Preface
1. See Globalization. An excellent systems-theoretical analysis of the financial crisis is Elena Esposito, The Future of Futures (Cheltenham: Edgar Elgar, forthcoming).
2. Globalization 69, 77, 74.
3. Ibid., 74. Luhmann continues: “And then, the calamity is no longer exploitation and suppression, but neglect. This society makes very specific distinctions with respect to its environment, for example, usable and not usable resources with respect to ecological questions or (excluded) bodies and (included) persons with respect to human individuals.”
4. Michael King, “The Construction and Demolition of the Luhmann Heresy,” Law and Critique 12 (2001): 1.
5. Globalization, 67, 72, 75.
6. Ibid., 76, 67.
7. Ibid., 76.
8. Ibid., 77.
1. The Trojan Horse
1. On the Anglophone reception of Luhmann’s work, see Cary Wolfe, “Meaning as Event-Machine, or Systems theory and ‘The Reconstruction of Deconstruction,’” in Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory, ed. Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 220–245. There are indications, however, that Luhmann’s theory is becoming increasingly relevant in the United States, the UK, and Canada. In the United States, for instance, he is highly influential in posthumanist theory. See, for instance, N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), and more recently, Bruce Clarke, Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), and Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
2. Still more in the way of a sympathetic reception of Luhmann’s theory is probably the theory itself. Not uncommonly, North American academics who actually make the painful effort to read and comprehend Luhmann are more appalled after this process than they were before it. Luhmann’s fundamental opposition to and deconstruction of the basic consensus among the “liberal orthodoxy” that continues to strongly dominate North American social theory is too much to swallow for many of those who have been reared by and still flourish within it. Hardly any social theory contradicts the basic humanist assumptions underlying concepts of a “civil society,” “liberty,” “freedom,” “democracy,” and “justice” as thoroughly as Luhmann’s. No wonder his impact on social theory in the United States and Canada is rather limited. Rodrigo Jokisch expresses a similar analysis of Luhmann’s relatively insignificant success in North America in “Why Did Luhmann’s Social Systems Theory Find So Little Resonance in the United States of America?” in Addressing Modernity: Social Systems Theory and U.S. Culture, ed. Hannes Bergthaller and Carsten Schinko (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011). This issue is discussed in more detail in chapter 3.
3. In P, 200. This volume was edited by Kai-Uwe Hellmann, who also conducted the interview that this quote is from. It was first published as “Systemtheorie und Protestbewegungen. Ein Interview.” Forschungsjournal Neue Soziale Bewegungen 7, no. 2 (1994): 53–69.
4. In P, 74. This interview was originally published in the leftist German newspaper Tageszeitung on October 21, 1986, under the headline “Systemtheorie und Systemkritik, Ein Interview mit Heidi Renk und Marco Bruns.”
5. I use the term “sublate” here as the common English translation for the Hegelian notion Aufhebung. It therefore has the threefold sense of “to lift to a higher level,” “to negate and overcome,” and “to preserve and maintain.”
6. SS, 37; emphasis in the original.
2. Why He Wrote Such Bad Books
1. The review is by Herbert Gintis. See www.amazon.com/Luhmann-Explained-Souls-Systems-Ideas/dp/0812695984/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_3.
2. Asked about his writing habits, Luhmann stated: “When I have nothing else to do, I write the whole day; from 8.30 in the morning until noon. Then I take a short walk with my dog. Then I have some more time in the afternoon; from 2.00 to 4.00 pm. Then it is time for the dog again…. Well, and then I normally write in the evening until about 11.00 pm…. I have to say that I never force anything, I always do what I can do easily. I only write if I know immediately how to do it. When I come to a standstill for a moment, I put the thing aside and do something else.” When asked by the interviewer what “else” he would do, Luhmann replied: “Well, I write other books. I always work on several books simultaneously” (SC, 29).
3. Ibid., 27.
4. Ibid., 26, 28.
5. There may soon be one book by Luhmann available in English that can be recommended as a first reading: an English translation of a posthumously published transcription of a lecture series by Luhmann titled Introduction to Systems Theory (Einführung in die Systemtheorie, Heidelberg: Carl-Auer-Systeme, 2002).
