Afterword

Abstract This Afterword considers the disappointing reception of Luhmann’s ideas by Anglophone intellectuals and their failure to appreciate the originality of his vision or the breadth and depth of his scholarship. To do that, it uses the essays in this book as a starting point for an examination of the structural mismatch between Luhmann’s world and the world of institutionalized academic sociology in English-speaking countries. This is a focus on the institutions which accommodate sociology and its related disciplines to examine if there are any structural factors which could interfere with the compatibility of Luhmann’s theory and its acceptance by these institutions as a valid way of perceiving the world. The more fully the complexities and, in particular, the epistemological implications of Luhmann’s sociology reveal themselves, the less possible it becomes for institutionalized sociology to treat Luhmannian sociology as just another sociological theory, albeit a ‘grand theory.’ This is why the essays in this book are so important. The epistemological and semantic problems that they pose are so fundamental to the self-image of sociology as a discipline that they cannot be resolved simply by minor adjustments to existing theories or substituting one validation criterion for another. To continue to do so is to turn a deaf ear to Luhmann’s repeated plea for sociology to open its eyes to the deceptions inherent in its own self-image and for it to recognize that the social world that it claims to observe scientifically is a social world of its own creation.