Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
Niklas Luhmann is a troublemaker: he writes a great deal, and on very many subjects, and he is still expanding his theory. As a jurist, he started with studies on law and administration, but soon he reached the level of general sociology and published a wealth of books and articles on power, love, religion, morality, education, art, the economy, and the like. With his supertheory he is now on his way to inheriting the philosophical tradition of the Occident (cf. Habermas, 1985: 426–45). Luhmann has developed his own terminology, which sounds familiar, but in which the meaning of customary expressions such as “legitimacy,” “ideology,” “institution,” and “meaning” is intentionally distorted. He also uses new concepts like “autopoiesis” and has created models for a fashionable semantic: “reduction of complexity,” “legitimation by procedure”—now clichés for a social scientist. His compact-hermetic supertheory, his nicely constructed conceptual framework does not derive from a single source or principle only; rather, Luhmann has combined various theories and approaches in his super-mega-world view. Not only does he use cybernetics, formal systems theory (input-output models), sociological systems theory à la Parsons, Husserl's phenomenological epistemology, Gehlen's anthropology, and symbolic interactionism, but he has also recently borrowed from thermodynamics, biology, neurophysiology, theory of cells, and computer theory (cf. Luhmann, 1984: 27). Luhmann claims to have established a general systems theory, for which law and sociology of law are only a single field of application.