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Niklas Luhmann’s anti-totalitarian Luhmann’s

anti-
observation of systems totalitarian
observation
Gorm Harste
Political Science and Government, Aarhus Universitet, Aarhus, Denmark, and
Klaus Brønd Laursen
Department of Management, Aarhus Universitet, Aarhus, Denmark Received 23 April 2021
Revised 29 June 2021
Accepted 8 August 2021
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the philosophical roots of Luhmann’s theory in relation
to its anti-totalitarian elements.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper offers a conceptual discussion of the critical and anti-
totalitarian angle in Niklas Luhmann’s system theory.
Findings – This paper finds that systems theory has a critical potential.
Originality/value – To the best of the authors’ knowledge the anti-totalitarian element of Niklas Luhmann’s
system theory has not be discussed before the present contribution.
Keywords Ethics, Philosophy, Social systems, Systems theory
Paper type Conceptual paper

“You cannot have your cake and eat it at the same time.” This proverb describes the
paradox in the German sociologist and systems theorist Niklas Luhmann’s conception of
morality and ethics. Morality is a code used in communication to describe communication
as “good” or “bad,” but it cannot at the same time be sure to claim that this distinction itself
is good or is bad (Luhmann, 1992). The acknowledgment of this paradox leads Luhmann to
emancipate ethics from morality by viewing ethics as a reflection theory of moral rather
than the ontological foundation of social manners – morality. This distinct separation of
ethics from moral begs the question what could be left of morality if such emancipation
takes place and the question of what ethics could then be? These questions are vital to
discuss in order to avoid the inherent totalitarian aspects of any moral communicative
super code. Because moral communications know no limitations, such communications
easily de-differentiate society when a crisis occurs, thus easily provoking a state of
emergency short-circuiting established decision procedures. This inherent nature of moral
communications reminds us that the current COVID-19 crises cannot be reduced to simply a
health matter.
The pandemic health crisis caused by the COVID-19 as it triggered a second-order
transition of crises disseminated from the structural coupling of organic systems to social and
psychic systems (Heidingsfelder and Lehmann, 2021). The pandemic as a zoonotic disease
likely developed in a row of crises in biodiversity influencing human organic systems. The
problem is, from a system theoretical perspective, that the environment enters into the body
system because human social systems have entered into the ecological system of the
environment (IPBES, 2020). This released a tipping point in the cultural and social relation to
nature that no longer can be ignored contrary to the slow-developing climate crisis, albeit
warnings appeared since long such viruses develop with the human deterioration of animal
organisms. Such ecological disasters appear mainly due to the always-risky neglect of
knowledge in social systems, which cannot know that they do not know what they do not
know (Luhmann, 1986, pp. 52, 59). That is, they cannot reduce the overwhelming complexities Kybernetes
and handle them sufficiently with material, social and temporal codes to give birth to social, © Emerald Publishing Limited
0368-492X
political, technical or organizational resonance (Luhmann, 1993, p. 101ff). DOI 10.1108/K-04-2021-0328
K The present article attempts to analyze the scenario of a crisis transition. The article
argues that crisis is constitutive to modern systems and in a certain sense to all systems, since
crisis is a concept used to describe that the future is unknown and different from the known
past (Koselleck and Richter Michaela, 2006). Just as the past is not given but is reinvented and
reinterpreted in the present, so is the future. Since Immanuel Kant, the future is somewhat
known to modern people because the future can be willed now, contrary to the traditional
society where the future was expected to replicate the past.
In our analysis, the topic of control vs emancipation is central in understanding the
implications of a communication systems theory, especially in relation to ethics and moral
communications. Communication is not about steering but about interpretation and creation
of meaning (Harste, 2021). This implies a strong anti-totalitarian standpoint, which Luhmann
did not elucidate in any explicated form. In the following, we trace the theoretical-historical
development and show seven concluding points what Luhmann left unsaid. We do this by
first showing the connection to Kantian moral theory, and second, we demonstrate how any
contemporary diagnosis of the present always has swung between apocalyptic and
paradisiac interpretations. Third, we show how the concept “system” has been used and
misused before. Fourth, we provide an account of how self-organization implies autonomy
rather than dominance. Fifth, we discuss the risky consequences of systems. Through this
journey, which we acknowledge cannot by nature be a straightforward trip, we highlight the
central points toward a better understanding of an uncovered part of Luhmannian systems
theory.

