Luhmann, Niklas

Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) was a German sociologist who gained worldwide reputation for his theory of social [Page 455]systems. He studied and received a doctoral degree in law, started his professional career in public administration, and became a professor of sociology in Bielefeld—one of Germany's younger reform campuses—in 1968. His devotion to systems theory connects him with Talcott Parsons, who he came to know while studying public administration in Harvard from 1960 to 1961. It is important to stress that Luhmann's understanding of social systems has only a little in common with Parsons's concepts. The reception of systems theory in American sociology is guided by the critique of functionalism in the 1960s and later by Habermas's reading of Luhmann. Whereas earlier controversies have led to the rejection of functionalist thought, Habermas quite unjustifiedly downgrades Luhmann's social theory to a special tool suitable for analyzing functional subsystems of society (in contrast to what Habermas calls “life-worlds”), disregarding his attempt to develop a social theory that follows Schutz's (1932) phenomenological sociology.

There are two important lines of argument that explain Luhmann's relation to Parsons and Schutz. The first concerns the theoretical and methodological status of “meaning” and “understanding,” the second is the problem of intersubjectivity. Even though both Parsons and Schutz claimed that it was the perspective of the actor that should guide sociological research, Schutz disputed that Parsons's theory was an analysis adequate to meaning (Schutz and Parsons 1977:57ff.). Phenomenological sociology and its interpretive variants have stressed against structural functionalism that sociological explanations must aim at meaningful adequacy. It is hardly known that Luhmann clearly supports Schutz's side in his discussion of Parsons and tries to develop a theory that will help interpretive sociology to find a way of making generalizable observations of modern society.

For Luhmann, there can be no doubt that sociological theories will inevitably lead to some kind of alienation of meaningful first-order expressions because in research individual motives must be subsumed under more general categories to be part of sociological explanations. While many social scientists continue to use Weber's problematic idealtype concept, Luhmann (1990:53ff.) believes that the interpretation of action as a means-ends-relation is a far too special and selective view of human behavior to be able to constitute a basic analytical tool. Undoubtedly, the causal relation between means and ends provides evidence to the observer, but it is not fundamental enough to reconstruct the broad ways in which meaning appears in the social world. Instead, Luhmann sees the attribution model of social action as it is applied in social psychology as suitable for achieving meaningful and causal (i.e., generalizable) adequacy in sociological research. This model yields four types of conduct out of the interaction of internal versus external, and stable versus variable interpretation. Internal attributions of behavior will appear as action based for example on ability and/or effort. External attributions are interpreted as “experiences” of the world, for example as luck or fate. Hence, social action is not an ontologically, unquestioned given object of sociological research but a first-order interpretation based on the internal attribution of conduct. It is for this reason that Luhmann (1995:137ff.) places his level of analysis on social systems, or, to be more precise, on communication instead of social action.

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