6. SS, 4.
7. Ibid., xxxvii.
3. The Fourth Insult
1. GG 35, 24. All translations, if not indicated otherwise, are mine.
2. Danilo Zolo, Democracy and Complexity: A Realist Approach (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), ix.
3. Quoted in Thomas Jefferson on Democracy, ed. Saul K. Padover (New York: Penguin, 1946), 13.
4. On Luhmann and posthumanism, see Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 249–263.
5. See, for instance, RM 3–4.
6. Jürgen Habermas, “Excursus on Luhmann’s Appropriation of the Philosophy of the Subject through Systems Theory,” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, translated by Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987). The quotation is on p. 372. One of the reviewers of my manuscript suggested that it might be more appropriate to change this term to “metabiotic” in order to avoid the mistaken impression that Luhmann shares the biological determinism of authors such as Richard Dawkins or E. O. Wilson. I fully agree with the reviewer that Luhmann is neither a biological determinist nor a social Darwinist. But, in my reading at least, this is not suggested by Habermas in the following quotation. Habermas simply points out that Luhmann’s theory does not follow earlier mechanistic social theories but rather looks at society in a more organic and ecological way.
7. See chapter 5 for a more detailed discussion of this issue.
8. Mind, 371.
9. See chapter 8 for a more detailed discussion of this issue.
10. Limits, 49–50, 48.
11. OM, 35.
12. Limits, 47
13. Ibid., 48.
14. Ibid., 42.
15. Kapitalismus, 193–194.
16. John Gray, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern (New York: New Press, 2003), 47, 43.
17. Sigmund Freud, Darstellungen der Psychoanalyse (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1969), 130–138.
18. Kapitalismus, 194.
19. Chirurg. See also Parteien, 44. In Parteien, Luhmann calls the concept of civil society a “sympathetic utopia.”
20. Kapitalismus, 197.
21. PG, 113.
22. Ibid., 135. Technically speaking, democracy is based on a paradox of sovereignty. “Democracy means: the people themselves govern. And whom [do they govern]? The people of course” (PG 353). In a paradoxical fashion the people simultaneously give orders to themselves and obey themselves. Such self-descriptions remind Luhmann of theological conceptions but cannot be accepted as adequate analyses of the functioning of politics. Similar to the semantics of steering, the semantics of the people seems to be largely a symbolic power.
23. See Michael King and Chris Thornhill, Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Politics and Law (New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2003), 204, for a summary of these criticisms.
24. See Limits.
25. On the boringness of contemporary philosophy with specific regard to ethics of the analytical variety, see Bernard Williams, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), xvii.
26. On the term “metacritical,” see Günter Wohlfart, “Metacritique of Practical Reason,” at www.guenter-wohlfart.de.
4. From Necessity to Contingency
1. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1987), 377; translation modified.
2. GG ,1097.
3. See Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Literatur und Karneval (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1990), 49.
4. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 2. The German term Wissenschaft (which literally means something like “the creation of knowledge”) encompasses all academic disciplines including natural sciences, social sciences, the humanities, and so on. See the more detailed discussion of this terminology later in this chapter.
5. See Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “Silicon Sociology, or, Two Kings on Hegel’s Throne? Kittler, Luhmann, and the Posthuman Merger of German Media Theory,” Yale Journal of Criticism 13, no. 2 (2000): 391–420.
6. I am grateful to Günter Wohlfart for outlining in detail Hegel’s indebtedness to Kant in private correspondence with me. Hegel, Phenomenology, 1, 14.
7. See Miller’s spelling of “True” in his translation of the Phenomenology.
8. Ibid., 23–27, 56.
9. EI, 341.
10. See n6 above and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, A 832/B860. See also Luhmann’s appreciative remark on the “excessive, unsurpassable awareness of theory architecture that one finds in Kant or Hegel” in n19 in his essay “Modernity in Contemporary Society” in OM, 116.
11. See GG, 11, and the appendix in this book.
12. P, 200.
13. Hegel, Phenomenology, 23.
14. Fussball.
15. See, for instance, Hegel, Phenomenology, 2.
16. Luhmann concludes his essay “Beyond Barbarism” with this statement: “If this diagnosis is only roughly correct, society can neither expect advice nor help from sociology. But it could make sense to search for theories that do more justice to the facts than the optimistic-critical traditional ways of thought within our discipline—justice to those facts with which society constructs itself” (Barbarism, 272).
