Introduction

It is a widespread assertion in sociology and social theory that systems theory is uncritical. This belief is articulated by theories that call upon society to change (itself, its structure, its inner logics). We want to argue that these assertions conceal the critical potentials which are inherent in Luhmann’s social systems theory. Admittedly, Luhmann was critical about critical theory and embarked on a controversy with Jürgen Habermas and others about the state of critical theory in the 1960s and 1970s. His point of departure was that critical theory was still indebted to ‘old-European assumptions’ about how societies are evolving. He sought to demonstrate that critical theory reproduced distinctions – such as between the ‘part’ and the ‘whole’ or ‘below’ and ‘above’ – which were already melting under an increased functional differentiation of social systems in modern society. Drawing upon Talcott Parson’s sociology and evolution theory, he argued that modern society emerged from a rather anarchic social evolution and, thereby, established a plurality of self-referential social systems that are not reducible to a unitary mode of domination. Based on these insights, Luhmann formulates a critique of society which may be deemed less appealing, less self-assured and void of gestures that support a sociologist’s self-image of an impressive public intellectual, but – as we argue in the following – it takes up motifs of social critique in the tradition of Hegel, Marx and Adorno and classical sociology such as Simmel and Weber. Not the least, a whole strand of critical systems theory from the 2000s onwards investigated into this potential of Luhmann’s theory – be it through clarifying the notion of critique in his work, through combining it with Marxism, post-structural thinking or the legacy of the early Frankfurt School – arguing that modern society calls for different forms of sociological critique.

In this chapter, we focus on a reconstruction of three characteristic dimensions of critical systems theory in order to demonstrate how these resources can contribute to a critique of modern society that operates immanently from within the social. Most importantly, we emphasise how social critique remains connected to a robust social theory instead of collapsing into a free-standing gesture.