While I was wrapping up my master’s in Brazilian Studies, I took up a voluntary post at Senate House Library. My job was to sift through the library’s collection of Latin American Political Pamphlets, which needed cataloguing, labelling and rescuing from their rusting steel paper clips, a task that ended up taking over a year. The boxes containing materials from Brazil had hardly ever been touched, and I was immediately drawn in. Without looking for anything in particular, I began piecing together remnants of social movements and resistance to the military dictatorship, which I was researching at the time. I became curious and descended into the rabbit-hole clues that the documents – which ranged from economic forecasts to solidarity posters – had left behind. Eventually, my curiosity evolved into a PhD project, and those clues led me to visit numerous other archives across Western Europe and Brazil. I learned that underneath the story of resistance to Brazil’s regime was a vast transnational network that had yet to be fully excavated and mapped.

Brazil and the Transnational Human Rights Movement explores how solidarity with victims of dictatorship contributed to the global human rights movement that emerged in the 1970s. Through a range of activities, solidarity for Brazil popularised the language of human rights and prompted the international community to join the fight against the military regime. They also reframed the debate on human rights, expanding beyond dominant interpretations that elevated the violation of ‘basic’ individual rights – such as the use of torture and political imprisonment – to also incorporate social and economic rights, inequality, indigenous minorities and the human rights responsibilities of multinational companies and development projects. Crucial to the very essence of solidarity for Brazil in Western Europe were pre-existing networks of exiles, Catholic activists, journalists and academics, which shaped the language and discourse of global human rights. This story challenges mainstream narratives and exposes the construction of human rights from below.

On 1 April 1964, the Brazilian government was overthrown by a military coup that would last for twenty-one years. Things happened slowly at first. Political opposition was disassembled through a series of constitutional amendments, while members of the military apparatus were woven into the organisational hierarchies of unions and universities.

Mothers raising sons.

The Introduction consists of four parts. It starts with short remarks on the biographical details of Niklas Luhmann. The second part outlines the development of Luhmann’s social theory in three stages and highlights a number of tenets of his social theory. In the third part, the Introduction offers concise summaries of the contributions contained in the Companion. And the last part provides a list of core monographs of Niklas Luhmann in English.

Brief Biographical Facts on Niklas Luhmann

Niklas Luhmann was born on 8 December 1927 in Lüneburg (in the North of Germany) and died 6 November 1998, in Oerlinghausen, near Bielefeld where he was Professor of Sociology for 30 years. He gained a worldwide reputation as a sociologist, philosopher of social science, and a prominent thinker in systems theory, who can be considered as one of the most important social theorists of the twentieth century.

Rather unusually for an academic sociologist, he worked during the first period of his adult life as a lawyer. He gained his legal education in Freiburg in the late 1940s (first state exam in law), followed by an obligatory period of legal training at the appellate administrative court in Lüneburg (second state exam in law). From 1956 to 1962 he was a civil servant in the Ministry of Culture in Lower Saxony, Germany. During this time, he was able to be seconded to spend a year (1960–1961) at Harvard University where he encountered and studied with the leading U.S. sociologist and social system theorist Talcott Parsons.

In 1962 he gained a research position at the College (since 1997 University) of Administrative Sciences in Speyer and moved in 1965 to a social science research institute located in Dortmund. This research institute was associated with the University of Münster where he was awarded in 1966 within one year the obligatory two doctorates for an academic career (Ph.D. and Habilitation). Further details and analyses of Luhmann’s early career can be found in Klaus Dammann’s contribution to this Companion which also reflects on how to write a Luhmann biography.

In 1968, Luhmann became Professor of Sociology in the newly founded University of Bielefeld.

