PREFACE

It is striking that Niklas Luhmann’s (1927–1998) social systems theory often provides the most advanced, adequate, and applicable models for understanding how things work in contemporary society. To give just one concrete example: in “Globalization or World Society? How to Conceive of Modern Society?” an article published in 1997, toward the end of his life, he not only answered these questions quite programmatically but also delineated in astonishing precision the economical developments that later led to the great financial crisis of 2008–2009.¹

Luhmann did not predict the crisis as such, but he did succeed in giving an account of the social context that was to make it possible. And he could do so because his theoretical approach radically departs from mainstream political theory, which, according to him, has been mainly concerned with the utopian ideals of happiness and solidarity. Luhmann proclaims: “We have to come to terms, once and for all, with a society without human happiness and, of course, without taste, without solidarity, without similarity of living conditions. It makes no sense to insist on these aspirations, to revitalize or to supplement the list by renewing old names such as civil society or community.” He appeals to social theorists to give up certain latent “idealist” and moralist pretensions: “Sociologists are not supposed to play the role of the lay-priests of modernity.” According to Luhmann, the moralist tendency of a good deal of social and political thought is rooted in theoretical backwardness. The “lay-priests” of social theory still think of society in terms of the grand masters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, namely in terms of stratification, that is, of a society divided into classes of oppressors and oppressed. He writes: “If we see stratification we will tend to see… injustice, exploitation and suppression; and we may wish to find corrective devices or at least to formulate normative schemes and moral injunctions that stimulate a rhetoric of critique and protest.”² Luhmann advocates a radical departure from such a theoretical attitude. This is based on an acknowledgement that society has changed from stratified differentiation to functional differentiation. He declares: “If, on the other hand, we see functional differentiation, our description will point to the autonomy of the function systems, to their high degree of indifference, coupled to high sensitivity and irritability, in very specific respects that vary from system to system. Then, we will see a society without top and without centre; a society that evolves but cannot control itself.”³

This change of perspective from that of the lay-priests to that of the radical theoretician is what I explore in this book. Or, in other words, I try to counter misinterpretations of Luhmann’s theory, which, as Michael King said, failed to “recognize its radical nature and the paradigm that it introduces.”⁴ But let me first go back to how, in 1997, Luhmann outlined the social conditions of a financial crisis that occurred long after his death.

In a global society based on functional differentiation, “‘international,’ indeed, no longer refers to a relation between two (or more) nations but to the political and the economic problems of the global system.” In a radically deregionalized world society, “all internal boundaries depend upon the self-organization of subsystems and no longer on an ‘origin’ in history or on the nature or logic of the encompassing system.” This leads to a situation in which “world society has reached a higher level of complexity with higher structural contingencies, more unexpected and unpredictable changes (some people call this ‘chaos’) and, above all, more interlinked dependencies and interdependencies. This means that causal constructions, (calculations, plannings) are no longer possible from a central and therefore ‘objective’ point of view.”⁵

Within such a chaotically complex society, “there is no longer a quasi cosmological guarantee that structural developments within function systems remain compatible with each other.” This means, for instance, that the “highly efficient modern medicine has demographic consequences”—that is “advances” in medicine lead to all kinds of social and economic problems, such as an imbalance in numbers between the old and the young and increasing health care costs. Similarly, the “new centrality of international financial markets, the corresponding marginalization of production, labour, and trade, and the transfer of economic security from real assets and first rate debtors to speculation itself, leads to a loss of jobs and seduces politicians to ‘promise’ jobs (without markets?)”—that is, the virtualization of the economy, the shift to an economy that focuses on financial products rather than goods creates immense wealth (for some) but undermines the traditional couplings of the economy with, for instance, infrastructure, means of production, labor, the legal system, and politics. In this way, society faces a novel “volatility of the financial market with its new derivative instruments for simultaneously maximizing security and risk with unpredictable effects.” In other words: “The economic system has shifted its bases of security from property and reliable debtors (such as states or large corporations) to speculation itself. He who tries to maintain his property will lose his fortune, and he who tries to maintain and increase his wealth will have to change his investments one day to the next. He can either use new derivative instruments or must trust some of the many funds that do this for him.”⁶ For Luhmann, all this cannot be explained on the basis of the traditional vocabulary of “exploitation” or with moralist categories such as “greed.”

The developments in the financial sector of the economy and the nearly catastrophic effects of these developments—on the education system in Ireland, for instance—quite clearly demonstrate that Luhmann was right when he said: “we are not in a phase of ‘posthistoire’ but, on the contrary, in a phase of turbulent evolution without predictable outcome.”⁷ In this situation, sticking to the vocabulary of political theory that has been developed by the philosophers of the past three or four centuries does not seem to be a promising strategy. Luhmann says: “At present, the unsolved problems surrounding the concept of society seem to prevent theoretical progress. The idea of a good, or, at least, a better society still dominates the field. Sociologists, interested in theory, continue to explore the old mazes with diminishing returns instead of moving into new ones. It might be rewarding, however, not to look for better solutions of problems—of problems that are constructed by the mass media—but to ask ‘what is the problem?’ in the first place.”⁸

So, what is the problem? And, moreover, how do we have to change our point of view so that we are better able to see it? The following chapters explore Luhmann’s paradigm shift from philosophy to theory that opens up new perspectives on the contemporary world.