17. Hegel, Phenomenology, 493.
18. GG, 1081.
19. Hegel, Phenomenology, 492.
20. Cognition, 250.
21. GG, 1122.
22. In Social Systems, Luhmann labels Hegel a “neo-humanist thinker,” SS, 259.See also chapter 5 in this book.
23. WG.
24. See RM, 20.
25. See WG, 457.
26. See RM, 29.
27. In all these expressions the genitivus subjectivus and genitivus objectivus are used simultaneously. The title The Science of Society, for example, uses the word “society” in both an objective and subjective sense and thus means both the branch of science that has society as its object (i.e., “sociology” as the science that studies society) and refers to science as a general body of knowledge that is produced by society as the “subject” which “does” science (science as something that society engages in).
28. Hegel, Phenomenology, 45;WG, 10.
29. WG ,547.
30. Instead of Roman (“novel”) one may therefore want to substitute, Bildungsroman.
31. OM, ix.
32. GG, 1097.
33. WP, 17.
34. WG, 159.
35. GG, 1097.
36. See RM, and the section on mass media in Hans-Georg Moeller, Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems (Chicago: Open Court, 2006), 119–161.
37. See SS, 5.
38. See also this interesting remark by Luhmann: “What we need after Hegel is a more pragmatic, more opportunistic, more playful game-like approach to theory” (Nico Stehr, “The Evolution of Meaning Systems: An Interview with Niklas Luhmann,” Theory, Culture, and Society 1, no. 1 (1982): 33–48, here: 47; emphasis added). In his very brief introductory remark to a session at a conference on Hegel in 1977 Luhmann asked whether “ironical theories contain a higher potential of reflection” (Niklas Luhmann, “Zur Einführung,” Hegel-Studien, Beiheft 17. Bonn: Bouvier, 1977, in Ist Systematische Philosophie möglich? Dieter Henrich, ed., 443–445; here: 445).
5. The Last Footnote to Plato
1. This has been remarkably different in certain non-Western discursive traditions such as the Chinese. In the Chinese tradition, a substantial mind-body division was never introduced. Quite to the contrary, the core philosophical vocabulary—which at the same time also constituted a core part of the “popular” vocabulary in practical fields such as medicine, politics, geomantics, and so on—contained several nondualistic notions such as xin (heart-mind), qi (energy), dao (way, truth), and many others that easily intertwined physical and intellectual connotations.
2. This is how Nietzsche argues in the section on the “four great errors” in Twilight of the Idols.
3. Rene Descartes, The Passions of the Soul (article 34, “How the soul and the body act on one another”). I am quoting from the translation by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross in The Philosophical Works of Descartes (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 347.
4. An excellent brief summary of the history of cybernetics can be found in Bruce Clarke, Posthuman Metamorphosis. Narrative and Systems (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 4–7.
5. Luhmann speaks of a paradigm shift from the concept of part/whole differences to system/environment differences: “Accordingly, a differentiated system is no longer simply composed of a certain number of parts and the relations among them; rather, it is composed of a relatively large number of operationally employable system/environment differences, which each, along different cutting lines, reconstruct the whole system as the unity of subsystem and environment” (SS 7).
6. See, for instance, GG, 117.
7. One may think here of James Lovelock’s Gaia theory.
8. This is indirectly proved by Marxist or communist readings of Plato’s most important text on social theory, namely the Republic.
9. SS, 9, 36.
10. SS, 36;RM, 66.
11. SS, 19.
12. See in particular section 4, part 1 in Hume’s An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding titled “Special Doubts Concerning the Operations of the Understanding.”
6. Ecological Evolution
1. See for instance John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta, 2002).
2. On Luhmann and Darwin, see Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “On a Species of Origin: Luhmann’s Darwin,” Configurations 11 (2003): 305–349.
3. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 372. See chapter 3 in this book for a more detailed discussion of this term coined by Habermas.
