Niklas Luhmann

Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) was a German sociologist who developed a theory of society as a self-reproducing system of communication. His work applied systems theory to law, politics, art, religion, and other social domains.

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Social systems theory: A sociological approach that explains social structures and processes through relations among systems and their environments. Luhmann transformed this broad approach into a theory centered on communication rather than human actors.
Meaning (Luhmann): A medium that makes more possibilities available than a system can actualize at once. Meaning lets communication select possibilities while leaving alternatives available for later operations.
Law as a social system: An account of law as a self-reproducing system that communicates through legal distinctions and procedures. Luhmann analyzed how legal communication maintains its boundaries while responding to social conditions.
Talcott Parsons: An American sociologist whose structural functionalism explained social order through interdependent institutions and roles. Luhmann began from Parsons’s systems approach, then revised its account of action and social order.
Social Systems: Niklas Luhmann’s 1984 book presenting his general theory of social systems and communication. This book gives the fullest systematic statement of the framework associated with Luhmann.
Autopoiesis: The self-production of a system through processes that recursively generate the components composing it. Luhmann adapted this biological concept to explain how social systems continually reproduce communication.
Functional differentiation: The organization of modern society into specialized systems that perform distinct social functions. Luhmann used differentiation to explain why modern society has no single center directing every domain.
Politics as a social system: An account of politics as a differentiated system that organizes collectively binding decisions. This application shows how political communication differs from the operations of other social systems.
Humberto Maturana: A Chilean biologist who developed the concept of autopoiesis to describe living systems. Maturana’s theory supplied the concept Luhmann adapted for self-reproducing social systems.
Theory of Society: Niklas Luhmann’s two-volume account of modern society, published in German in 1997 and 1998. This late work applies his systems theory to society as a whole.