Immanuel Kant’s moral theory

In moral philosophy, the question on the relation between ethics and moral found a first
solution with Immanuel Kant. What was the medium of morality solved by the Kantian form
– if he indeed found the path out of the dilemma? Perhaps, the Kantian solution is easier to
consider than the medium in question since this is the historical remote theme so intensely
discussed by Luhmann – and others such as Charles Taylor in A Secular Age (2007) or J€ urgen
Habermas in Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (2019). Luhmann discussed the dilemmas
and paradoxes of morality to be observed and reflected by ethics primarily in the almost 100
pages long article “Ethik als Reflexionstheorie der Moral” (1989a). This is a complex written
text and less well-known than his shorter Paradigm Lost given as acceptance speech when he
received the famous Hegel award in Stuttgart in 1989.
Like many others, Luhmann stands on the shoulders of Kant. Why could Luhmann then
not simply stay sitting calmly on the shoulders of the emperor of philosophers and follow the
lead described by Kant in Critique of Practical Reason (1788/1974) and The Metaphysics of
Morals (1798/1977). The problem responded to is that the famous “fact of reason” (“das
Faktum der Vernunft”) formulated by Kant in (1788/1974, x 7) in Luhmann’s re-description is
a “fact of self-reference” (Luhmann, 1981, pp. 31, 63, 191). To Kant, the medium of self-
reference was “will.” Will has will itself, and exactly this is the a priori form explained
previously by Kant in his x 4. Will is a form that in the present moment binds a future present;
thus will is a temporal binding, which Kant shortly addressed in Grundlegung zur Metaphysik
der Sitten (1785/1974). This explanation might seem as a complex philosophical issue. Yet,
this is indeed known in everyday life and is a common theme in sociology, particular in
interaction. Consciousness and acting somehow has to be accountable and refer to a common
acknowledge past and future.
Today, we have an indispensable knowledge of will because of this Kantian “fact of
reason.” Will is, as expectation, norms and rules, always will about will, about willing a
specific future. Will, a priori, codes itself from the inside as an endogenous system of
obligatory expectations and rule formation. Kant formulated this in his famous categorical
imperative, “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it Luhmann’s
in principle should become a universal law.” (Kant 1788/1974, p. x 7). It can even be described anti-
with a “we” since human communication cannot function in solipsism but is always
conditioned by structural couplings between human psychic systems and social systems.
totalitarian
This form of obligatory (“verpflichtende”) will formation in the 18th century observation
Enlightenment occurred differentiated from legally coded duties of behavior as the
external side of expectations. Accordingly, our modern expectation and even obligation to
follow the so-called “fact of reason” could be observed philosophically as a universalized
form, even though it emerged as such differentiated from positive law when legal forms were
differentiated as a standardized and homogenous form in particular French, Prussian,
Austrian, Bavarian and Dutch law (Behrens, 1985).
Whoever read Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel or Emile  Durkheim and Georg Simmel
has seen how such more or less unavoidable social bonds structure everyday life. Luhmann
re-described such social bonds in his study on Trust – a reduction of social Complexity (1968).
For trust to function as an undeniable fact, consciousness must be present since trust always
implies a decision between trusting and distrusting. It is thus, a fact that consciousness as the
medium, which none of us human beings can avoid thinking about, in order to create
meaning, has to have a form of reduced complexity in three modalities, namely social,
material and temporal modalities. Kant described such modalities in Critique of Pure Reason
(1781/1788, B258ff.). Consciousness stabilized whatever it is about in its communication
(“Mitteilung”) with others in a social dimension of reduced complexities; it does so in the
material dimension and is about something – and at least about itself; third, it is temporal and
not merely subject to contingent variances. As Simmel – and later Pierre Bourdieu – in a
reappraisal of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790/1974, xx. 40–41) demonstrated with fashion,
and as Luhmann re-described in Art as a Social System (1995), taste as fashion is a form of
communication medium concerning some material fact, withheld among social observers and
accountable for some time. Fashion begins, culminates and ends.
Kant’s solution began as a transcendental form – albeit he immediately early on saw it as
an empirical form of virtues. That is, he recognized it as a transcendental civility
(“Sittlichkeit”), which is indispensable and unavoidable. In Critique of Judgment, Kant
addressed this a priori of a presumed indispensability to every form of thought as
communication (“Mitteilung” cf xx 19–22). Karl-Otto Apel described this as an “A priori of
the Community of Argumentation” (1976), and the topic became subject to the famous
debate between Habermas and Luhmann (1977) and Harste (2021). Many philosophers
follow this argument and become caught in the net or “iron cage” of argumentative
reasoning. To Luhmann, what is at stake is broader. It grabs the individual even more but
also emancipates the individual from being caught and trapped into the closure of social
asylums and revitalized panopticisms (Goffman, 1963; Foucault, 1975). As already

