Gianfranco Poggi

MachtMacht, by LuhmannNiklas. Stuttgart: Enke, 1975. 156 pp. No price listed.

Contemporary Sociology 5(1) (January 1976):61—3. Niklas Luhmann, Professor of Sociology at the University of Bielefeld since its establishment in 1968, and certainly one among the top five sociologists now active in Germany, is as yet little known outside his country. There are three main reasons for this: his commitment to a strenuously conceptual, intellectually very demanding approach to theory-building; his writing style, which Germans also find difficult, and is liable to “throw” the hardiest translator; and the rule apparently observed on the social science publishing market, according to which even second-rate Marxisant writers get translated before first-rate non-Marxist ones. Ironically, in fact, the first event to give Luhmann’s name some international resonance (for example, by getting him translated into Italian) was probably Jurgen Habermas’ decision, a few years back, to have it out with him on the scientific and ideological significance of Luhmann’s own variety of functional systems theory. Together Habermas and Luhmann produced an extraordinary, truly dialogical book (Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie; Suhrkamp, 1971) which unmistakably signaled, even to audiences previously undisposed to bother with him, that Luhmann was indeed a man to reckon with. Not that the reckoning is easy. As I have indicated, Luhmann is a taxing writer; he is also a prodigiously productive one, and one with an astonishing thematic range and formidable resources of diverse scholarship. Finally, his theoretical approach, capable as it is of powerful and subtle elaboration at the master’s hands, is also unwaveringly consistent (“monomaniacal,” some critics have said) in its basic inspiration, and at length provokes in the reader a kind of wary and weary wonderment. HereIcannotillustratethatbasic inspiration, demonstrate the wealth of insights which Luhmann draws from it, or spell out the reasons for the persistent unease the whole enterprise generates in me. But perhaps a short account of this recent book on power by Luhmann (though, I would wager, not the most recent by the time this review will appear) might give the reader some notion of what kind of pudding is being produced at Bielefeld. The problem around which Luhmann’s whole enterprise revolves is the discrepancy between on the one hand the severalness, complexity, and contingency of reality, and on the other the very restricted human capacity for consciously attending and responding to that reality. Being themselves a product of the increase in the differentiation and complexity of nature intrinsic to the evolutionary process, human beings must sustain their existence not by eliminating complexity, but by reducing it through system formation. That is: by countering the threatening boundlessness and overwhelming complexity of raw experiential givens by constructing them into a plurality of overlapping “islands of lower complexity,” of manageable, bounded sets of selected aspects of reality. The most distinctive way of constructing such

Book Reviews : Thomas Mathiesen: Law, Society and Political Action: Towards a Strategy Under Late Capitalism, Academic Press, London/New York 1980, pp. 323

ated with the crisis. As the demand for real local influence increases, so does the state’s demand for effective coordination. Can these antagonistic tendencies be satisfied without citizen participation being called off, made illusionary, or replaced by repress~on’? In Miller’s book there are only hints at these problems. In Miller et al. the problems are more precisely defined. It is here that we find hints as to whether participation gives political influence or...?

Economy and Polity: A Chastened Reflection of Past Hopes@@@The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph.

In The Passions and the Interests, Albert Hirschman reconstructed the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to puzzle out the intricate ideological transformation that ended up producing capitalism. How was it that the pursuit of material interests, so long condemned as the deadly sin of avarice, came to occupy the role of containing the unruly and destructive passions of humankind? Hirschman offered a new interpretation for the rise of capitalism, one that emphasized the continuities between old and new, in contrast to the assumption of a sharp break that is a common feature of both Marxist and Weberian thinking. Among his startling insights was the ironical finding that capitalism was originally supposed to accomplish exactly what was soon denounced as its worst feature: the repression of the passions in favor of the “harmless,” if one-dimensional, interests of commercial life. In offering his novel interpretation of capitalism’s emergence, Hirschman speaks to the full range of scholars for whom capitalism’s triumph has become a subject of study unto itself. By injecting human motivation and its unintended consequences into the understanding of capitalism, Hirschman enriches the scholar’s appreciation of contemporary economic society. “Hirschman makes us see the ideological foundations of capitalism in a fresh way,” wrote Amartya Sen in his foreword to the twentieth-anniversary edition, despite the “remarkable fact that this freshness is derived from ideas that are more than twohundred-years old.”