The work of Niklas Luhmann can’t ever be simplified, but I certainly did try. This is an email that I’d sent in response to some of my students from my undergraduate “Sociology and STS through Science Fiction” class at Krea University, who had several questions about Luhmann’s work. For some additional context, we just had finished watching the 2013 movie “Snowpiercer”, and were discussing it in relation to a few different readings. Luhmann’s work came up along the way.
N.B Luhmann wasn’t part of the syllabus. Parts of this email were edited with AI for clarity. Any errors below are my own, and I would be very grateful if anyone wanted to correct my understanding (or lack thereof). Texts/excerpts of texts that I had referred to as being “attached” to the original email are not included here.
Dear class,
I apologise in advance for how long this email is - but please bear with me. There were a few questions that came up in class on Friday (about Luhmann’s work) that we didn’t have time to go through, but I’m hoping that these responses will suffice (remember to think of everything below in terms of communication) - feel free to ignore this if you thought that Luhmann was too intense/abstract (this is not a part of the course); I had to dig into some of my notes from grad school for this (and I admit that I have straightened them out a bit with Claude, without which this would’ve taken me many more hours):
Regarding the questions concerning a “merger” or “overlap” of systems: There is no operational overlap or merging, because each system is defined by its own distinctive operation and binary code (legal/illegal, true/false, payment/non-payment, etc.), systems cannot merge. A communication is processed as legal or illegal by the legal system; the same event might simultaneously be processed by the economic system, but as a different communication according to a different code. The operations don’t blend; they run in parallel, each system constituting the “same” event differently.
As we discussed, a “structural coupling” is Luhmann’s term for the way systems become dependent on and attuned to each other without merging. The classic example is a legal constitution, which structurally couples the legal system and the political system. Neither absorbs the other, but each becomes highly irritable by the other: developments in law constrain politics and vice versa. Property and contract law structurally couple law and economy. The university structurally couples education and science. These couplings are tight and enduring, but they’re not overlaps; each system still processes everything through its own code.
Interpenetration (the special case of structural coupling that we discussed) is a related but distinct concept Luhmann uses specifically for the relationship between psychic systems (consciousness) and social systems (communication). Consciousness and communication are operationally distinct; you can’t communicate a thought directly, and communication isn’t a mental process, but neither can exist without the other. They co-enable each other while remaining operationally closed.
On the “nesting” of systems: Luhmann does recognize “subsystem” differentiation within function systems; the legal system differentiates internally into courts, legislation, contracts, etc. And organizations (universities, firms, governments) are their own type of social system that can participate in multiple function systems. A university processes scientific communications, educational communications, economic communications, legal communications — but it does so as an organization, not by merging those systems. So there’s internal differentiation, but it’s not a neat Matroyshka-doll-like (I hope I spelled that correctly) hierarchy. Luhmann explicitly argues that modern society has no apex, no master system that contains or steers the others.
And what about the possibility of systems built on other systems? - Luhmann would resist the “built on top of” metaphor because it implies a foundational hierarchy, such as a Marxist base and superstructure, which is precisely the kind of architecture he’s trying to escape. But the intuition behind the question is real, and he addresses it in a few ways. Think about how the modern economy presupposes a functioning legal system (property, contract), science presupposes education, and so on. But for Luhmann, this is a matter of co-evolution, not foundation. Once differentiated, no system serves as the “base” for the others. The economy doesn’t rest on law the way a building rests on a foundation; both are operationally autonomous systems that have become structurally coupled. Remove one and the other would be massively disrupted, but neither contains or grounds the other. Additionally, Luhmann conceptualizes organizations as sub-systems that are multi-system participants (I know how that sounds). This is probably the closest Luhmann gets to what looks like layering. On one hand, organizations such as a central bank, a university, or a tech company are their own autopoietic systems (based on decisions), and they operate across multiple function systems simultaneously. A platform like Meta processes economic communications (revenue, payment), legal communications (compliance, liability), political communications (lobbying, content governance), and scientific communications (research publications). This can look like systems layered on top of each other, but Luhmann would say the organization is a distinct system type that provides a site where multiple function systems become practically entangled without fusing.
And lastly, about power in systems/communication - The biggest critique is that he relocates it, and many people find the relocation unsatisfying. Power is code-specific to the political system, a part of its medium of communication. You have to think of it in the context of a “function system”, which is a subsystem of society that has differentiated itself around a specific societal function and become autonomous (the other types of subsystems are “interaction systems” and “organizations”). Each function system processes communications according to its own binary code and reproduces itself through its own operations. Nobody designed them; they evolved. Each function system gets its own dedicated communication medium. The economy gets money. Science gets truth. The political system gets power. Power becomes the medium specific to politics; the system that produces collectively binding decisions through the code “government/opposition”. It’s no longer floating freely across social life; it has a home address.
