Niklas Luhmann
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Biography
Niklas Luhmann (8 December 1927 - 6 November 1998) was a German sociologist, administration expert, and a prominent thinker in sociological systems theory. He was one of the most influential sociologists of the late 20th century and his theories continue to gain acceptance amongst a still wider audience at the beginning of the 21st century.
Luhmann was born in Lüneburg, Germany, where his father's family had been running a brewery for several generations. After graduating from the Johanneum school in 1943, he was conscripted as a Luftwaffenhelfer in World War II and served for two years until, at the age of 17, he was taken prisoner of war by American troops in 1945. After the war Luhmann studied law at the University of Freiburg from 1946 to 1949, when he obtained a law degree, and then began a career in Lüneburg's public administration. During a sabbatical in 1961, he went to Harvard, where he met and studied under Talcott Parsons, then the world's most influential social systems theorist.
In later years, Luhmann dismissed Parsons' theory, developing a rival approach of his own. Leaving the civil service in 1962, he lectured at the national Deutsche Hochschule für Verwaltungswissenschaften (University for Administrative Sciences) in Speyer, Germany, until 1965, when he was offered a position at the Sozialforschungsstelle (Social Research Centre) of the University of Münster, led by Helmut Schelsky. 1965/66 he studied one semester of sociology at the University of Münster.
Two earlier books were retroactively accepted as a PhD thesis and habilitation at the University of Münster in 1966, qualifying him for a university professorship. In 1968/1969, he briefly served as a lecturer at Theodor Adorno's former chair at the University of Frankfurt and then was appointed full professor of sociology at the newly founded University of Bielefeld, Germany (until 1993). Holder of a number of honorary degrees, Luhmann received the prestigious Hegel Prize of the City of Stuttgart in 1988. Articles in German newspapers and numerous speaking engagements at professional meetings enabled him to broaden his audience. Although primarily occupied with his own research after 1968, he served as an occasional political adviser on matters of public policy in Germany. He continued to publish after his retirement, when he finally found the time to complete his magnum opus, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft ("The Society of Society"), which appeared in 1997.
Largely working independently, Luhmann became one of the most prolific and original sociological theorists in the world. His works, which for the most part were written in a relatively dense and scholarly style, drew on disciplines ranging from philosophy to linguistics to information science. They covered a wide spectrum of subjects, including law and love, politics and religion, education and the environment.
Luhmann was especially interested in systems which operate on the basis of "meaning," in particular, systems of human communication. He regarded society not as a network of individuals united by shared beliefs, but rather as the totality of all communications.
The (translated) titles of Luhmann's main publications in German convey the focus and range of his work: Functions and Consequences of Formal Organization (1964), Fundamental Rights as an Institution: A Contribution to Political Sociology (1965), The Goal Concept and System Rationality: On the Function of Goals in Social Systems (1968), Theory of Society or Social Technology (1971; a famous debate with the German social theorist Jürgen Habermas), Societal Structure and Semantics (3 volumes; 1980, 1981, 1989); Social Systems: Outline of a General Theory (1984; perhaps Luhmann's theoretical masterpiece, in which he developed the concept of "autopoietic" or self-producing systems, to be published in English by Stanford University Press), and four volumes of essays under the general title Sociological Enlightenment.
Luhmann married Ursula von Walter in 1960; she died in 1977. They had two sons and one daughter. He has been a Professor of Sociololgy, University of Bielefeld since 1968. He died in 1998.
Further Media
You'll find some links and materials contributed by Benjamin Baumann in the Media Collection
Corresponding Articles
- Changes of communication due to electronic media (Essay)
- Communication (Definition according to Luhmann)
- Distribution Media (Definition according to Luhmann)
- Luhmann "Kommunikationsmedien"
- Media Collection: Niklas Luhmann
- Medium and Form (Definition according to Niklas Luhmann)
- Niklas Luhmann (Bibliography)