4. SS, li.
5. See John Gray’s deconstruction of this narrative in Straw Dogs.
6. On Luhmann’s terminological discussion of history versus evolution, see “Evolution und Geschichte” in GG, 569–576.
7. The pun with Wesen and gewesen is not translatable into English. Literally, the sentence means: essence (Wesen) is what has been (gewesen).
8. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 51.
9. The most infamous example of equating biological evolutionary progress with social evolutionary progress is the Nazi ideology. See my comments at the end of this chapter.
10. To my knowledge, Luhmann never uses the term “genealogy” as a component of his theoretical vocabulary.
11. See chapter 4 in this book.
12. For Luhmann’s concept of sense, see the glossary entry in Hans-Georg Moeller, Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems (Chicago: Open Court, 2006), 225. Luhmann originally derived the concept from Husserl and defines it as a (contingent) actuality within a horizon of possibilities.
7. Constructivism as Postmodernist Realism
1. GG, 35.
2. A representative anthology of constructivist epistemology is Die erfundene Wirklichkeit: Wie wissen wir, was wir zu wissen glauben? Beiträge zum Konstruktivismus, ed. Paul Watzlawick (Munich: Piper, 1981). This volume includes essays by Paul Watzlawick, Ernst von Glasersfeld, Heinz von Foerster, Francisco Varela, and others. The explicit designation “radical constructivism” became academically popular in Germany (to my knowledge) through publications such as Der Diskurs des radikalen Konstruktivismus, ed. Siegfried J. Schmidt (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1987). It seems that Luhmann—as is obvious by his frequent citations—felt very much indebted to the earlier constructivists like von Glasersfeld, von Foerster, and Varela, but did not fully accept the later more “fashionable” constructivist developments as represented in the volume edited by S. J. Schmidt.
3. Cognition, 241. This essay may well be read as Luhmann’s programmatic exposition of his version of radical (epistemological) constructivism.
4. SS, 2.
5. On “ontology,” see GG, 893–912, in which Luhmann diagnoses a “complete breakdown of ontological metaphysics” in modern theory.
6. SS, 2.
7. See Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, 1: “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist” (the world is everything that is the case; my translation), and 2: “Was der Fall ist, die Tatsache, ist das Bestehen von Sachverhalten” (what is the case—the actuality—is the existence of facts [my translation and my italics]).
8. See also chapter 4 in this book on the relation between Luhmann and German idealism.
9. See Luhmann’s clear rejection of Kant’s “recantation” of a more radical constructivism in “Cognition as Construction,” Hans-Georg Moeller, Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems (Chicago: Open Court, 2006), 241–260. Luhmann disapprovingly cites and annotates [in brackets], the following proposition from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: “The mere, but empirically [!] determined consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of the objects [!] [and thus not only of something, N.L.] in the space [!] outside of myself,” (“Cognition as Construction,” 242n3).
10. As translated by G. H. R. Parkinson in Spinoza, Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 76.
11. GG, 35; LE, 239.
12. For an attempt to use this Luhmannian approach for an analysis of globalization, see Jean-Sebastien Guy, “The Name ‘Globalization’: Observing Society Observing Itself,” in Ignacio Farias and Jose Ossandon, eds., Observando Sistemas 2 (Mexico DF: Universidad Iberoamericana, forthcoming).
13. Cognition, 250.
14. RM, 6, 7 (emphasis added).
15. On Luhmann and Derrida, see Deconstruction.
16. SS, 498n19; italics in the original. Interestingly enough, following this statement, Luhmann refers approvingly to an article by Alfred Locker, “On the Ontological Foundations of the Theory of Systems,” in Unity Through Diversity: A Festschrift for Ludwig von Bertalanffy, ed. William Gray and Nicholas D. Rizzo (New York: 1973), 1:537–572. At least indirectly, Luhmann thus accepts an ontological dimension of his theory.
17. Jean Clam, Was heißt, sich an Differenz statt an Identität orientieren? Zur De-ontologisierung in Philosophie und Sozialwissenschaft (Konstanz: UVK, 2002). As the subtitle says, Clam perceives the shift from identity to difference as “de-ontologization.” I like to conceive of the shift as one from “classical” ontologies to “postmodernist” ones.
18. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Penguin, 1990), 536–537. As the source for the account of the conversation between Drury and Wittgenstein, Monk refers to Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford: 1984), 157.
19. “European Rationality,” in OM, 23.
20. Ibid., 35.
21. Donald Phillip Verene has an excellent essay (included in an altogether excellent book) titled “The Topsy-turvy World,” in Verene, Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985), 39–58.
22. According to Verene, Hegel’s “Phenomenology can be seen as a philosophical ship of fools, in which each stage is a different compartment in the ship, and the individual reader, following the original course of the illusions of consciousness itself, works his way toward wisdom” (Hegel’s Recollection, 54).
23. In the preface to Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.
24. The original German expression he uses is “Zurück auf den rauhen Boden!” (Philosophical Investigations, 107).
25. Ibid., 107.
8. Democracy as a Utopia
1. This expression is used by Edwin Czerwick in his Systemtheorie der Demokratie: Begriffe und Strukturen im Werk Luhmanns (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008), 134.
2. In private conversation, Jason Dockstader suggested that the fact that these decisions have to be made, and that they are often not made by the political system, indicates that there exists one social system Luhmann never wrote about, namely the war or military system.
3. RM, 50.
4. Semantik, 80. See also Czerwick, Systemtheorie der Demokratie, 65.
5. Wahl.
6. Czerwick, Systemtheorie der Demokratie, 98. Czerwick (and Luhmann) obviously have European democracies in mind with this description. In the United States, the government and the president are not elected by Parliament, but by a different political body—which, however, is also elected, so that the “circles” are basically the same in Europe and the United States.
7. PG ,366.
8. PG 366, 283.
9. Parteien, 52.
10. Meinung, 107. With respect to the notion of “symbolic rule” Luhmann refers in a footnote to the following literature, Thurman W. Arnold, The Symbols of Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935); Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,1967); Marcelo Neves, A Constitucionalização Symbólica (Sao Paolo, 1994).
11. Michael King and Chris Thornhill, Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Politics and Law (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 203–225. See the appendix for further details on King’s and Thornhill’s analysis.
12. Czerwick, 191–192. I think Czerwick’s book is overall an excellent and highly accurate study of Luhmann’s concept of democracy.
9. Conclusion
1. My friend’s name is Jari Grosse-Ruyken.
2. One example is John Mingers, “Can Social Systems be Autopoietic? Assessing Luhmann’s Social Theory,” Sociological Review 50 (2002): 278– 299.
3. In the following, I use the term “theory” in reference to Luhmann’s conception of (super)theory.
4. See Michael King and Anton Schutz, “The Ambitious Modesty of Niklas Luhmann,” Journal of Law and Society 21 (1994): 261–287.
5. I hope the ironical nature of this sentence may not be noticed only by readers who look at this note.
6. See chapter 4.
7. How modern science does not simply “grow” by accumulating knowledge but functions rather differently has most prominently been outlined in the works of Thomas Kuhn.
8. Translation by Cyril Smith at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/index.htm.
9. See the discussion of the grammatically ambiguous titles of many of Luhmann’s books (e.g., Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft [The Society of Society]) in chapter 4.
10. Apology, 38a.
11. Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit: 1969).
12. See his Die neuzeitlichen Wissenschaften und die Phänomenologie (Vienna: Picus, 1996), 45–46.
13. See the discussion of this sentence in chapter 4.
14. For Luhmann on morality and ethics, see “Paradigm Lost: On the Ethical Reflection of Morality: Speech on the Occasion of the Award of the Hegel Prize, 1989,” Thesis Eleven 29 (1991): 82–94; “The Code of the Moral,” Cardozo Law Review 14 (1992–93): 995–1009; “The Sociology of the Moral and Ethics,” International Sociology 11 (1996): 27–36; “The Morality of Risk and the Risk of Morality,” International Review of Sociology 3 (1987): 87–101. See also the section on negative ethics in my Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems (Chicago: Open Court: 2006), 108–114.
