Book Review: Law as a Social System
| Author | Peer Zumbansen |
| Published date | 01 September 2006 |
| Date | 01 September 2006 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0964663906066620 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
BOOK REVIEWS
NIKLAS LUHMANN, Law as a Social System. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004,
498 pp., ISBN 0–19–826238–8, £65.00.
DOI: 10.1177/0964663906066620
Despite the availability of sometimes brilliant English translations of many texts by
the late German sociologist and legal theorist Niklas Luhmann, his influence on
Anglo-American theory continues to be minimal. In his version and elaboration of
systems theory, Luhmann describes the collision of societal systems in an endless
struggle not for coherence, but for interpenetration, co-existence and perturbation,
operational closure and cognitive openness, not for ‘exit, voice and loyalty’, but for
reflexive processes of irritation and co-evolution, not for regulatory competition
versus harmonization, but for evolution and autopoeitic self-reproduction. These are
key words that are central to Luhmann’s theoretical construction and on which Euro-
peans may spend years of intellectual probing, convening conferences of extraordi-
nary magnitude and exhausting intensity, where they show their grey faces sticking
out of turtlenecks or tie-less shirts while they drink black coffee; not much of this
seems to be of great appeal to the Anglo-American world.
Where can we look for reasons? Already the number of English language trans-
lations that are available of Luhmann’s œuvre should refute possible comparisons to
another case of – at least in the beginning – scholarly disinterest in the English-
speaking world in the work of Carl Schmitt, whose wide-ranging work has only more
recently really been discovered in English. The comparison does not hold because
Carl Schmitt eventually found his way into the debates in the English-speaking world,
his work has been translated and he has become the target of symposia, conferences
and major collections. Giorgio Agamben’s persistent inquiry into the ‘state of excep-
tion’ signalled a renewed interest in Schmitt’s work and influence on contemporary
legal and political thinking, one that is again increasingly dominated by a normative
thrust and a seemingly inevitable moralization of positions into either good or bad,
friend or foe. Luhmann, in contrast, is regularly seen as disinterested, even incom-
patible to such universalizing legal-political discourse. Instead, his identification of
society as consisting of communications that take place among scattered systems
of consciousness, his pernicious insistence on the self-referentiality of systems of
meaning and the ensuing, hard-to-swallow, dire consequence of an exclusion of moral
thinking from driving and determining learning processes seem to situate Luhmann’s
concepts on the outside of most contemporary political and legal theory. A closer
look at the admittedly overwhelming volume of Luhmann’s literary production,
however, reveals a different story, one that is again powerfully told by the latest
English translation of his Das Recht der Gesellschaft.
Luhmann’s work appeared in English translation considerably early, but was
accompanied by nothing as vivid a discussion of his work as there has been in
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, www.sagepublications.com
0964 6639, Vol. 15(3), 453–468
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