Foundations Of Niklas Luhmann's Theory Of Social Systems

Of all contemporary social theorists, Luhmann has best understood the centrality of the concept of meaning to social theory and has most extensively worked out the notion's implications. However, despite the power of his theory, the theory suffers from difficulties impeding its reception. This article attempts to remedy this situation with some critical arguments and proposals for revision. First, the theory Luhmann adopted from biology as the basis of his own theory was a poor choice since that theory has no explanatory power, being purely descriptive; furthermore, that theory is fundamentally flawed since it implies that viruses are impossible. Second, Luhmann's theory of meaning cannot coherently make the social domain autonomous as he desires since Luhmann does not take into account the distinction between syntax and semantics. By introducing this distinction, making clear that social systems consist of rules, not just communications, and raising the rule concept to the same prominence in social theory as those of actor and system, autonomy can be maintained while avoiding the counterintuitive aspects of Luhmann's theory.

Although his work has not yet received in other countries the attention it deserves, Niklas Luhmann is widely recognized in Germany as the most noteworthy contemporary social theorist.(n1) Unsatisfied with the present state of sociology because the discipline "remains dependent on working with the data that it produces itself, and, where theory is concerned, on working with the classical authors that it has itself produced" (Luhmann 1995, 11; 1984, 28), Luhmann was taken aback by the "theory-disaster which sociology has experienced as a result of the introduction of so-called empirical methods" (Luhmann 1990a, 410). He undertook to correct the situation by developing a concerted research program that spanned three decades. In this program, he has done the conceptual work otherwise neglected by sociologists by constructing from the ground up a unified system of concepts that aims to span the social and modern society in particular.

The responses to this highly complex, self-contained, and interconnected theoretical product have been several. One can distinguish several different kinds:

1. rejection of the theory as speculative and unscientific, insufficiently concerned with empirical verification (Zolo 1986; Wagner 1994,1997);

2. rejection of it on the grounds that it gives up humanistic, enlightenment, and emancipatory values, which should be maintained (Habermas 1985; Miller 1994) or because it abstracts from individuals to an absurd degree (Izuzquiza 1990);

3. use of the theory as a "toolbox, out of which one can take individual concepts and theorems depending on one's immediate goals, without having to worry about the rest of the theory" (Schimank 1991, 579);

4. criticism of the theory from the perspective of general system theory, with the argument that what is constitutive of society is not communications but neural networks or some other biological entity (the papers collected in Schmidt 1987) or making some other modification of the theory from a natural science perspective (Leydesdorff 1996) while following Luhmann's general method of theorizing;

5. full-fledged embrace, with little or no criticism of Luhmann's fundamental theory (Baecker 1988; Willke 1992);

6. seeing the theory as currently the most advanced sociological theory and hence adopting it, while presenting it less "self-referentially" than Luhmann or his close disciples do, not working wholly within it, and making connections between it and the sociological tradition (Kiss 1986, 1989).

The approach proposed in this article adopts the last position, with a critical spirit. One can agree with Luhmann that sociology can not uncover new knowledge merely by engaging in empirically orientated "normal science" and that the classics did not say all that there is to be said of a general nature about society, particularly modern society. To make progress, all science, and not just sociology, must explore different concepts and find a set that allows it to adequately take apart the phenomena it studies (Buchdahl 1969, 495-512; Mayr 1982, 24, 75-76). None of the other positions listed above, aside from number 5, does this aspect of science sufficient justice or has led to as promising and versatile a body of theory as has Luhmann. Unlike the fifth type of response, however, I do not believe that a full-fledged, noncritical embrace of the theory is appropriate for the following reason. Luhmann has carried out his program by employing a very particular strategy, consisting of two interrelated moments: he has explored how far one can take theorizing of the social "in and for itself," in which the role of individuals is "bracketed out.' To do this as freely as possible, he has proceeded in a "speculative" fashion, without preoccupying himself with epistemological problems (until the core of the theory has been constructed) or the question of how the theory is to be verified empirically. I believe that this was the correct way to proceed at the time: the sheer richness of Luhmann's Gedankenwelt shows that. However, now that the theory has taken on a more or less mature form, one can pose the question of whether the same exploratory mode of theorizing should be continued by sociology indefinitely. For, to someone who has a more or less conventional view of science--the kind most natural scientists themselves have--and who wants to see sociology become a mature science, Luhmann's theory suffers from two related problems. First, it is not clear what the status of Luhmann's theory is: Luhmann himself takes ironic or indeed paradoxical positions on this question and declines to say that the theory is "true" (Luhmann 1987b). His theoretical strategy has forced him to adopt an antirealist position, not just on social entities but on physical ones as well. Despite Luhmann's arguments to the contrary, that can be taken as a warning sign that something is amiss with the theory.(n2) Second, since the theory operates in its own hermetic conceptual world, it is not clear how its concepts relate to clearly identifiable empirical entities, and hence it is not clear how his theory can be linked up with "neighboring" empirical sciences such as psychology, social psychology, or biology (not to mention how it can be related to actors' own self-understanding). But the linkability of related sciences is one hallmark of their maturity: if one could not connect chemistry to physics and biology to chemistry, one would feel that something is wrong.(n3) Both these problems are a direct consequence of Luhmann's strategy of "unrestrained exploration."

The conviction underlying the present article is that the time for such conceptual exploration is over. If sociology is to continue to progress, it must shift to a phase of consolidation of concepts. Now that the domain of the social has been limned in a way that almost certainly would not have been possible without letting lapse the constraints that a good social theory, pace Luhmann, should be compatible with actors' own self-understanding and that the way in which theory is verified must be clearly specified, it is time to reimpose those constraints. This article outlines in two steps one way of doing so, the first critical and the second one of reconstruction. Thus, in a first step, I shall attempt to show how the difficulties of Luhmann's theory can be traced to two substantive (as opposed to strategic) choices that he made: adopting the system concept of Humberto Maturana and adopting a phenomenological theory of meaning. In a second step, I shall try to show how under the guidance of normative conceptions of scientific method obtained from the contemporary philosophy of science, it is possible to use concepts from the contemporary philosophy of mind to provide an underpinning for Luhmann's theory and to reconstruct the latter in a way such that it obtains the same truth status as any valid theory in the natural sciences. If this demonstration can be carried out at all convincingly, then one will have reason to believe that by making some conceptual substitutions, it is possible to preserve the generality and richness of Luhmann's theory while freeing it from the paradoxical and hermetic qualities from which it now suffers.