I begin my exposition with an attempt to characterize the very social system within which Luhmann’s writings were produced, that is the German academic “scene” of the last decades of the twentieth century. Within this social environment, Luhmann was able to succeed despite, or perhaps because of, the challenges he posed to Habermas’s dominating doctrine of a society based on “domination-free discourse” (herrschaftsfreier Diskurs). Luhmann offered a radical alternative to this normative political philosophy. He conceived of his theory as a subversive Trojan horse that, once inside the enemy’s camp, might destroy them from within. I argue that one of the tactics employed by Luhmann to disguise this threat was his often rather convoluted writing style. By adopting the jargon of Habermas and others who constituted the academic elite of the time, Luhmann was granted entry into their Troy.

After these preliminary considerations, I move on to look at various aspects of what I believe to be a shift from philosophy to theory in Luhmann’s works. Luhmann breaks with the anthropocentric heritage of modern Western philosophy. More so than any other of the humanities, philosophy has been looking to humans as “the measure of all things,” particularly in political and social philosophy. Luhmann’s “fourth insult” to human vanity consists in denying the notion of the “human being” a central place in social theory. He follows earlier nonanthropocentric shifts that occurred in cosmology (Copernicus), biology (Darwin), and psychology (Freud). Unsurprisingly, this insult, just as with its historical predecessors, has been perceived by many as scandalous and continues to make Luhmann a persona non grata in some ideological camps.

Chapter 4, “From Necessity to Contingency,” deals with a comparison between Luhmann and Hegel. In my view, Hegel is the most important philosophical influence on Luhmann. However, the relation between the two great systemic thinkers is rather ambiguous. I argue that Luhmann attempted a Hegelian Aufhebung (sublation) of Hegel’s philosophy. Just as Hegel tried to sublate religion through philosophy (in the threefold sense of lifting it to a higher level, overcoming it, and preserving it), Luhmann intended to sublate philosophy through theory. For Hegel, the task of philosophy consisted in transforming contingency into necessity. Luhmann’s theory aims to transform necessity into contingency.

In chapter 5, “The Last Footnote to Plato,” I outline what I believe to be the most obvious, and yet most overlooked, achievement of the Luhmannian shift to theory: a solution to a central problem of traditional Western philosophy, mind-body dualism. After Descartes, and in negative reaction to him, attempts to deal with his strong dualism typically aimed at reconciling the body and the mind in such a way as to emancipate the body. The preoccupation with the mind-body discourse led to an incapability to think “outside the box” and to develop more radical alternatives to this dualism. Luhmann convincingly shows that there is at least one more dimension in addition to the intellectual and the physical, namely communication. This third dimension allowed Luhmann to replace traditional substance dualism with a functional theory of structural couplings between different systemic realms.

In chapter six, I discuss Luhmann’s “metabiological” approach (to use a term coined by Habermas) to social theory, which marks another break with mainstream modern social and political thought. Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy tended to look at civil society and the individuals who were believed to constitute it in terms of autonomous agency. Free will, rationality, and responsibility allow humans to shape society and to emerge from their “self-inflicted immaturity.” In this way, humans become self-creators. They are the ultimate masters of their fate and the society in which they live. From an evolutionary perspective, however, such self-steering or self-governing is an illusion. From the perspective of systems theory, the social world, just as nature, consists of many complex system-environment relations that have no room or use for any intelligent designer or autonomous governor.

In chapter 7, “Constructivism as Postmodernist Realism,” I discuss Luhmann’s self-identification as a “radical constructivist.” I point out that constructivism and realism are not inherently contradictory—specifically not in Luhmann’s case. Luhmann’s constructivism is a cognitive constructivism, that is, it is epistemological. Cognitive construction is the “condition of the possibility” for the emergence of reality; it distinguishes that which is from that which is not, and thereby realizes the real. In this way, cognitive construction radicalizes German idealism and reverses the relation between ontology and epistemology. For Luhmann, reality is not the a priori condition for experience. Instead, he argues that cognitive functions are capable of generating themselves “autopoietically” and thereby of constructing reality—and that they can do so in multiple ways. Reality, as an effect of cognitive self-generation and construction, is not based on identity, but on difference, and this makes it no less real.

My analysis of Luhmann’s understanding of democracy in chapter 8 examines the limitations of social steering in a more concrete way. Luhmann puts into question the very notion of democratic participation. According to him, the idea of democracy as rule of the people is no more than a utopian fantasy. It fails to meaningfully describe the functioning of politics in contemporary society. Rather than reflecting on how society may be able to become more democratic and to ultimately allow the people to rule themselves, Luhmann suggests a functionalist concept of democracy as a symbolic narrative that allows the political system to construct legitimacy. Paradoxically, attempts to make society more democratic may in fact endanger the functioning of democratic politics. Luhmann’s political radicalism is therefore not an ideological radicalism but an anti-ideological one.

The conclusion attempts to answer what is perhaps an inappropriate question: where does Luhmann’s radicalism ultimately lead us? Or, how can a Luhmannian attitude toward society, and, indeed, life, be described? I suggest that this attitude can be defined as a cultivation of modesty, irony, and equanimity.

The appendix contains a short overview of Luhmann’s life and his theory.

I thank Anne R. Gibbons, Andrew Whitehead, and Jason Dockstader very much for correcting my English and for suggesting many changes and improvements. I am indebted to Bruce Clarke, Michael King, and Elena Esposito for their detailed comments and criticisms of drafts of this book. I am grateful to Wendy Lochner at Columbia University Press for taking on this “radical” project. I appreciate the support for this publication given by the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences, University College Cork, Ireland.