Introduction

Modern science enjoys an extraordinary authority in explaining ‘reality’, as well as in looking for solutions to the world’s problems. Anyone who does not observe scientific insights and its standards of justification is thrown into defence. Even the Pope must make concessions to scientific thinking, for example, by actively supporting alternatives for using embryos in stem cell research.

In his lengthy book, Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft (Science as a Social System), Niklas Luhmann affirms the exalted prestige and the amazing accomplishments of science, yet at the same time stresses the severe limitations of its perspective and questions its ability to simply dictate rules to other parts of society. Science is just one of the function systems of modern society and hence cannot claim priority over any other fields, including law, politics, economy or religion. While many would like to see politicians developing policies based on scientifically sound facts, or religious leaders wising up and acknowledging scientific realities, the tasks of politics are simply not that of science, and neither are the issues of religion. Each of them requires specific solutions, which cannot just be transferred to other systems. While science can identify problems for politics (e.g., severe nitrogen pollution) and suggest solutions (e.g., reducing livestock production), it cannot tell politics how to find majority support for the latter, just as law cannot instruct the economy how to gain profit.

Throughout his career, Luhmann has emphasised this disappearance of a hierarchy in the structure of society. There is no ‘grand narrative’ anymore, no worldview, no philosophy and no system that can provide binding references for acting in the world. This also goes for science. Its customarily privileged position over other function systems, for instance in the Enlightenment project or twentieth-century modernist technocracy, can no longer be guaranteed. A common reality, as Enlightenment philosophers envisaged it to emerge out of the proper use of ‘reason’, is replaced by ‘heterarchical’ multiple realities, which are subject to continuous change and contingent upon constantly evolving social conditions. Notwithstanding its traditional prestige, scientific knowledge, within this constellation, is thus perceived to be ‘only one form of social potency among others’, Luhmann writes