From
The Guardian (London) November 27, 1998
The Guardian Features Page; Pg. 22
Obituary: Niklas Luhmann: There is such a thing as society
By ANDREAS HESS
The task was a theory of society, and the timeframe was 30 years. That was how Niklas Luhmann, who has died aged 70, once described his research project, when he was appointed the first professor of sociology at West Germany's then new Bielefeld University in 1969.
In pursuit of that task, Luhmann became, as one colleague commented, a one-man theory factory. He produced more than 30 books, more than 150 journal contributions. He not only challenged the Frankfurt School philosopher and sociologist Jurgen Habermas's critical theory, but out of his critique, developed a theoretical system now acknowledged to be a modern classic reading in sociology.
Luhmann belonged to the flackhelfergeneration, which meant that he was old enough to have taken a minor part in Nazi Germany's last-ditch second world war efforts, and was held as a teenager as a prisoner of war. He had been raised in a liberal-leaning family and, on his homecoming, graduated in law and worked in Lower Saxony's public administration between 1954 and 1962, when he became a lecturer at the Hochschule fur Verwaltungswissenschaften in Speyer. His early publications focused on law and administration.
In 1960-1, he had spent a year at Harvard University, where he had encountered Talcott Parsons, the renowned American sociologist. This meeting, coupled with his already intensive preoccupation with philosophy, history and early functionalist theory, led Luhmann into a career as a sociologist. He qualified on the fast track at the University of Munster, and then in 1969 went to Bielefeld.
There he launched what became his lifelong systems theory project, and became known as one of the most industrious sociologists of recent times. Most of his published material spelt out the valuable information that his famous zettelkasten (file cards in a box system) contained - hence the reader's impression of reading one long book in many instalments.
Yet Luhmann's work was not solely an extension of one original idea. He never dryly spelt out systems theory in Social Systems (1984/English translation 1996), Ecological Communication (1986/1989) or his last book and magnum opus Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (The Society of Society).
Anyone interested in the great debates between Habermas and Luhmann believed that, after Habermas published Theory of Communicative Action and Luhmann produced Social Systems, everything that had to be said had been said. But Luhmann surprised everybody with Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. In it, he addressed the problem of what the word "societal" really means.
In the book, Luhmann treats sociology as a self-descriptive enterprise where sociology itself is just one of the many constitutive parts. It thereby re -enters society not with a monopoly of interpretation, but merely as one of the possible vantage points.
Luhmann's sociology truly knows no secularised gods such as "reason" or "emancipation", and so it is also more pluralistic. His approach is more democratically founded than that of any of his contemporaries.
Niklas Luhmann's contributions will be sadly missed, since, as the newsweekly Der Spiegel observed, there is at present not much in sociology between number -crunching and fashionable essayism. Luhmann's work has been translated into all major languages and is discussed throughout the world. For a newer generation of sociologists, he became an iconoclast within his own lifetime. And without his contributions, preparing sociology for the 21st century will be much harder.
Andreas Hess
Niklas Luhmann, sociologist, born December 8, 1927; died November 6, 1998
