Differentiation and Modern Social Theory
Luhmann uses the operative distinction between system and environment to determine that society is a complex system which replicates the system/environment distinction to form internal subsystems. Science is among these internally differentiated social systems, and within this system is the sub-system sociology. Here, in the system sociology, Luhmann finds himself again, an observer observing society. His knowledge of society as an internally differentiated system is a contingent observation made from within one of the specialized function-systems he observes. He concludes, therefore, that any social theory claiming universal status must take this contingency into account. Once one uses the basic system/environment distinction, then none of the traditional philosophical or sociological distinctions – transcendental and empirical, subject and object, ideology and science – can eliminate the contingency of enforced selectivity. Thus, Luhmann’s theory of social systems breaks not only with all forms of transcendentalism, but with the philosophy of history as well (Knodt and Rasch 1994).
Luhmann is criticized as being self-referential and repetitive, this is because a system is forced to observe society from within society. Systems theory, for its part, unfolds this paradox with the notion that the observer observes society from within a subsystem (in this case: sociology) of a subsystem (science) of the social system. Its descriptions are thus “society of society” (Luhmann and Ward 2000).
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