Introduction

A central argument in Niklas Luhmann’s theory of society is that modern society comprises a variety of function systems. In an early version of his theory, written in the mid-1970s, Luhmann presented a list of ten important function systems: politics, law, the military, the economy, science, the family (and intimate relationships), art, education, medicine and religion. This list was not intended to be exhaustive. Some suggestions for including additional function systems, such as the mass media, social work, sports and tourism, were discussed in later publications. Throughout the different versions of his theory of society, however, Luhmann has continued to underline the idea that modern society is characterised by the primacy or dominance of the form of functional differentiation.

While religion may have contributed to the genesis of modern society, Luhmann argued, it has above all been forced to come to terms with the consequences of its differentiation form. ‘Today religion survives as a functional subsystem of a functionally differentiated society. It has gained recognised autonomy at the cost of recognizing the autonomy of the other subsystems, i.e., secularization’. Although, interestingly, Luhmann expressed some hesitations about the usefulness of the concept of secularisation in his late work, he kept using it – if only because it ‘calls attention to how religion reacts to the assumption of a secularised society’. While his hesitations have to do with changes in his view on the ways religion adapts to the form of functional differentiation, the challenges associated with secularisation provide a good avenue for analysing and discussing Luhmann’s view on the position of religion in modern society.

As is well known, Luhmann was an astonishingly productive author, able to cover a broad variety of topics. He devoted much time and effort to studies on (the evolution of) single function systems. As he remarked in the introduction to the essay collection The Differentiation of Society, the analysis of modern society as a functionally differentiated system ‘requires a detailed study of each of its single functional subsystems’. He covered religion in a number of papers as well as two books: Funktion der Religion and Die Religion der Gesellschaft.

Introduction

Modern science enjoys an extraordinary authority in explaining ‘reality’, as well as in looking for solutions to the world’s problems. Anyone who does not observe scientific insights and its standards of justification is thrown into defence. Even the Pope must make concessions to scientific thinking, for example, by actively supporting alternatives for using embryos in stem cell research.

In his lengthy book, Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft (Science as a Social System), Niklas Luhmann affirms the exalted prestige and the amazing accomplishments of science, yet at the same time stresses the severe limitations of its perspective and questions its ability to simply dictate rules to other parts of society. Science is just one of the function systems of modern society and hence cannot claim priority over any other fields, including law, politics, economy or religion. While many would like to see politicians developing policies based on scientifically sound facts, or religious leaders wising up and acknowledging scientific realities, the tasks of politics are simply not that of science, and neither are the issues of religion. Each of them requires specific solutions, which cannot just be transferred to other systems. While science can identify problems for politics (e.g., severe nitrogen pollution) and suggest solutions (e.g., reducing livestock production), it cannot tell politics how to find majority support for the latter, just as law cannot instruct the economy how to gain profit.

Throughout his career, Luhmann has emphasised this disappearance of a hierarchy in the structure of society. There is no ‘grand narrative’ anymore, no worldview, no philosophy and no system that can provide binding references for acting in the world. This also goes for science. Its customarily privileged position over other function systems, for instance in the Enlightenment project or twentieth-century modernist technocracy, can no longer be guaranteed. A common reality, as Enlightenment philosophers envisaged it to emerge out of the proper use of ‘reason’, is replaced by ‘heterarchical’ multiple realities, which are subject to continuous change and contingent upon constantly evolving social conditions. Notwithstanding its traditional prestige, scientific knowledge, within this constellation, is thus perceived to be ‘only one form of social potency among others’, Luhmann writes

Introduction

On the 31st March 1964, General Olympio Mourão Filho led three regiments from the State of Minas Gerais into Rio de Janeiro to depose the constitutionally elected government of President João Goulart. The series of events that followed were hardly unprecedented. Goulart, like a number of the presidents who had preceded him, posed a threat to traditional land-owning elites, national capitalists and foreign economic interests. In this way, General Mourão Filho and his regiments were just one of a number of circles that had been hoping for a change in the political establishment since the 1940s. While Mourão Filho did not personally oversee Goulart’s forced removal from power, his actions opened the door to the various factions of military and civil society actors who eventually occupied key positions in the post-coup regime.

