it from the rest of the world. It would have been nice if Luhmann had somehow been able to escape from it, but, “alas, such does not appear to be the case.”