displayed in Emile Durkheim’s writings, the Kantian a priori of morality is in addition a
synthetic unavoidable judgment. It is not only logically unavoidable, but also an empirical
fact that morality exists!
Thus, what we see is the “Kantian Mind” before Kant, which is before the culmination of
Enlightenment in the late 18th century and the French Revolution. Whether as a
philosophical moment or as a moment of historical sociology, this abstraction and
reflection process of variance has to take place and took place. If it does not and did not take
place, society and at least societal communication has a problem (Luhmann, 1972). At an even
higher level, societal communication has to enter into a crisis and a risk that the future is
different from the past. In this sense, society has been risky even before Saint Augustine (397)
discovered that will only in a risky present is able to bind itself into forms of temporal life.
Therefore, he argued that a (transcendent) god could have an almighty but absent say about
temporal occurrences in our will formation. Humans are sinful and albeit bound to a certain
K well-authorized form of decent (Rawls, 1993) will formation; so they often fail and have to be
forgiven and even loved.
The point defended here is that this self-reference of will formation constitutively is about
time-binding – with all its complexities of synchronization and non-simultaneity. As systems
theory in Luhmann’s version has an extremely strong temporal theory (Luhmann, 1984, 1991/
1993), Luhmann perhaps, therefore, does not see the need for a strong moral philosophy.
In the long 12th century, this dilemma was subject to an organizational dogmatic in the
theology of the Catholic Church and a legal dogmatic well established in this threefold or
Trinitarian dogmatics of the Son, the Holy Spirit and God. After the pandemic plague around
1350 and the printing press revolution, communication freed itself from dogmatic
encapsulation. Erasmus and Luther tried to find the roots in written communication, in
belief or/and in procedures of communication (liturgy, courts). Erasmus and Luther would
eventually disagree; neither could the reformed Protestants and the Catholics agree. The
latter attempted to continue with substantial agreements about what was decided, whereas
the reformed had the individual interpretation to be free, if not as completely individualized
individuals then in communities and congregations. The Lutherans initially opted for a
compromise as a socially constructed reality of procedures authorized as liturgy yet observed
in every form of meeting if not even in dinners, courts, councils, market places, school classes
and so on (Wandel, 2006).
Luhmann and Habermas agree on Durkheim’s description: morality can be described as it
regulates forms of communication (Luhmann, 1973; Habermas, 1985, pp. 396–404). A
functionally differentiated society or even a society with some division of labor has to allow
for some variance among members (for instance even generations) and for some differences in
norms, hence enforce some forms of reflecting subjects to abstraction processes about who
and how social bonds and communication are delivered. It has to accept variations in moral
and even does so morally, without being caught up in a moral panic: the phenomenon where
the fast pace of moral communications gets the upper hand on all other communication and
by the means of the code good/bad, leaving no alternatives open. In a moral panic, like the
current Covid-19 situation, There are no alternatives simply because alternatives are
observed morally, and since the moral panic by definition departs from the marked side of the
moral code: good, alternatives become observed as the outer side of the code: bad.

Between paradise and apocalypses

Both Koselleck and Luhmann look to the past in order to observe our immediate intuitions
and predictions. For 2,500 years, the diagnostic pendulum has swung between a paradise
narrative and a narrative of the apocalypse. Moreover, there is a good reason for this
permanence. We are extremely shortsighted concerning the future. From the past, we
remember less today than we did yesterday. Thinking ten years back, we remember a large
amount of changes from the time when YouTube conquered the Internet, algorithms
deciphered what taste buds we have, and Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accelerate
communication pace, thereby allowing short-circuiting deliberation, thus destroying trust in
democratic public reasoning. But, if we go back to the decades 1890–1900 not to mention
1490–1500, even seasoned historians remember less. Probably, so to speak with rumors,
nothing really happened. That is, apart from Columbus’ discovery of America, the
introduction of the printing press, the beginning of the Reformation, the first modern military
revolution, the discovery that the earth was round and was not the center of our solar system
etc. We easily believe that right now there are bigger and more changes happening than ever
before. The problem is that for almost 2,500 years, people have held that view. We are
oscillating between striving toward the apocalypse and toward paradise. We are sent into the
deepest pessimism and the most flourishing optimism. All at the same time!
 However, it is a form of optical illusion. Quite simply, this mindset can even be described Luhmann’s
mathematically. If we look at the memory of the changes out of one axis and the axis of time anti-
out of the other, we see a curve that, seen from the moment of the present, rises straight up
into the ceiling after a long time only showing a slight increase. If we think 30 years ahead,
totalitarian
with our own manageable lifespan, then the imagination encounters either apocalypse or observation
utopia’s paradise (see Figure 1).
A crisis is a crisis when you stand in the middle of it and find yourself in despair over how
the crisis should be observed – let alone solved. The objective course of the crisis shifts to the
question of why the crisis does not resolve itself – whether in health, in ecology, in economic
or in international politics. The crisis is, therefore, unmanageable; it is bad. Consequently,
decisions must be made, which, however, are not already known and given, and they involve
confusion and require new consideration. The future of the crisis process is also
unpredictable, and this overall complexity even creates conflicts and disagreements
concerning the conceptualization of the crisis. Therefore, the crisis is essentially
controversial, for example politically, but also existentially.
The illusion is also that we can much more easily see the significance of change when the
context, for example in the welfare society, is stable. The involution creates attention to
innovation and thus, evolution! There is no zero that sum between stability and change.
Stability and change presuppose each other (Luhmann, 1984; Laursen and Noe, 2018). The
stabilizations of the welfare state enable innovation.
Currently, we reap what we have sown. Modern society’s version of the Titanic sinks as
the flag goes to the top. Despite the pandemic and the manifold shifts in crisis in all directions
from health to the economy, the rule of law, politics, education, art and motivation, the
compensatory life of the consumer society maintains its race toward compensating
(Luhmann, 1981, p. 8) for the irreplaceable. Even the person-centered “ethical consumer” is
not there to save us – all he/she does is to demand and consume more products just in disguise
of the “good choice” (Laursen and Kure, 2019). Thus, pseudo-consumption, travel, cars,
highways, pop-smart glitter and entertainment make us lose our judgment. We sense the
senseless, as if it made sense.

