Niklas Luhmann 1927 – 1998

Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist and one of the leading systems theorists of the twentieth century. Trained as a lawyer and trained further in the United States under Talcott Parsons, he held a chair at Bielefeld for most of his career, where he produced an enormous theoretical corpus, the centerpiece of which is the two-volume Social Systems and the late synthesis Theory of Society. He treated modern society as a network of self-referential communicative systems including law, economy, politics, science, religion, and education, each of which constructs its own environment. His running debate with Habermas defined a generation of German social theory.