Political instability and trauma had been accumulating for some decades in Brazil. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, when the crash of world coffee prices led Brazil into an economic crisis, an alliance of liberal elites, fronted by Getúlio Vargas, came to power by way of an armed revolution. The revolution, which began in October 1930, consisted of worker strikes, civilian occupations and mounting military forces. Then-president Washington Luis resigned, and following a short military junta, Vargas assumed the presidency in November 1930. Vargas came to be known as the ‘Father of the Poor’, thanks to sweeping reforms that contributed to the country’s industrialisation, urban workers’ rights, suffrage and literacy levels, among other things. But he also placed constraints on political and union-based opposition groups and, just as the opposition feared, staged an autocoup1 in 1937 which began an eight-year dictatorship.

The complexities of what followed are well documented elsewhere, but what needs to be conveyed is the sense of chaos and exhaustion that was felt by Brazilians during these years. In 1945, after 15 years of populist and dictatorial rule, the military staged another coup, and Vargas was replaced with the Head of the Supreme Court Jose Linhares, who served as interim president for three months. Between 1946 and 1951, the Brazilian presidency was occupied by Marshal Eurico Gaspar Dutra. Vargas then returned to power until 1954; amid political and economic turmoil and the threat of military action, he committed suicide.

Towards the final months of finishing this book, I still hadn’t found out who Francisco Correia was. I decided to try one last time. I contacted some of the pioneering scholars of the field: Denise Rollemberg, Marcos Napolitano, Marcelo Ridenti, Maurice Politi and Anthony Pereira, but nobody could say for sure. A running theory was that it might have been Francisco Correa Weffort, a Brazilian professor of political science who served as Brazil’s minister of culture between 1995 and 2002, but he hadn’t spent any significant amount of time in Europe during the dictatorship.

Then, an answer arrived, first from former exile Tullo Vigevani, and then, a few hours later, from an archivist at the Centro de Documentação e Memoria, the collection managed by José Luiz del Roio, who I had interviewed in 2016. ‘Francisco Correia is one of the most brilliant and important people in the contemporary history of the Left in Brazil and overseas’, the email began. Of this I was sure. It only takes looking back over the pages of this book to realise the impact and reach of his efforts. And then, the answer was revealed: ‘It was the codename that José Luiz del Roio used in clandestinity, when he was in Europe.’

José Luiz was seemingly amused by the whole conversation, ‘they told me this Francisco Correia guy was a terrorist.’

I spoke to José Luiz one last time before submitting the book. I was eager to hear from ‘Francisco Correia’ himself, and to ask him what he thought of my work. This second encounter was very different from the first. In 2016, I went to Brazil to carry out interviews and explore the country’s archives. One of the first places I visited were the CEDEM archives at the State University of São Paulo, UNESP, home to collections of important events in Brazil’s social and political history, particularly relating to public education and social movements. Sat down in his office, overlooking the Praça da Sé, José Luiz and I spoke about Brazilian exiles and their political activism overseas. An archivist walked me through the centre’s collections and set me up with the gloves I needed to handle the delicate materials.

Introduction: Constitutional Blind Spots and Theories of Differentiation

This chapter examines ways in which Luhmann’s sociology can be used to enrich empirical understanding of institutional structures in contemporary global society. In particular, it discusses how the formation of the institutions that typify modern societal order, both at the national and the transnational level, can be illuminated by his theory of functional differentiation. To achieve this, it proposes a counter-intuitive way of reading Luhmann. It argues that his sociology provides the most adequate construction of the institutional determinants of world society, not if it is simply employed a literal sociological lens, but if it is observed through a method that probes critically at its conceptual adequacy. Centrally, this chapter advances a dialectical engagement with Luhmann’s theory of functional differentiation: it accepts his account of differentiation as a matrix for examining modern society, yet it argues that institutional organs with a central position in society have resulted from historical trajectories of differentiation that deviate from those imputed to society by Luhmann. It claims that Luhmann’s theory has utility as a framework for distilling many social phenomena in broad terms, but many institutional phenomena come most sharply into focus as they jar against the terms of his systemic observation. As a result, his theory frequently illuminates social institutions in a rather unintended fashion. On this basis, this chapter claims that, more than any direct application of Luhmann’s thought, it is through engagement with the aporia, blind spots and oversights in his work that we obtain the most accurate perspective for describing the underlying institutional form of society. In promoting this approach, this chapter aims to show, using a broadly Luhmannian method, how explanatory simplifications in systems theory hold clues for the comprehension of society, challenging us to think through the given categories of systems theory to generate more complex descriptions of empirical realities.

