For intellectuals of the younger generations, it is hard to imagine the intensity with which Niklas Luhmann's publications, but also Luhmann as a figure, provoked enthusiastic approval or indignant rejection over the last quarter of the twentieth century. This attention began with the famous lecture given by the lateral entrant to university life – Luhmann came from a family of brewers in Lüneburg and was initially an administrative lawyer – who questioned three central premises of the Frankfurt neo-Marxism that dominated the discipline at the 1968 Sociology Conference.
In place of the seemingly unavoidable concept of society as a group of individuals, he introduced a universal concept of the "system", which encompassed societies as well as individuals and was defined by the processing of challenges in the respective system environment; the structures of the systems were not to emerge from actions, but from their "self-organization" reacting to the environment; and the goal of system analysis was a "higher complexity" of the description provided instead of political change.
What activated both indignation and agreement in this position was the alienation effect of a philosophical design that dispensed with a concept of the human being as a starting point. The effect converged with Luhmann's forms of self-presentation, which were perhaps meant ironically but were taken quite seriously by antagonists and supporters alike, who referred, for example, to the possible combinations of a Zettelkasten and not to his own consciousness as the energy center of his intellectual productivity.
As Luhmann consistently pursued these elementary intuitions in the direction of a philosophical system of all systems with the vanishing point of a coherent and all-encompassing explanation of the world, the controversies dwindled. Intellectual Germany followed his essays and books like the chapters of a serialized novel and developed sympathy for the serene author of their elegant prose. Luhmann's death brought the process to an abrupt end. The predicted international reception failed to materialize. It goes without saying that the productivity of the Zettelkasten, which had risen to mythical status, did not outlive its owner. And even the Wikipedia reference to Luhmann as a "classic of sociology" now seems like an echo from the distant academic past.
Whether sociology and philosophy would have been well advised to continue to focus on his work would have been well advised is a question for the specialist histories. It has little to do with Luhmann's legacy. Rather, a look back at the period of his singular fascination shows the power the beauty of thought can unfold, beauty according to Immanuel Kant as an impression of "purposefulness without purpose." Precisely in this sense, Luhmann's thinking triggered hopes of practical relevance, which he himself had little interest in. From the perspective of aesthetic perspective of aesthetic appreciation, he certainly belongs to the great thinkers of the German tradition - like Hegel or Marx, without whose counter-impulses he might have remained an administrative lawyer.
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Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Schönheit des Denkens. Zum Vermächtnis von Niklas Luhmann. page 