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In a Radio Bremen interview conducted by Wolfgang Hagen,

Hagen: Mr. Luhmann, December 8 is your birthday.

Luhmann: Yes.

H: And you were born in 1927, […]. You come from Lower Saxony […], you were born in Lüneburg. You were ten, in 1937; that means twelve, when the war broke out. That is, the moment you practically came to consciousness, the world was already turned upside down. Or didn't it seem that way to you at the time?

L: That's hard to really say exactly. So in itself the Nazi environment was a problem for me, and then the war was actually just the further consequence. And ...

H: Why was the Nazi environment a problem for you?

L: Well, I had to join the Hitler Youth, all these unpleasant things like marching and saluting, and then also the whole situation, that one simply found the self-promotion of the regime disgusting, and ...

[…]

H: The main reproach or the main misunderstanding - or maybe it is not a misunderstanding - of your draft theory is that the critics lack the sense to talk about society at all in this way, if the one who makes the draft does not at the same time also imply the idea of the realization of a subject, which after all only participates in society in order to realize itself in it. Your approach is a completely different one, and you are accused that it does not allow for any concept of ethics, in any case not for a reasonable one, not even for a political morality at all. Would you agree with that?

L: Yes, or I wouldn't say 'doesn't allow', but layers, downgrades. That politicians talk morally cannot be overlooked, of course. That ethics is a kind of..., or ethics commissions is a kind of event that allows to refrain from interests first of all, that has a certain place in modern society, that people come together for a discussion of problems that refrains from interests and seeks better solutions. It's just that... That's not a social theory. You need a social theory to explain that that can happen.

H: But it doesn't necessarily have to happen.

L: It doesn't necessarily have to happen.

H: So you can't give any guarantee from your theory that inhuman and fascistoid systems won't develop.

L: No, how should one be able to exclude that as a factual possibility? If you do that, then you are walking blindly into such a situation. One can, after all, recognize certain structural purposes of modern society, and then see that it allows and even encourages fundamentalism, for example, in contrast with the consequences of globalization, which are not welcome to everyone.

H: Oh, so you're concerned with describing the fractures, so to speak, in order to describe the ideologies that arise - necessarily arise - at these fractures, or even through which these fractures can only express themselves, in such a way that one then also confronts these ideologies more adequately than possibly falsely biting into them.

L: So it is to let a little air out of the unnecessary agitation. And then to see what you can do with a better understanding of structural resistance and structural problems.

H: The ethos of your theory is, as it were, that there is none, or can be none, but that ethics and ethos is something that has a very specific place in society, a very specific function, but can never determine the theory of society.

L: I think that's actually a question of.... What do we do with the excluded, who don't agree, and in science they are supposed to write a better theory, but from the point of view of ethos, from the point of view of the normative or moral basic doctrine, one can't really deal with them at all; they are just, somehow heretics or whatever, and I just find it..., to play the whole thing over onto a, a merely scientific terrain, I also find, again, politically meaningful. Every assertion of criteria, every assertion of starting points, premises, etc., or of theory structures always creates people who don't agree.

H: Yes, they say: It's not so.

L: It is not so, or it is unacceptable to write it that way. And what do you do with them?

H: They're just wrong.

L: Yes, if you assert a normative basis for your theory. If you don't do that, as I'm trying to do, then you say: then suggest something, do it better, make a better theory, which brings your points of view more to the fore or whatever.

H: A theory without normative foundations - is that even possible?

L: I think so. That is, of course, it depends on what you mean by normative. But if, at the same time, one prescribes with the theory that others must accept it or fall into some zone of badness, of intemperance, of.... (I don't know how you want to classify it), then I think, first of all, that is not scientifically seen, because you would have to give the others the chance to do it better, from their preferences, and besides, you don't need that at all. And that's what I mean by the political or moral content of theory. If they claim that, they classify their opponents with it, and I want to avoid that.

[…]

H: Well, you said something similar in another place. You said: My theory is something like an Experiment. So I feel more related to the experimental sciences than, for example, to the ethical sciences. But also for experiments there must be, so to speak, common starting conditions, and in the natural sciences this is simple, there is a measurable nature, and a mathematics, of which we don't know exactly why it is the way it is, but it is the way it is. And with the help of measurements and mathematics one creates a basis, about whose ethics and about whose meaningfulness it is difficult to discuss. But how is that in society?

L: Well, I think the first task - that's why experiment -, is to once imagine a structure that you can then improve or reject; where you can think about how can we construct an alternative that is better for other interests and at the same time superior in complexity or whatever. But if you don't even try to produce such a work of form, then a task that is there in itself..., is not served at all. This collective singular is so fatal because there is simply a non-thematization of the central-social problem.... Many people experience and act simultaneously, and there is no order in simultaneity. Subject theorists or the meaning theorists don't really give an answer to that.

[…]

L: I just don't see that, or I just see it as a late consequence of, let's say, phantom pains that you had in the 19th century with loss of meaning and, I don't know, alienation and exploitation and all these terms. They were responding to a complete change in the structures of society in the 1800s, so the assassination of the king, the employment of people outside the home; schools, factories, offices, and so on and so forth. So there have been so many ruptures in the tradition that, as a result, such a phrase as loss of meaning or lack of self-realization or emancipation (whatever that can mean then) comes up, as it were. But that's not a sufficient basis, so that's a kind of reaction to something that is not grasped in the reaction.

H: You said phantom pain, that's an interesting term.

L: Yes, because it was also mutation. In the past, you were safe and secure in society and had your place, a good place or a bad place. And that's over now, and that's exactly why this complaint comes – loss of meaning, loss of orientation and that kind of thing.

H: That is, there are never any transcendental presuppositions of thinking at all. You made that clear in your Husserl speech, that you read Husserl minus transcendental subject.

L: Yes, yes. Essentially you can include that via self-reference figures, I think. So that if you say society can only be described in society and writing must be an operation that society tolerates, that is, communication – then that's actually caught, I think. It's just that it's become circular, sort of. And it changes historically with the change of foci of attention that society itself generates or also with the help of the figures of theory that illuminate something and obscure something else.