As its primary object, this chapter discusses Luhmann’s understanding of the legal system and the political system and his interpretation of the processes by which contemporary society structures legal and political communications to produce and preserve its essential differentiated form.

Introduction

China’s increasing role in the world is one of the dominant themes of the twenty-first century. Rising from a per capita income similar to those of the poorest African nations in the 1950s, the World Bank now classifies China as an upper-middle-income country and the country has lifted some 800 million people out of poverty. The growth in aggregate income level is even more dramatic: China now has the largest economy in the world in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms and is expected to overtake the United States in current dollar terms later in the 2020s. Militarily, China has vastly expanded the capacity of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and increased its role in outer space. Institutionally, it has established powerful new development banks and invited the world to join its massive infrastructure program—the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

While the main thrust of China’s expansion thus far has been in Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have also been incorporated, mainly in economic terms. China–LAC relations have burgeoned through trade and finance since the early 2000s. While not all aspects of the encounters have been positive, and many in the region remain skeptical of their new partner’s intentions, the Chinese presence has enabled a diversification of Latin America’s international relations that can only be seen as beneficial. Certainly, relations with the US continue to dominate in the northern half of the region and Europe is a significant partner for South America, but China’s new presence provides important new opportunities.

A major problem that Latin America must face in this new context is the growing conflicts between the United States and China and the expectations that Latin America should “take sides” in this struggle. Although the tensions reached an apex during the presidency of Donald Trump in the United States, no one expects them to disappear under the new Biden administration there. Indeed, although the tone may moderate, the conflicts may even increase as Biden officials try to enlist European and Asian allies to contain China’s power. Keeping its distance from such power struggles should be a major foreign policy goal for the LAC region in the coming years.

The word “crisis” is inherent to Latin America. Throughout two centuries of independent history, the region has gone through many crises. Some triggered from abroad and others self-induced, the majority generated in the interface between domestic and international affairs. According to the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC), however, the crisis of 2020–2021, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, has been the worst in 120 years. In 2020, the region’s economy contracted by 7.7 percent (versus 3.5 percent for the world economy), per capita income fell to 2010 levels, and poverty levels to those of 2006. As a result, in 2021, 33.7 percent of the region’s population, one in three Latin Americans, lives below poverty levels (ECLAC 2021). Data indicate that the region faces another lost decade, this time between 2015 and 2025, since the 2015–2019 five-year period was already one of slow growth. Although the pandemic has affected the entire world, there have been regions that have emerged as winners (such as East Asia) and others that have done so as losers (such as Latin America) in the wake of this humanitarian catastrophe. The outlook of a stagnant region, one that is caught in the middle-income trap in that every 30 or 40 years it goes through a “lost decade” in which everything achieved in the previous 10 years fades away and demands a new start, is nothing less than overwhelming, to put it mildly.

What hope for the future can the 660 million Latin Americans have in these circumstances?

The previous lost decade in the region, in the eighties, was triggered by an event beyond its borders—the rise of interest rates in the United States in 1982, which led to the so-called “debt crisis.” The same is true for the current crisis, triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic, which arose in 2020 from a virus that emerged in Wuhan, China. Once again, the crisis surprised a fragmented Latin America, making a coordinated response that could have lessened its effects (González et al. 2021), difficult, if not impossible. Far from being a mere addendum to its condition, the region’s location in and interaction with the international political economy is central to its development and progress.

