Luhmann, all too Luhmann

Nietzsche, Luhmann and the human

Todd Cesaratto

pp. 108-134

in: Anders la Cour, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (eds), Luhmann observed, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

For a while it seemed that modernity had made Humpty-Dumpties of us humans — broken, alienated and isolated us. Then Niklas Luhmann came and put us back together. He made us hale and whole again. This theoretical coup owes to the fact "that he emancipates humans from an overload — which is motivated by worldview-architectonics — that ostensibly makes them extremely crooked subjects"¹ (Sloterdijk, 2000: 21). Correspondingly, Luhmann's newly uncrooked human meets a version of society that he describes as less sinister by far than the one presented by the Frankfurt School and related intellectual traditions.² This constitutes a 180-degree change in perspective in how one may understand the social world. For Luhmann, society is sometimes fair, sometimes unfair, but always imbued with clear, relatively easy-to-understand operational guidelines if one observes with an adequate systematic framework.

Cited authors

Luhmann Niklas