De-Colonizing Luhmann

Ralf Rapior, University of Bielefeld

My contribution reflects critically on the standpoint of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory of world society from the perspective of postcolonial and global-historical sociology. It addresses the Eurocentric, Orientalist, world-bifurcating, and empire-obscuring modalities of Luhmann’s theory of societies, social differentiation, and global expansion of world society. To transcend the epistemological obstacles contained therein and make world society theory useful for postcolonial and global-historical analyses, I suggest bringing the repressed history of empires (back) into world society theory and to situate the formation of world society in pre-existing global relations and connected histories. Functionally differentiated and autonomous world systems (such as world politics, the world economy, or world science) did not, as I argue, originate in a transformation of European aristocratic societies but rather in long-term transitions from a plurality of foremost imperial societies to a globally singular world society. The emergence of world society is, therefore, not the consequence of endogenous and exceptional developments in the European Middle Ages but of complex global, imperial, and transnational interconnections that have so far been marginalized in a Eurocentric perspective.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 55. Presidential Session: New Perspectives in Postcolonial Social Theory