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Niklas Luhmann, Professor Emeritus at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, died on November 12, at the age of 70, after a long battle with cancer. We have lost one of the most distinguished scholars and sociologists of our time. Luhmann came to sociology and academics relatively late; trained as a lawyer, he worked for a state Kultusministerium until the 1960s, when he was called to the newly founded reform university in Bielefeld. He taught there ever since, interrupted by numerous appointments and visits to universities throughout the world.
His recognition in US theory circles lagged behind his status as one of the dominant intellectuals and theorists in Europe. In the United States, reception of his work has been delayed because of his affiliation with Parsons and structural functionalism. Although there are some commonalities, Luhmann was much less of a Parsonsian than Muench, Alexander, or even Habermas, with whom he had an ongoing dialogue on reason and rationality. But the Parsonsian influence got weaker and weaker as Luhmann's work continued to advance. Especially in his later works, most of which have been translated into English by now, Luhmann moved toward a radically constructivist theory of observers. An observer is anything and anyone that uses distinctions to generate information; on a second level, sociology is the comparative observation of first-order observers.
No one has developed a more ambitious and general theory of society than Luhmann. At the core is a theory of social systems, understood as recursive networks of communication and observation. Social systems include interactions, organizations, and society itself. Interactions are based on copresence; organizations on membership; and society includes all communication. Outside of society, there is no communication. Communication latches on to previous communication, not to the world "as it is." At the same time, communication is an empirical event that happens in the world, so that there is no view from nowhere.
Events come and go; they can never be repeated. Therefore, a central problem is communicative coupling, or how communication is possible at all, given that minds are closed to other minds and have no way of directly experiencing what...