Now the political system (as a function system) operates on the code “government/opposition” (or, in some formulations, power-superior/power-inferior). Power circulates within the political system and affects other systems through structural coupling, but Luhmann explicitly rejects the idea that power is a diffuse, capillary force running through all social relations. The Foucauldian and Marxist objection is straightforward: confining power to the political system means you can’t theorize how, say, economic power shapes legal outcomes, or how racial hierarchies structure access to education, or how platform architectures exercise a kind of governance that doesn’t look “political” in Luhmann’s narrow sense. Luhmann would say these are cases of structural coupling and system-specific operations being irritated by their environment, but critics argue this is an elegant way of making domination analytically invisible.
At the same time, power is a medium that operates whenever one person’s choices are shaped by another person’s ability to impose consequences. Your boss tells you to finish a report by Friday; you do it not because you find it intrinsically compelling but because refusing carries risks. That’s power. A landlord raises your rent and you comply because the alternative is eviction. That’s power too. In this formulation, power shows up all over the place: workplaces, families, markets, schools. It’s a general feature of social life, not confined to any particular domain. The problem is a bit more obvious now: the boss and the landlord don’t go away. Those power relations still exist. But if power now “belongs” to the political system (as we read above), what do you call what the boss is doing? Luhmann’s framework would say the boss is operating within an organization, which is a different type of system as mentioned before, or that the landlord is operating through the economic medium of money and the legal system of contract. The phenomena get analytically redistributed across systems rather than unified under one concept of power. In the end, none of this is neat: Luhmann’s own work complicates this considerably (especially what I’ve written about power belonging within the political system), and I doubt that there are more than a few hundred scholars across the world who truly understand the nuances of his use (and framing) of power.
In short - Luhmann is trying to explain something real: that modern power often operates without a Wilford, without a central agent pulling strings. Systems produce outcomes that no one intended and no one controls. Climate change, algorithmic bias, financial crises — these are system-level phenomena that can’t be reduced to anyone’s ideology or interests. Luhmann gives you tools to describe that. What he doesn’t give you is a way to critique it normatively, which is what makes him a great “descriptive” resource, but not necessarily an analytical one that is handy at all times. At the same time, he can be an excellent analytical resource as well: Think about how his conceptualization of social systems uses consciousness; social systems don’t contain it. This is one of the claims that scandalizes newcomers to Luhmann, but it’s doing serious analytical work. It means you can’t explain communication by pointing to intentions, and you can’t explain consciousness by pointing to social structures. The two co-evolve through interpenetration but never collapse into each other. Quite the mind-trip.
The key features are:
Each system is operationally closed. It only processes communications in its own code. The economy can’t “see” truth; science can’t “see” payment. They can be irritated by each other through structural coupling, but they can’t operate in each other’s terms.
Each system is autopoietic. It reproduces itself from its own operations. Legal communications produce further legal communications. Scientific publications produce further scientific publications. There’s no external authority keeping them going.
And crucially, no function system is more important or foundational than any other. There’s no hierarchy. The economy doesn’t sit on top of law, politics doesn’t govern everything else. They operate side by side, each handling its own function for society. That’s what makes modern society “functionally differentiated”; it’s organized around parallel, autonomous functions rather than around a single center, a single hierarchy, or a single ruling principle. This is what makes Luhmann distinctive and also what makes people uneasy. If no system is in charge, then nobody is steering society as a whole — and that’s exactly what he thinks.
That’s the neat version. Phew. I won’t claim to answer everything in one email, certainly not Luhmann’s decades’ of work in this area. Again, none of this is in the syllabus, for the very clear reason that we could keep going on with our conversations about Luhmann, but I hope that this answers the questions that you had! I’ve attached a few texts by Luhmann in case any of you wanted to go over his work in the summer. See you tomorrow!
Warmly,
Shiv
TL;DR - Society is the total system of communication, internally differentiated into function systems. So in short, society is communication, not people: For Luhmann, humans are the “environment.” Society itself is just a massive web of communications. Organizations and interactions operate within society, crosscutting function systems in different ways. Psychic systems are outside, coupled to all of it through interpenetration. Each system has its own “code”; they can’t “talk” to each other directly because they don’t speak the same language. Systems don’t merge, but they can be “irritated” by each other. There is no “master system.” The government doesn’t control the economy, and the economy doesn’t control science. They are all autonomous engines running in parallel. You, the individual, are a “psychic system”. You provide the “noise” and the “thoughts” that trigger communications; the social system itself (the law, the market, the university) only needs your next communication to keep the engine running. At the same time, you’re a biological system. If the biological system stops (life/death), the psychic system stops (thinking/not thinking). They are “structurally coupled” through the brain/nervous system. Furthermore, you can’t have a conversation without people thinking, but the conversation itself is a social phenomenon, not a mental one. Lastly, Luhmann would argue that a “person” is just a label the Social System uses to identify a point of origin for communication. The “real you” (your cells and/or your private thoughts) stays outside the social system. The social system just creates a “persona” (like a legal persona or a job title) to make sense of the noise you’re making…It’s a bit cold, but that’s why he’s a “radical” theorist! My reading above isn’t perfect - but it might help you think about Luhmannian theory a bit more comprehensively if you do end up reading the texts that I’ve attached.