The essays in this section are all about basic concepts of the theory of social systems that was developed by Luhmann in the last quarter of the 20th century.

This theory describes social systems as realities sui generis, consisting of interrelated communications. Communications are interpreted as the system-specific elementary operations, which are produced in and by the complexes of interrelated communications.

Social systems are self-producing – autopoietic – complex entities, distinguishing themselves from and existing alongside human beings, which are categorized as combinations of organic and psychic systems in their environment. Social systems are, in Luhmann’s theory, therefore not built out of actions of human beings, because that would mean the inclusion of parts of psychic and social systems in social systems. This theory further provides concepts for the explanation of the specificity of various kinds of social systems like organizations and functionally specialized societal subsystems (for example law, politics, education and science). The specificity of social systems, it is said, is dependent on the specific characteristics of their communications – for example being a communication of a decision is typical for the case of organizations; using the distinctions of “true/untrue” and “legal/non-legal” in their communications is typical for respectively the societal systems of “science” and “law”.

The articles that are collected in this section—listed and summarized below—accept the notion of a social system as a complex with specific elementary operations – communications – that distinguishes itself from its environment and is characterized by an elementary closure. A lot of further theoretical decisions that are typical for Luhmann’s systems theory are, however, rejected. These concern: the dismissal of actions from social systems; the juxtaposition of organic, psychic and social systems; the one-dimensional conception of the constitution and the categorization of the social world as a matter of the use of opposite distinctions in communications.

My texts try to conceptualize communications as consisting of actions, which are in turn made up of psychic and organic operations. This implies that actions and communications are realized as operations of psycho-physical human beings. I try to undo the decoupling and juxtaposition of social, psychic, and organic systems that is typical for Luhmann’s theory. Interpreting psychic and organic systems – i.e. human beings – as environments of social systems makes it impossible to imagine that human beings could be involved in, and therefore be pleased or hurt by, actively judging and producing social systems.

Luhmann’s theory of distinctions overemphasizes, in my view, contingency, and ends up in relativism about meaning-giving and valuation. Besides, the theory implies wrongly that the closure of a social system can be identified with the use of a particular distinction, like true/not true in the case of science or government/opposition in the case of politics. These systems do not exclusively consist of communications that use these distinctions.