Systems theory – between history and future

Many people find themselves fleeing screaming when they hear the word “system.”
“Systems” have gained a bad reputation. Probably because the concept of systems proved
extremely flexible and could be used for making sense of everything from denoting traffic, to

Figure 1.
The form of optical
illusion of the
evolutionary paradox
between paradise and
apocalypse
K economics, philosophy and to musical compositions or electrical systems. Systems theory is
not about ordering, it is about sense and meaning. An introduction to systems theory,
therefore, begins with an account of how systems theory has been used and abused.
The very word “system” dates back to the Romans and Latin usage (Riedel, 1990). In the
late Middle Ages, it was used to describe composition. The concept of system was given a
renaissance when Martin Luther’s close associate Philip Melanchthon in Loci Communes
(1,521, revised 1,559) used it to describe connections (“communes”) between individual parts
(“loci”), a unit of parts in a “system” of those biblical scriptures that made up the holy
scriptures. The point was that this system should be understood less obliquely than the
doctrinal discourse of the Catholic doctrine of a fixed body of textual passages. In other
words, the “system” was something to interpret, something that concerns sense and meaning:
what systems could be laid down over the scriptures so that the coherence and context was
clear? Systemic understanding and hermeneutics both seem to arise at the same time as
interpretive theory, as Hans-Georg Gadamer has pointed out in Wahrheit und Methode (1960/
1975, p. 164).
Subsequently, the concept “system” only slowly became widespread, for example in
political science and law. However, in the latter third of the 17th century, the term began to be
used in philosophy and outside of narrower intellectual circles, and from thereon things
accelerated. There was almost inflation in what could be made into systems, such as tax
systems but also biological systems. The liturgy and the scriptural connections had to enter
the world and be observed out there. Ironically speaking, during the 20th century many have
complained that the term “system” has been taken from science and from biology to be used
in the humanities – with even misunderstood analogies. However, it is rather the other way
around: the concept originated in music and theology to replace the corpus metaphor of the
body of Jesus Christ, as a whole of (fellow) members, from which designations of organ,
organism and organization also originate. The liturgy was thus seen as a symbolic and/or a
real extension of the sacrament into the Church, into the world, and therefore the concept of
system should also be able to be applied to a large number of phenomena in the earthly world.