15. If readers now begin to wonder if there is a difference between social systems theory and postmodernism, here’s what Luhmann says: “Is this, after all, a postmodern theory? Maybe, but then the adherents of postmodern conceptions will finally know what they are talking about” (“Why Does Society Describe Itself as Postmodern?” Cultural Critique [Spring 1995]: 171–186; here, 184).
16. Barbarism, 269.
17. World Society, 187.
18. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Lecture on Ethics,” Philosophical Review 74, no. 1 (1965): 3–12.
Appendix
1. Quoted from an interview with Luhmann by Wolfgang Hagen for Radio Bremen; broadcast on October 2, 1997. The transcript is at www.radio-bremen.de/online/luhmann/es_gibt_keine_biographie.pdf. The translation is mine. In German, Luhmann uses the term “Nazi-Umwelt” in analogy to the “System-Umwelt” terminology of his theory. Unless noted otherwise, all biographical information presented in the appendix is taken from Luhmann’s statements in this interview.
2. Drinking beer at a public festivity while mingling with the local population is considered a social virtue in Germany. Those who refrain from such activities may encounter difficulties in obtaining a position as a civil servant.
3. A comprehensive bibliography of Luhmann’s writings is Sylke Schiermeyer and Johannes F. K. Schmidt, “Niklas Luhmann—Schriftenverzeichnis,” Soziale Systeme: Zeitschrift für soziologische Theorie 4, no. 1 (1988): 233– 263.
4. See www.radiobremen.de/online/luhmann/es_gibt_keine_biographie.pdf.
5. GG, 11.
6. SS, 4.
7. TG.
8. P, 71.
9. On the difference between first- and second-order cybernetics, see Bruce Clarke, Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 4–7.
10. SC, 25.
11. See the chapter on Luhmann in Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987).
12. All books except the last one were published by Suhrkamp (Frankfurt/ Main); Die Realität der Massenmedien (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag). Das Recht der Gesellschaft, trans. Klaus A. Ziegart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Die Kunst der Gesellschaft, trans. Eva Knodt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Die Realität der Massenmedien, trans. Kathleen Cross (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
13. Die Religion der Gesellschaft (The Religion of Society) (Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 2000); Die Politik der Gesellschaft (The Politics of Society) (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2000); Das Erziehungssystem der Gesellschaft (The Education System of Society) (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2002).
14. Published by Suhrkamp (Frankfurt/Main); an English translation is currently being prepared.
15. Published by Suhrkamp (Frankfurt/Main). The translation is by Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1986). A number of Luhmann’s articles on semantics were published in four volumes by Suhrkamp (Frankfurt/Main) under the title Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik (Social Structure and Semantics) in 1980, 1981, 1989, and 1995.
16. The translation is by John Bednarz Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
17. The translation is by Rhodes Barrett (New York: De Gruyter, 1993).
18. Deconstruction.
19. Postmodern, 179.
20. For a more detailed introduction to Luhmann’s theory see my book Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems (Chicago: Open Court, 2006).
21. On second-order systems theory, see Clarke, Posthuman Metamorphosis, 7;on second-order cybernetics and second-order emergence, see N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 6, 243.
22. SS, 7.
23. The terminological distinction between trivial and nontrivial machines goes back to Heinz von Foerster. See Clarke, Posthuman Metamorphosis, 141–142.
24. I borrow this citation of a Beatles song from an essay by Ranulph Glanville and Francisco Varela, “Your Inside Is Out and Your Outside Is In (Beatles 1968),” in Applied Systems and Cybernetics, vol. 2, ed. George E. Lasker (Oxford: Pergamon, 1981), 638–641.
25. See chapter 5.
26. See Mind.
27. GG, 35.
28. SS, xxiv.
29. This term has also been translated into English as “utterance.”
30. SS, xxiv.
31. See LS.
32. RM, 97.
33. As formulated in the eleventh thesis against Feuerbach.
34. See Michael King and Chris Thornhill, Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Politics and Law (New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2003), 204.
35. For an overview of Luhmann’s academic impact in Germany and Europe, see Henk de Berg and Johannes Schmidt, eds., Rezeption und Reflexion: Zur Resonanz der Systemtheorie Niklas Luhmanns außerhalb der Soziologie (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt/Main, 2000).
36. See chapter 2.
37. Harrison C. White, Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 337.