Luhmann, Niklas (1927–1998)

Niklas Luhmann's major contribution to sociolegal scholarship was to translate the notion of legal positivism into sociological terms. “There is only positive law, that is, law decided exclusively within the legal system itself. This means at the same time that the decision between right and wrong can be taken only within the legal system itself” (Luhmann 1992: 145). He viewed law, and all of the other communication systems in society, as forging its own identity in an environment that it constructed. Law itself, and not any universal morality, rationality, or scientific facts, validated and legitimized all legal arguments and decisions.

Luhmann studied law at Freiburg from 1946 to 1949, but he did not practice as a lawyer, nor did he go straight into an academic career. He first worked for several years in the Ministry of Education and Culture of Lower Saxony (1956–1962). In this position, he obtained invaluable experience in the workings of politics and administration and their relationship with law and “the public”; these experiences later informed much of his work on politics and law.

In 1960 and 1961, he studied at Harvard, where he met Talcott Parsons (1902–1979). Luhmann was already extensively versed in classical and European literature and philosophy as well as the functionalist anthropology of Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955). After his encounter with Parsons, he was able to create a sociological framework for his ideas. When he returned to Germany, he embarked almost immediately upon an academic career, with his appointment in 1969 to the first chair of sociology at the newly founded University of Bielefeld.

His literary output over thirty-five years was astonishing. He produced more than forty books and at least 350 journal articles. Although many have not been translated into English, several of his later books have been translated. Perhaps the one book that best summarizes Luhmann's achievements is Social Systems(1995). In this work, he set out his approach to sociology. He saw it as the study of social systems and their communications, which he contrasted with the Enlightenment enterprise of treating society as the product of human rationality. As such, it was amenable to progress through understanding and control.

In Luhmann's The Differentiation of Society(1982), it was systems, and not people, who became the proper objects of sociological study. Events in the world were essentially contingent and chaotic; only within social systems was any semblance of understanding and control possible. Law, in Luhmann's hands, became, therefore, a self-referential system that coded its environment in terms of lawful and [Page 972]unlawful, and which had as its function the stabilizing of normative expectations over time.