When the French sociologist Emile Durkheim in the late 1800s began to talk about organic
systems, it was admittedly with analogies to biological systems, but first and foremost, it was
actually the classical theological use of society as an organic extension of the body of Christ
(Durkheim, 1893/1930).
In 1770, the Frenchman Paul-Henri d’Holbach published a, he believed, complete
mechanically based systems theory, arguing that everything in the world and primarily in
nature could be described as parts of systems. However, the Prussian philosopher-king
Frederik the Great, criticized the theory for not including its own description pragmatically –
of course without having examined in advance how this self-affirming circle or short circuit
could be done. In 1773, therefore, d’Holbach published a revised and more social work
Systeme social (d’Holbach 1773/1994). Just as in Charles Montesquieu’s (1749) great work The
Spirit of Laws, one would now talk about the legal system, about the system of economics, the
system of education, the system of agriculture, the system of war, the system of research etc.
Then in 1790, Immanuel Kant presented a completely revolutionary approach with
Critique of Judgment. The Critique’s starting point was that the cognition of the world must
first be recognized by cognition itself. If the world is to be observed as systems, it is because
cognition itself with its reason, its ideas and its communication, a priori can be understood as
a system that independently can be understood as a free form of reasoning in its own “self-
organization”, i.e. its own self-knowledge in communication (“Mitteilung”). Kant’s solution
was so revolutionary that although he could immediately show its significance for law, war,
education, politics and not least aesthetics and philosophy of history, it took more than
170 years before German and French philosophers (Klaus D€ using, Alexis Philonenko and
Gilles Deleuze) could go to great lengths explaining why Kant must have been right in his
analyzes. However, the extremely knowledgeable German philosopher Ernst Cassirer had Luhmann’s
already done much in 1918 with his work Kants Leben und Lehre. anti-
After Cassirer, the dualism of the so-called neo-Kantianism between natural science and
cultural science collapsed. First World War showed that there was no balance and harmony
totalitarian
between science and cultural understanding; the contexts of opinion were dissolved. The observation
evolution of nature had to be understood so that culture is possible as an independent
phenomenon. Also, the evolution of culture had to be understood as capable of describing the
evolution of nature as independent. This created a paradox where culture and nature were at
the same time distinctly different and bound together in unity. A paradox that has ethical
implications of mutuality and responsibility toward the unknown future has been analyzed
by Jonas (1985).
Because we cannot avoid this paradox in observing nature and evolution, the
communication of symbolic forms seems to be able to arise in the extension of natural
history into the history of civilization and culture. This way of thinking created enormous
innovations, of which the Frankfurt School (Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno) as well as
the modern system theory’s distinction between system and the outside world are among the
most striking. However, the full effect of these innovations did never fully unfold in Germany
as a major delay occurred following 1933, where numerous German-speaking researchers,
scholars and intellectuals fled into exile, herein many to the USA (Fleck, 2011).
The systems theory that subsequently re-emerged in the USA had to be formulated in
concepts compatible with the scholarly discourse and paradigms dominating the American
universities and research institutions. This changed the premises from a focus on the
autonomous freedom of systems, into how they are influenced by input from the outside
world with consequences (output). Causality, rather than reason let alone the freedom,
characterized the hypothetical-deductive approach of the American positivism. It became
visible in biology, thermodynamics and in the social sciences. Most detrimental, it led to
military tactics of the Vietnam War where the United States should drop more bombs and kill
more than the Vietnamese could give birth to: input should destroy output (Summers, 2007).

