Customer Reviews

Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems (Ideas Explained)

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This book surprised me since I received it from Amazon and immediately started reading it! I am always a little bit suspicious about this kind of "summaries" and "reports" on someone's else work. Mostly when this someone else is Niklas Luhmann, whose work I have been studying for my academic texts. In the case of Moeller's "Luhmann Explained", I have to recognise the excellence of the result in the "dangerous" task taken up by his author. First of all because he tried to introduce Luhmann's complex and difficult theory by using quotations and citations from Luhmann himself. The fact is that he succeeded in being as much as possible "faithful" to Luhmann's own texts. In few occasions, when strictly necessary, Moeller puts forward his own opinions on Luhmann's ideas. I recommend this book for everyone who wants to be "safely" introduced to Luhmann's complexity. It is a serious "entrance gate" to the contingency which characterizes Luhmann's ideas as, for instance, the formulation of a theory of a nonhuman society based on the differentiation of the autopoietic "social systems".
If you are interested in learning about one of the most intriguing and "puzzling" thinker of 20th century: be welcome on board!

Ulisses Schwarz Viana
Brasilia (Brazil)

College-level collections strong in philosophy will appreciate this blend of philosophy and sociology, which considers systems, society, and Niklas Luhmann's sociological theories in particular, which departs from many competing concepts in explaining how economics and mass media evolve. From biology to philosophy and other genres, LUHMANN EXPLAINED analyzes the fundamentals of world society and its logical systems. College-level students will find it a challenging, exciting read.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

I enjoyed this book immensely. Moeller provides a friendly, intelligent guide to the complexity of Luhmann's thinking. Just as Galileo removed the earth from the center of the universe, Luhmann removes human beings from the center of society. Step by step, Moeller spells out Luhmann's devastating critique of the dominant humanistic understanding of humans as individuals with unitary identities whose thoughts, decisions and actions make society what it is. Luhmann insists, counterintuitively, that if we ever were unitary beings, we no longer are. Instead, we are multi-dimensional, our wholes never neatly the sums of the parts. Society, for its part, is continuously recreating itself as functional systems operating separately, but interdependently.

Luhmann's way of conceptualizing society and the place of humans in it is initially disorienting, ultimately exhilerating. Moeller's reading of Luhmann's radical, complex and apparently topsy-turvy view of human society is eminently readable, and by the end I felt that I'd been offered -- and had grasped -- a compelling new vision of the social world. In the preface, Moeller writes this: "Luhmann...tries to grant all the different dimensions of bodily life, of conscious experience, of communicative practice their own right of existence." In doing so, he adds, Luhmann is a thinker "of multiplicity and difference and in this respect he is more 'postmodern' than 'modern.'" For Moeller, Luhmann's functionalist model of society is the best theoretical description of our society that is currently available. His careful, well-paced exegesis of Luhmann's thinking gave me the opportunity to tap into the mind of a great, original thinker. Moeller did a beautiful job with this book, and I'm a grateful beneficiary of his thoughtfulness. To close, here is the Luhmann quote that Moeller chooses for the book's frontispiece.

"It has always been clear to me that a thoroughly constructed conceptual theory of society would be much more radical and much more discomforting in its effects than narrowly focused criticisms -- criticisms of capitalism for instance -- could ever imagine."

Just so.

While I am not qualified to judge the interpretations or scholarship, I found this as good an introduction as I could have hoped for. I had heard about Luhmann in relation to Habbermas and was curious, but not quite curious enough to settle in with the primary texts. This nicely done book convinced me to read some Luhmann, who is well worth studying, and gave me the background to get started without a lot of brow scrunching.

The author is quite good, with a real facility for exposition. His writing style has somehow survived a doctorate in philosophy without the usual gruesome mangling. The text format is superb and I hope the publisher produces more. In a follow-up section it includes a very brief Luhmann glossary, brief notes on Luhmann in relation to various other philosophers (a really great feature!), and a few excerpts from Luhmann's writing. This format is far superior to other "short intros" to philosophy. Though the assertion "Luhmann Explained" probably makes the author wince, this title series is to be highly recommended. And no, I'm not a shill.

