Niklas Luhmann

Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist who built one of the most comprehensive and abstract theoretical systems in the discipline, social systems theory. Drawing on the biological concept of autopoiesis, he described society as composed of self-referential, self-producing communication systems, such as law, the economy, politics, and science, each operating according to its own internal binary code and largely closed to direct steering from outside. His major work, Social Systems (1984), and his later multi-volume studies of individual social subsystems made him one of the most influential, and most demanding, theorists of modern society.