Self-organization, autopoiesis and self-reference

Communication cannot communicate about everything. All research and all social
communication must inevitably relate to meaningful communication – it must reduce
complexity. Otherwise, research is hopeless and social communication is meaningless.
Communication must, therefore, be able to create social meaning. Communication must also
be able to excrete when it takes place, and thus distinguish the temporal complexity it
handles. As a third dimension in addition to the social and temporal dimension,
communication must be able to handle objectivity and be able to make sense of what the
communication is about. Complexity must, therefore, be able to be reduced in a factual, a
temporal and a social dimension in order to make sense (Luhmann, 1975, 1997a, b).
The complexity reductions take place using historically generated communicative codes
concerning when, about what and with whom the communication takes place.
Communication only makes sense by selecting socially, objectively and temporally. All
social organization resembles for example a dinner party: who is included as a guest, what is
eaten and when does the party begin and end. The organization depends on the decisions that
synchronize the party such as who, what and when of the meal. Such organization can follow
various codes depending on the function of the given type of organization; it happens in
contracts and courts, in politics, in war, in schools, theaters etc. Another possibility is by the
more loose code of morality; it does close itself into a moral of morality, merely a distant ethics.
If the distinction good/bad is central to the code of morality, nothing guarantees that this
distinction itself is good and not bad (Luhmann, 1989a, p. 371ff). It can turn into a totalitarian
dogmatic and often has done so.
K Codes arise and disappear, but they do not arise by chance. They vary but are selected and
stabilized. They re-enter themselves whereby codes begin to communicate about the very
code itself. The communication communicates about communication and its codes codify
which codes are relevant. Communication communicates most easily, most obviously and
most meaningfully in self-organizing and self-referential communications and that is in self-
referential communication systems, e.g. legal communication takes place in legal systems.
Admittedly, we can very well communicate about law outside the legal systems but that
communication does not have legal meaning and validity if it does not have a legally
recognized right to speak about law.
It is by no means random how we communicate in which communication systems.
Communication systems for law, marriage, religion, payments, science, war, art, mass media
etc. all have originated historically. They are differentiated from each other and have been
stabilized in separate organizational systems, which differ from each other and distinguish
their organization from their functions. With the stabilization of organizational systems, the
organization of organization, the possibilities of distinguishing what functions
communication could perform separated from the decisions about organization increased:
religion communication is not the same as Church communication about membership and
hiring priests and choirs. The communication of science is not the same as the organization of
universities. Judicial decisions are also not the same as judge appointments, let alone court
buildings. Legal courts have arisen separated from Church meetings. Likewise, academic
communication on valid theories is distinguished in separation from religion, politics and
legal sentencing. At the same time, the different functional systems are interconnected, so
that in their specialization they support each other. Love and marriage have been stabilized
by law, religion, and to some extent the securing of property and trade by means of payment,
which in turn was secured by law and credibility. But, since the reformation, moral
communication does not refer to a specific functional or organizational system.
From the 1960s to the 1990s, Niklas Luhmann has written a large number of works, which
present the communication and the semantics that have arisen in the historical evolution of
the individual communication systems and their development to be able to describe
themselves. The point is not that he simply wrote a general work on how social systems
communicate meaningfully with themselves (Luhmann, 1984). The point is instead that each
of these so-called functional systems must be able to be described on the basis of the
semantics and the conditions of possibility with which they themselves condition their
communication codes, forms of observation, self-descriptions and semantics. Thus, it has
been inevitable to review the functional contexts of the individual communication systems.
Where Talcott Parsons believed that one could top-down distinguish four types of
systems, Luhmann leaves it empirically and historically open how many systems there are,
ten, fifteen or twenty. However, there is no infinite number of functional systems, as each of
the systems monopolizes the communication about itself and thus separates itself from other
systems. First and foremost, the communication of functional systems is self-referential
communications. As monopolized systems of communication, functional systems are
abstract systems that communicate through a symbolic generalized media. Thus, the
systems cannot control each other (Luhmann, 1997a, b), even though different functional
systems do develop semantics about steering other systems – a point that is easily missed
and confused for steering possibilities. From this creation, a semantic reservoir of concepts
the confusion arise that functional systems can be steered from the outside, which then allows
totalitarian communications to begin communicating by referring to for example politics,
religion or law, without necessarily recognizing this. And it is here that we see the real
totalitarian danger in the functional differentiated society and the self-illusion of control
through steering. As based on an illusion such attempts are doom to fail, which often leads to
only more stubbornly undertaken attempts with even less room for reflections and critiques.
 Political communication is decision communication with the function of exercising power. Luhmann’s
The political system thus develops powers to govern organizational systems and create anti-
decisions that are required to constitute decisions for organizations’ more or less hierarchical
decision-making systems and Luhmann has written several works on organization as
totalitarian
decision-making systems. Nevertheless, political systems cannot control the communication observation
of religion, although they can try to control ecclesiastical organizational systems. Politics
cannot control what counts as true and false in research, although political decisions can
invalidate funding. Very centrally, neither political systems nor religious systems can
override the legal systems’ communication on legality and illegality in modern society
defined as a functionally differentiated society.
This is a key insight because this is precisely the division of powers. The division of power
consists of much more than a separation between the legislature, the judiciary and the
executive. Mass media and companies, universities and the military also exercise power just
as art exercises power, possibly just like love by freeing itself from power, although both art
and love can turn into violence when the music becomes too loud and quarrels become
screaming. Morality, in its ethical reflection, from Kant to Luhmann and Habermas, escapes
power and is even not a criterion of power, but freedom from power in the same sense as
thoughts in psychic systems are emancipated from the communication of social systems.
This we also see when Carl von Clausewitz (1832/1952) following Kant (1795) defines war as
the opposite of morality (Harste, 2016).