Introduction

The chapter asks what kind of biography in writing about Niklas Luhmann as a person is compatible with Luhmann’s own theory. In contrast to most other canonical authors in social science, with whom Luhmann was well acquainted, his biographical writings are characterised by an ‘ambitious modesty’ (to use Michael King’s and Anton Schütz’ label and reveal a sceptical distance to information on the non-scholarly person. By adopting a Luhmannian perspective and using his theoretical distinctions the chapter introduces Luhmann as a divided person. A central concern of the chapter resumes in an effort to reconstruct a Luhmannian perspective on biography and to use his view on methodology and empirical research. In the last part, the chapter debunks allegations of Luhmann’s involvement in Nazi Germany and demonstrates instead the usefulness of Luhmann’s theories for studies of Nazi violence.

Niklas Luhmann Individualised and Divided

We need both names, Luhmann and Niklas, to refer to the phenomenon that has become recognised in the discipline of sociology. Luhmann insists throughout his work that sociology should not speak of ‘the’ individual, but refer to addresses (billions) when conceiving individuals: Which individual? Sometimes it is necessary to use bureaucratic data, like ‘born in 1927 in Lüneburg, died 1998 in Oerlinghausen’ in order to identify and address him, because there are fake Niklas Luhmann (not only on Facebook) and other Niklas Luhmann (real, named after him?).

Not only the rise of individuality in the Western world is a topic in Niklas Luhmann’s work, but we also find a theory of ‘personal division’, dividuality. Luhmann’s distinction between social communication and psychic processes, which he derived in part from US role theory, suggests the distinction between social and psychic Luhmann. The latter is visible for a sociologist only by observing the psyche in its communicative academic and lay versions. In Christian faith the soul, and in sociology the psyche (in Luhmannian parlance: consciousness), can be conceived of as individual, that is: indivisible. Non-sociological academic analysis does not think in this way: the psyche (observed by psychology) and the body (observed by biology) must be seen as divided as Luhmannian sociology conceives the person in communication as being divided.

The chapter engages with Niklas Luhmann’s understanding of the concept of culture, from his critical examination of Talcott Parsons’ concept of a normative culture to ideas about a specifically modern notion of culture. It includes discussions of his ideas about culture forms of different media epochs of human society and about culture as memory of society. Luhmann’s sociology of culture remains a fragment, but it can provide inspiration for a media-theoretical derivation of culture forms of society, as well as for a social theory of values. Luhmann remained sceptical about the concept of culture throughout his life, since any attempt to ‘register’ a social phenomenon, for example, religion or art, ‘as culture’ runs the risk of infringing upon the necessary protection of its latency.

Introduction

Niklas Luhmann tried to get rid of the concept of culture. His relationship to this concept was not only sceptical but also polemical. In the 1980s, he had succeeded in neutralising Talcott Parsons’ use of culture as a set of values able to normatively solve problems of double contingency. He pointed out that mere coincidences, that is, time, would do the same. But in the 1990s, he experienced a rebirth of so-called cultural studies, which did not seem inclined to draw their lessons from the failure of cultural studies in the 1920s; when culture was thought to possibly provide the a priori values, by then lacking, ever since ontological metaphysics had lost its grip (Max Scheler, Nicolai Hartmann). Luhmann tried to limit the concept of culture as merely ‘historical’, as the product of a specific constellation of modern society – belonging to the past more than to any present, let alone future – but in the process of his examination began to conceive of culture as a memory function of society, to which he devoted ever greater attention. Luhmann’s description of so-called ‘culture forms’ of ancient, modern and postmodern society does not lack irony in being highly speculative, but could nevertheless develop into a fruitful paradigm of future research and teaching in cultural sociology.

Culture versus System

Niklas Luhmann had a not-entirely tension-free relationship with both culture and the concept of culture. Culture is ‘what one finds in the soil not belonging there’.