Translators’ Introduction

Translators’ Introduction

Description

The focal concern of this volume is the historical uniqueness of the West—of “modernity” in all its preconditions and ramifications. In this respect, if not in others, Niklas Luhmann shares the preoccupations of Max Weber. Although the essays that are collected below were composed over a period of fifteen years (from 1964 to 1979), they have a single and clearly defined purpose. Luhmann's ultimate aim, in fact, is to develop a conceptual vocabulary that is refined, variegated, and supple enough to capture what he sees as the unprecedented structural characteristics of modern society. His books and articles are typically prefaced with a claim that many of the most influential ideas inherited from the great tradition of ancient and early modern political philosophy are far too coarse, rigid, and simplistic to help us grasp the hypercomplexity of our present social order. Thus, Luhmann argues that social theory must routinely begin with a “critique of abstraction,” with the dismantling of obsolete and procrustean theoretical frameworks. This exercise in razing the past, of course, must be followed by a more difficult (and thus more tentative and experimental) process of building up, by an attempt to replace the jettisoned frameworks with a more flexible and realistic set of categories and questions. What should be stressed at the outset is that the highly abstract, sometimes difficult and abstruse quality of Luhmann's sociology results from his ongoing endeavor to provide a highly general map with which empirical and historical research can approach the study of modern society. One of the methodological rules to which Luhmann constantly recurs is this: we must always resist the temptation to blame modern society for deficiencies in our outmoded theories. Indeed, his entire approach is predicated on the belief that naive moralism, afflicting both Marxist and conservative social thought, frequently stems from the anachronistic inadequacy of our descriptive schemata. All too often, he tells us, modern society is diagnosed as “in the throes of crisis” simply because its complex order and novel patterns of change do not pliantly conform to our antiquated concepts of integration and stability. A revamping or updating of the basic categories of social theory, of course, does not dictate a jubilant celebration of “all modernity.” But it may help us approach our unsurveyably complex social order in a more cogent and exploratory (and less plaintive) fashion. This, in turn, should allow us to unearth solutions and alternatives for action that have hitherto been concealed by tradition-skewed misperceptions of modernity.

Source Publication

Niklas Luhmann, The Differentiation of Society

Publication Date

1982

Translators’ Introduction

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