Niklas Luhmann was born in 1927. Following his teenage stint in the army, he went on to study law at the Universität Freiburg from 1946-1949 (Müller 2005). He trained as a lawyer, but found the intellectual constraints of practicing law not to his liking. He decided to go into public administration, as it promised him more freedom to pursue his own ideas (Hornung 1998). Luhmann became a civil servant for the town of Lüneburg in 1954. Although he enjoyed his work, he accepted the opportunity to take a sabbatical leave to study administrative science at Harvard University in 1960. Here Luhmann became a student of systems theorist Talcott Parsons, a thinker who would have a great impact on the development of Luhmann’s theories. After returning to Germany in 1961, Luhmann transferred to a research institute at the Hochschule für Verwaltungswissenschaften (School of Public Administration) in Speyer. Here he was afforded the freedom to pursue his scientific interests, and began his research of social structure.
In 1965, Luhmann studied Sociology for a single semester at the Universität Münster. He was awarded a PhD and Habilitation (a postdoctoral qualification enabling one to teach at the university level) for two books previously published. After briefly occupying The Frankfurt School’s former chair at the Universität Frankfurt, (where he taught a poorly-attended seminar on the sociology of love), he accepted a position at the newly-founded Reformuniversität Bielefeld (Baecker, 2005).
In 1973 he engaged in a debate with theorist Jürgen Habermas about the role of social theory. This debate was later published as a series of essays in Theorie der GesellschaftoderSozialtechnologie: Was leistet die Systemforschung? (Theory of Society or Social Technology: What can Systems Research Accomplish?) (1973). The debate with Habermas (whose theory receives a much wider acceptance outside of Germany) served as the Anglophonic world’s major introduction to Luhmann’s thought.
Luhmann published profusely throughout his career, with each book and essay building a foundation for his final theory of society. He retired from this position in 1993, but continued to publish. His magnum opus, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (The Society of the Society) was published a year before his death in 1997.
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