Niklas Luhmann is remembered as one of the most important social theorist of the 20th century. Yet in much of the Anglo-Saxon world, reception of his work has been delayed. This is at least partly because of the opacity of his writing style, which is challenging even in its native German, and notoriously difficult to translate (Kieser, 2007). There are also reproaches that Luhmann was too radically antihumanist, radically antiregional, and radically constructivistic (Lee, 2000). Nonetheless, he was and still is an important contemporary intellectual leader and representative of systems science even for those who may not fully share Niklas Luhmann's opinions.
Luhmann’s way into science was not at all common. He was born on December 8, 1927, in Lüneburg, as the son of a brewer (Wilhelm Luhmann) and forced to join Hitler’s army in 1943. In 1945, at the age of 17, he was taken as a prisoner of war. After the war he studied law, received a doctoral degree, and began a career in public administration. During a sabbatical in 1961, he went to Harvard University, where he met Talcot Parsons, then the world’s most influential social systems theorist. In later years Luhmann dismissed Parsons’ approach and developed his own systems theory (Kieser, 2007). In returning to Germany he switched from administration to research and became the first professor of the University of Bielefeld. He stayed in Bielefeld until his retirement in 1993.
There is virtually no theme or topic not addressed by Luhmann in one way or another. The volume of his production is little short of extraordinary with 50 books and 300 articles between 1963 and 1997 (Arnoldi, 2001). One could start on his magnificent body of work with Ecological Communication, before moving on to the essay collection, The Differentiation of Society, and eventually Social Systems. None of these publications is easy, but there is always something to learn from Luhmann (Fuchs, 1999).
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