My only qualification is that the approach is entirely from philosophy, and there is very little on cybernetics, Talcott Parsons, and the various controversies in sociology and biology that Luhmann also draws on, but you have to stop somewhere. It takes some work to grasp Luhmann's antihumanist and somewhat anti-intuitive approach, but I already find his ideas very compelling. The "operational closure" of systems opens up a revealing perspective on today's grossly ineffective struggles between the government and financial systems, for example. I am still suspicious of Luhmann's epistemology and do not think it terribly consistent, but such issues are way above my pay scale. On the other hand, there is a wonderfully ironic essayist and social critic submerged in Luhmann's often dense writing.

In brief, highly recommended for anyone interested in social theory and unfamiliar with Luhmann. If the author and publishers wish to do further service to a bewildered world, they should gather and translate more of Luhmann's writings on economics. It is a timely topic for deeper "eluhmannation" and I find little available in English translation. (Oh, I might add, for those who have picked up an anti-Luhmann meme somewhere, that I am a leftist by instinct and by no means a blanket fan of "emergence" theories. As with Heidegger, no truly interesting style of thinking need be politically determined, in my view. While he is certainly not compatible with socialist (or capitalist) "metanarratives," as they say, Luhmann mainly provides descriptive and analytical tools useful to one and all.)

Niklas Luhmann was a student of Talcott Parsons, from whom he apparently learned only how to write impossibly vague and convoluted prose. I have found reading Luhmann extremely soporific, so I though perhaps this book might be refreshingly lucid and penetrating. Perhaps, I thought, if I could only stay awake, I could learn a lot from Luhmann. Alas, such does not appear to be the case.

The central epithet that applies to Luhmann's work is "vague." Luhmann describes in great detail the intepenetrations of institutions and interactions in complex modern societies, but in no way does he analyze these higher-level aspects of social organization. Moreover, there are no human actors in Luhmann's narrative--all we find out is that people yearn for simplicity and the role of institutions is to reduce complexity to the point that the world is understandable.

Luhmann is more like an artist with words than a scientist. There is no way to test his theories, and his opinions are ideosyncratic and boring. If your teen-ager is bad, don't ground him; make him write an essay on the sociological theory of Niklas Luhmann.

Hans-Georg Moeller's book is a relatively easy entry into Luhmann's work. Not having read anything on Luhmann before I now feel that I have a reasonable grasp of Luhmann's ideas. Others with a more thorough knowledge of Luhmann would be better placed to comment on the integrity of Moeller's interpretation.

While the book is short, it is not an 'easy' book as such; this is not a pop culture book. The book covers what seems to be Luhmann's essential elements in a distilled form.

Towards the end there are chapters that locate Luhmann relative to Kant, Hegel, Marx and Habermas as well as postermodernims and deconstruction. While a good idea in some respects, I found this coverage a little scant and not completly satisfying, particularly Kant and Hegel who I have not read. The others I had some prior exposure to so was able to grasp but I would have preferred more.

The translated extracts included as appendices seem to be well selected, and provide welcome substance to Moeller's substantive text. Again, somebody who has read Luhmann more widely would be better placed to comment on whether this selection is reflective of Luhmann's work.

The book provides a solid basis for further reading, and on this I would have liked a suggested list of further readings, although the bibliography at the end of the book is very extensive.

Five stars because the book fulfilled the expecations it evoked with a reasonable investment of my time and at a reasonable price.

We live in a functionally differentiated society. The mass media, the economy, politics, etc are all separate complex, self organizing and self-reproducing systems.

To each system the others are just the environment, they influence the system, but not in any direct, simply input-output related way. The systems has it's own rules / ways of digesting the input and creating things from it that make sense to it.

Just like a living organism takes it's food and energy from the environment, and creates Picasso's with it. Who could have guessed such a relation between input (potatoes) and output?

Anyway, this view goes a long way in making clear why politics so often seems to come to nothing, or why the economy takes its own fearful course.

The book is not very factual however, if you want to know more about the abstract theory of complex adaptive systems. Or want to know how exactly (e.g.) the mass media is an example of such a system.