Luhmann’s Social Systems advances a radically post-humanist theory of society by relocating the social not in persons, intentions or actions, but in communication as an autopoietic system. Against sociological traditions that treat individuals as the elementary units of society, Luhmann argues that social systems reproduce themselves through recursive chains of communicative events: communication generates further communication, thereby creating the boundaries, structures and environments through which society becomes observable. This shift is decisive because it displaces the sovereign subject as the foundation of social order. Individuals do not disappear, but they belong primarily to psychic systems, operating through consciousness, while social systems operate through communication; the two are structurally coupled, yet neither can be reduced to the other. The central problem is complexity: the world contains more possibilities than any system can process, so systems survive by selecting, reducing and organising complexity through distinctions. Meaning, therefore, is not a stable substance but a horizon of possible selections that allows systems to move from one communicative event to another. Luhmann’s case synthesis of double contingency clarifies this logic: when two actors confront one another without certainty about each other’s expectations, social order does not emerge from shared essence or pre-existing consensus, but from communication’s capacity to stabilise expectations through repeated selections. Modern society, in turn, becomes functionally differentiated into autonomous subsystems—law, politics, economy, science, art—each operating according to its own code and observing the world from its own partial perspective. There is no external Archimedean standpoint from which society can describe itself as a whole. Luhmann’s contribution is thus to replace humanist sociology with a theory of self-referential systems, where society is not made by subjects who communicate, but by communication that constructs subjects as observable positions within its own operations.
