From this groundation he developed his functionalist-oriented systems theory, which claims to be able to describe all social phenomena in a theoretically consistent language.
Leaving the civil service in 1962, he lectured at the national Deutsche Hochschule für Verwaltungswissenschaften (University for Administrative Sciences) in Speyer, Germany.
[8] Luhmann wrote prolifically, with more than 70 books and nearly 400 scholarly articles published on a variety of subjects, including law, economy, politics, art, religion, ecology, mass media, and love.
His relatively low profile elsewhere is partly due to the fact that translating his work is a difficult task, since his writing presents a challenge even to readers of German, including many sociologists.
[10] Luhmann is probably best known to North Americans for his debate with the critical theorist Jürgen Habermas over the potential of social systems theory.
Rather, Luhmann's work tracks closer to complexity theory, broadly speaking, in that it aims to address any aspect of social life within a universal theoretical framework—as the diversity of subjects he wrote on indicates.
Luhmann's theory is sometimes dismissed as highly abstract and complex, particularly within the Anglophone world, whereas his work has had a more lasting influence on scholars from German-speaking countries, Scandinavia and Italy.
[9] Luhmann himself described his theory as "labyrinthine" or "non-linear", and claimed he was deliberately keeping his prose enigmatic to prevent it from being understood "too quickly", which would only produce simplistic misunderstandings.
Luhmann called this process of reproduction from elements previously filtered from an over-complex environment autopoiesis (pronounced "auto-poy-E-sis"; literally: self-creation), using a term coined in cognitive biology by Chilean thinkers Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.
[13] Maturana, however, argued very vocally that this appropriation of autopoietic theory was conceptually unsound, as it presupposes the autonomy of communications from actual persons.
[17] Luhmann likens the operation of autopoiesis (the filtering and processing of information from the environment) to a program; making a series of logical distinctions (in German, Unterscheidungen).
Here, Luhmann refers to the British mathematician G. Spencer-Brown's logic of distinctions that Maturana and Varela had earlier identified as a model for the functioning of any cognitive process.
This binary code is not to be confused with a computer's operation: Luhmann (following Spencer-Brown and Gregory Bateson) assumes that auto-referential systems are continuously confronted with the dilemma of disintegration/continuation.
[23] Functions are therefore not the coordinated components of the organic social whole, but rather contingent and selective responses to reference problems which obey no higher principle of order and could have been responded to in other ways.
Likewise, a legal judgement may also be an economic operation when settlement of a contractual dispute obliges one party to pay for the goods or services they had acquired.
The codes of the economy, politics and law operate autonomously, but their "interpenetration"[24] is evident when observing "events"[25] which simultaneously involve the participation of more than one system.
In fact Luhmann himself replied to the relevant criticism by stating that, "In fact the theory of autopoietic systems could bear the title Taking Individuals Seriously, certainly more seriously than our humanistic tradition" (Niklas Luhmann, Operational Closure and Structural Coupling: The Differentiation of the Legal System, Cardozo Law Review, vol.
Luhmann was devoted to the ideal of non-normative science introduced to sociology in the early 20th century by Max Weber and later re-defined and defended against its critics by Karl Popper.
However, in an academic environment that never strictly separated descriptive and normative theories of society, Luhmann's sociology has widely attracted criticism from various intellectuals, including Jürgen Habermas.
[28] Luhmann described the zettelkasten as part of his research into systems theory in the essay Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen (Communication with slip boxes) (probably published in 1980/81).
[29] Luhmann also appears as a character in Paul Wühr's work of literature Das falsche Buch, along with Ulrich Sonnemann [de], Johann Georg Hamann, Richard Buckminster Fuller and others.