The risky consequences of systems

System differentiation has many benefits to society. The division of power and the
differentiation between systems do away with totalitarian attempts to unite communication
systems under a single super code as happened in the Catholic Middle Ages. Thus, the
functionally differentiated society differs from stratified societies or caste societies. It also
differs from the center- and peripheral-based kingdoms that see themselves as the center of all
social interaction. Moreover, even more basic from more primitive interpretations of us/them
segmentation in tribal societies.
However, system creation also makes itself blind; any system has its own blind spot
(Luhmann, 1975, 1997b). Systems, according to Luhmann, can primarily see themselves and
to a lesser extent their surroundings independently of their own observations. Furthermore,
they cannot observe that they cannot observe what they cannot observe. Systems can
attempt taking into account this distortion of their observations, but there are limits to how
much they can take into account. In addition, as a third risky consequence, Luhmann is
extremely aware of how systems communicate with different time constraints and in time
horizons that close in on their own time codes. A time code can, for example, code for what can
be made profitable and for a good investment within an economic system. Yet, it cannot
function at all as a time code usurped by other functional systems in, for example, an
education system or in families’ love systems for upbringing until the children’s old age and
even the grandchildren’s old age in maybe 100 years. Children are not for loan and do not earn
interest as shares, houses or a new car. The time codes, therefore, communicate past each
other about what counts as sustainability. Without children, society comes to a standstill and
implodes into nothingness and into meaninglessness.
Therefore, applications of systems theory must pay particular attention to the so-called
structural couplings that may or may not be created between different functional systems
(Febbrajo and Harste, 2013). Systems can, so to speak, entangle themselves and entangle their
own development into other systems and create complications as well as impossible
compensations, which create irritations and disturbances. One can look at blindness and risks
of conflicts between observations, between time constraints and between the people who use
the various systems.
K When functional systems cannot communicate with each other and can neither
communicate about the same thing in the same way and even very rarely, highly unlikely
and randomly cannot communicate with the same time bindings and the same time horizons
for a change, well then we can observe “crises” in society’s system integration. If the systems
cannot communicate about their differences and see them as power-sharing and division of
labor, the crises can spin and become self-referential disasters. It happens when one system
crisis refers to the other and that to the third. It takes at least three systems in crisis for us to
talk about a catastrophe. Because, then the systems only observe themselves and their
mutual conflicts, rather than their surroundings. This happened at Stalingrad, in Vietnam
and possible Iraq and Afghanistan where the internal communication of each belligerent was
so caught up in its own self-reference that cost and consequences to self and others
disappeared in blind spots.

