Soziologie des Risikos (de Gruyter Studienbuch)

by Niklas Luhmann

In seiner Soziologie des Risikos entwickelt Niklas Luhmann ein theoretisches Programm für die soziologische Forschung und geht davon aus, dass der Begriff des Risikos wesentliche Aspekte der Zukunftsbeschreibung der heutigen Gesellschaft in die Gegenwart projiziert. Risiko ist danach die Möglichkeit der Auflösung unerwarteter, unwahrscheinlicher schädlicher Folgen durch eine Entscheidung, die einem Entscheider zugerechnet werden kann. Die Prominenz des Themas Risiko hat es daher wesentlich mit der Annahme zu tun, dass unsere Zukunft von gegenwärtig zu treffenden Entscheidungen abhängt. Die einzelnen Kapitel des Buches zeigen, wie sehr und wie verschieden die Funktionssysteme der modernen Gesellschaft, wie Politik, Recht, Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft, auf die ihnen zugemuteten Risikolagen reagieren und wie sich daraufhin eine allgemeine Opposition derjenigen bildet, die an der Entscheidung nicht beteiligt sind, aber deren etwaige Folgen zu tragen haben.

Genres: Sociology, Science, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Society

252 pages, Perfect Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist, and a prominent thinker in systems theory, who is increasingly recognized as one of the most important social theorists of the 20th century.

Luhmann wrote prolifically, with more than 70 books and nearly 400 scholarly articles published on a variety of subjects, including law, economy, politics, art, religion, ecology, mass media, and love. While his theories have yet to make a major mark in American sociology, his theory is currently well known and popular in German sociology and has also been rather intensively received in Japan and Eastern Europe, including Russia. His relatively low profile elsewhere is partly due to the fact that translating his work is a difficult task, since his writing presents a challenge even to readers of German, including many sociologists. (p. xxvii Social System 1995)

Much of Luhmann's work directly deals with the operations of the legal system and his autopoietic theory of law is regarded as one of the more influential contributions to the sociology of law and socio-legal studies.

Luhmann is probably best known to North Americans for his debate with the critical theorist Jürgen Habermas over the potential of social systems theory. Like his one-time mentor Talcott Parsons, Luhmann is an advocate of "grand theory," although neither in the sense of philosophical foundationalism nor in the sense of "meta-narrative" as often invoked in the critical works of post-modernist writers. Rather, Luhmann's work tracks closer to complexity theory broadly speaking, in that it aims to address any aspect of social life within a universal theoretical framework - of which the diversity of subjects he wrote about is an indication. Luhmann's theory is sometimes dismissed as highly abstract and complex, particularly within the Anglophone world, whereas his work has had a more lasting influence on scholars from German-speaking countries, Scandinavia and Italy.

Luhmann himself described his theory as "labyrinth-like" or "non-linear" and claimed he was deliberately keeping his prose enigmatic to prevent it from being understood "too quickly", which would only produce simplistic misunderstandings.