Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) was a German sociologist and system theorist
who wrote on law, economics, politics, art, religion, ecology, mass
media, and love. Luhmann advocated a radical constructivism and
antihumanism, or "grand theory," to explain society within a universal
theoretical framework. Nevertheless, despite being an iconoclast,
Luhmann is viewed as a political conservative. Hans-Georg Moeller
challenges this legacy, repositioning Luhmann as an explosive thinker
critical of Western humanism.
Moeller focuses on Luhmann's shift from philosophy to theory, which
introduced new perspectives on the contemporary world. For centuries,
the task of philosophy meant transforming contingency into necessity, in
the sense that philosophy enabled an understanding of the necessity of
everything that appeared contingent. Luhmann pursued the opposite--the
transformation of necessity into contingency. Boldly breaking with the
heritage of Western thought, Luhmann denied the central role of humans
in social theory, particularly the possibility of autonomous agency. In
this way, after Copernicus's cosmological, Darwin's biological, and
Freud's psychological deconstructions of anthropocentrism, he added a
sociological "fourth insult" to human vanity.
A theoretical shift toward complex system-environment relations helped
Luhmann "accidentally" solve one of Western philosophy's primary
problems: mind-body dualism. By pulling communication into the mix,
Luhmann rendered the Platonic dualist heritage obsolete. Moeller's
clarity opens such formulations to general understanding and directly
relates Luhmannian theory to contemporary social issues. He also
captures for the first time a Luhmannian attitude toward society and
life, defined through the cultivation of modesty, irony, and equanimity.