Conclusion: systems theory as an anti-totalitarian enlightenment project

Luhmann’s theory formation often causes difficulties at a very specific point where it really
should not. Luhmann lays his intersections between social communication systems and
psychic systems for thinking, consciousness and emotions so that society consists of
communication and not of people. “People are not part of society, what should it be in other
words in social theory,” he says provocatively not to say appallingly. Some mistakenly
attribute to him anti-humanism, as if it were the extermination of people by the concentration
camps he wanted to restore. But, the point is actually the opposite, and it consists in what he
calls sociological enlightenment (“Aufkl€arung als Abkl€arung”): people must be able to
identify with themselves rather than being forced to identify with society’s organizational
systems and their functional systems. Only a totalitarian organization can truly demand of its
members that their psychic system, their most inner feelings and private thoughts, should
follow specific pre-defined forms. Requiring the individual to identify with his/her country,
organization, flag and leader is a horror scenario for Luhmann – he experienced enough of
this when he was called up to the Wehrmacht in Nazi Germany as a 15-year-old schoolboy.
His social theory and philosophy are, therefore, built to counter the traces of totalitarian
narratives that still appear in modern society on a regular basis. Still, companies and
managers who talk about love and “corporate identity” abuse notions that have developed.
People in a modern society have the right to equip themselves with individuality and
personality in the individual’s monopolization of being able to speak about its own life story,
identity and narrative. Luhmann’s project of formation and enlightenment is thus radically
anti-totalitarian. As shown by Harste (2021b), in The Debate Habermas – Luhmann, this anti-
totalitarian aspect contains a whole range of layers. From the perspective of the present
article, these can be summarized in seven points as follows:
First, the differentiation of psychic systems from social systems radically establishes the
individual’s right to be able to autonomously and individually distinguish themselves from
the communication systems to which their consciousness is structurally coupled. Society is
not individuals and the individual is not society.
Second, we see a radical – and inevitable – defense of a division of power. It is just as
radical because, in the form of a functional differentiation, it not only marks a normative
distinction between legislative, executive and judicial power in the traditionally narrowly
interpreted tradition of Charles Montesquieu and Immanuel Kant. Just as Montesquieu and
Kant defended, Luhmann realized that the Enlightenment created a functional differentiation
between a whole range of functional systems, from law, education, war, economics, religion,
mass media, politics, art and love. But also to a number of societal phenomena analyzed and
discussed by scholars taking inspiration from Luhmann including studies on health, sports,
agriculture, waste, tourism, pop-culture only to mention some.
 Third, with this sociological demonstration of the potentials for differentiation, rationality Luhmann’s
and enlightenment in European social evolution, we see that these potentials are also being anti-
extensively tested in, for example, East Asia and China. The point is not in a Eurocentric way
to repeat the narrow and ahistorical understanding of human rights and democracy (as a
totalitarian
majority election or?) as a criterion of modernity. Neither does the point lie in criteria taken observation
from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notions of human autonomy and people’s sovereign self-
determination in Du contrat social from 1762. The point is rather, that functional
differentiation seems to offer a possibility of organizing a society and a state in a manner
that unleashes creative, innovative and entrepreneurial potentials in ways other forms of
society cannot. How these potentials are actualized is though an empirical question that
cannot be deduced theoretically, not even from systems theory.
Fourth, we see a civilization-critique. Not an ideological, utopian or archaic critique, but a
functional and, not the least, temporal critique pointing out that because different functional
systems operate in different pace, there is always the risks that functional differentiation
develops asymmetrically and that some functional systems e.g. war or the economy develop
far more self-referentially and ruthlessly than others.
Fifth, we also see in this the blindness that the individual system formations can develop,
including psychic systems, interaction systems and organizational systems, which, like
digital systems based on algorithms, can close in on the autopoiesis of their own echoes. Such
echo chambers can be almost impossible to penetrate, especially if they develop around the
moral code, fx as observed with conspiracy myths. The strong inclusion/exclusion
mechanism of the code good/bad is very difficult to approach from the outside, simply
because the good/bad code cannot be applied to itself and thus, only with great difficulty
develop a reflection theory of its own. Luhmann already noted this when he warned any
communication of moralizing unless the desired result was a communicative break-down
(Luhmann, 1986).
Sixth, we see a strong focus on the fact that this distortion (Marx “Verkehrung”) is not only
understood cognitively, as a subject/object distortion, but temporally as well. The twinnings
and time horizons of the individual functional and organizational systems contradict each
other, conflict and develop paradoxes. In some respects, they relieve and enlighten each other,
both temporally and cognitively. In others, they burden and outsmart or colonize each other.
Some temporal commitments are for one week, others for four years and others for
hundred years (upbringing) or seven years (interest, profit).
Seventh, the Luhmannian systems theory writes off the possibility of abolishing the
differentiation between systems in favor of just a single super system, whether, as previously
the system of religion, a moral perspective or the political system. All systems may tend to
develop their own totalizing observations and descriptions. They maintain a preference for
primarily observing themselves and their own monopolized codes, which were all about
religion, war, capitalism, art and politics – or narcissistic/psychotic about me and “me first” or
possibly about our community, genossenschaft and corporate spirit before anything else. Yet,
because functional systems precisely fulfill different and unique functions in society, they
cannot replace each other, e.g. the freedom of religious belief cannot be replaced meaningfully
by the freedom of commerce.
In that somewhat post-Kantian (not neo-Kantian) sense, the Luhmannian systems theory
develops a radical critical theory. It is an attempt to escape from the “iron cage” of modern
systems. Where each functional system constructs its own unique form of rationality,
organizations can and must always balance several rationalities and are thereby expected to
operate in a non-totalitarian modus operandi. However, we know from countless examples
that any organization always faces the temptation (or danger) of allowing one, often the
economic rationality to dominate. The facts that different functional codes operate in
different temporalities contribute to this totalitarian tendency is because in the contemporary
K risk society (Luhmann, 1991/1993), the expectations of the present is borne from an
observation of an unknown future. Thus, when the present is constantly constructed from
expectations to the future, those functional codes with the fastest operating pace will
naturally be favored by organizations. The critical element in Luhmann’s systems theory will,
in turn, always provoke the observer to apply different perspectives, as any observation
always begins with a contingent difference. Observing the future in the present from the
economic code can, therefore, be replaced with the health code, the moral code – or perhaps in
a not too fare distant future – a sustainability code. A code that for now primarily is replaced
by the moral code as a preliminary form of what Luhmann calls embarrassment. Ethics is,
therefore, needed not to include, but to reflect the emancipation of those moralities, which
merely and reductively serve to make each functional system rule as if there is no
environment to it, no context, and no other systems to respect.
With systems theory we can now observe how moral panics emerge when the social
systems are dedifferentiated and the difference between their functions are obfuscated one after
another. What we since Montesquieu and d’Holbach in the Enlightenment era have known as
separation of powers, checks-and-balances, and rule of law are in risk to dedifferentiate.
The pandemic demonstrated that also the health system is able to dominate and
dedifferentiate whatever counts as differentiated with strict codes and delimitations. The
organizational systems of health were in many places close to its breaking point. Through the
political and legal systems, this created forms of moral panics when differentiated
communication codes tended to flow, and on the one hand, it became stricter with legal means
about interdiction to access public places. On the other hand, solid common communication
codes as handshaking, hugs and close interaction in meetings, school classes and families
“melted into air” as Karl Marx could have said.

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Corresponding author
Klaus Brønd Laursen can be contacted at: klausb.laursen@mgmt.au.dk

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