Observing Society: Meaning, Communication, and Social Systems By ...

There is no possible way to scientifically describe the observation of society as a whole because the complexity of functional differentiation removes any operational center from the social world. Every perspective yields useful information only by closing itself, by selecting and limiting its field of view. Variety, restriction, and self-referential closure set contingent parameters for making multiple forms of meaning in a world society that offers no all-encompassing Archimedean vantage point. With the continued autopoiesis of modern communication, society observes its own distinctions in a decentralized and polycontextural manner. The future of communication is open, therefore, because society has closed itself.

This theory of society presents itself as the key to what Niklas Luhmann called a “sociological enlightenment” that will bring social thought out of “the Dark Ages” of anthropocentrism, social ontology, and normative social philosophy. In this book we explain why Luhmann and other social system theorists argued that sociologists have continually failed to produce an adequate theory of society. Orthodox sociologists occasionally use “theory” to help organize research and account for a myriad of empirical data. However, theorists spend most of their time interpreting and reinterpreting “classical” treatises, as if sociologists could understand society by studying their own revered texts. When it comes to theory, traditional sociology is a quagmire of competing grand narratives, none of which offers a generally useful concept of the unity of society. The discipline has assembled a small collection of favorite theories, including conflict theory, functionalism, rational choice, feminism, symbolic interactionism, and others. Students in introductory sociology courses are faithfully instructed in the canonical “paradigms of the masters,” an enculturation process that only intensifies in graduate school. With so many divergent theories in use, it can be difficult for students to see any semblance of an integrated approach within the discipline. Indeed, it is often difficult to find consensus even within each of the most popular theory camps.

We believe that sociologists have trouble making sense out of one another's work because they lack a systematic way of describing what