23 Facts About Niklas Luhmann

Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist, philosopher of social science, and a prominent thinker in systems theory.

Niklas Luhmann entered the Gymnasium Johanneum at Luneburg in 1937.

In later days, Niklas Luhmann dismissed Parsons' theory, developing a rival approach of his own.

Niklas Luhmann continued to publish after his retirement, when he finally found the time to complete his magnum opus, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, which was published in 1997, and has been translated into English as Theory of Society.

Niklas Luhmann wrote prolifically, with more than 70 books and nearly 400 scholarly articles published on a variety of subjects, including law, economy, politics, art, religion, ecology, mass media, and love.

Niklas Luhmann's relatively low profile elsewhere is partly due to the fact that translating his work is a difficult task, since his writing presents a challenge even to readers of German, including many sociologists.

Niklas Luhmann is probably best known to North Americans for his debate with the critical theorist Jurgen Habermas over the potential of social systems theory.

Niklas Luhmann's theory is sometimes dismissed as highly abstract and complex, particularly within the Anglophone world, whereas his work has had a more lasting influence on scholars from German-speaking countries, Scandinavia and Italy.

Niklas Luhmann called this process of reproduction from elements previously filtered from an over-complex environment autopoiesis, using a term coined in cognitive biology by Chilean thinkers Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.

That is, by describing social systems as operationally closed networks of communications, Niklas Luhmann ignores the fact that communications presuppose human communicators.

Niklas Luhmann likens the operation of autopoiesis to a program; making a series of logical distinctions.

Niklas Luhmann starts with the differentiation of the systems themselves out of a nondescript environment.

For Niklas Luhmann, functional differentiation is a consequence of selective pressure under temporalized complexity, and it occurs as function systems independently establish their own ecological niches by performing a function.

One seemingly peculiar, but, within the overall framework, strictly logical, axiom of Niklas Luhmann's theory is the human being's position outside the strict boundaries of any social system, as initially developed by Parsons.

Niklas Luhmann was devoted to the ideal of non-normative science introduced to sociology in the early 20th century by Max Weber and later re-defined and defended against its critics by Karl Popper.

However, in an academic environment that never strictly separated descriptive and normative theories of society, Niklas Luhmann's sociology has widely attracted criticism from various intellectuals, including Jurgen Habermas.

Niklas Luhmann's approach has attracted criticism from those who argue that Luhmann has at no point demonstrated the operational closure of social systems, or in fact that autopoietic social systems actually exist.

Niklas Luhmann has instead taken this as a premise or presupposition, resulting in the logical need to exclude humans from social systems, which prevents the social systems view from accounting for the individual behavior, action, motives, or indeed existence of any individual person.

Niklas Luhmann was famous for his extensive use of the "slip box" or Zettelkasten note-taking method.

Niklas Luhmann built up a zettelkasten of some 90,000 index cards for his research, and credited it with making his extraordinarily prolific writing possible.

Niklas Luhmann described the zettelkasten as part of his research into systems theory in the essay Kommunikation mit Zettelkasten.

Niklas Luhmann appears as a character in Paul Wuhr's work of literature Das falsche Buch, along with Ulrich Sonnemann, Johann Georg Hamann, Richard Buckminster Fuller and others.

Niklas Luhmann owned a pub called "Pons" in his parents' house in his native town of Luneburg.