Sociological Enlightenment: from critique to second-order observation in the sociology of Niklas Luhmann

Abstract

One of the central traits of Niklas Luhmann’s sociological theory is the work of conceptual transformation of the Enlightenment-founded sociological tradition. Luhmann called this the old European tradition. In opposition to these underpinnings, Luhmann construed his sociology aiming at a sociologically founded sociology formulated as a research program in the book Sociological Enlightenment. In this book, Luhmann deployed one of the central points of his sociology and, at the same time, one of the sources of greatest criticism towards it, namely: the turn from critique to second-order observation as a framework for the construction of knowledge from society. The aim of this article is to expose Niklas Luhmann’s program of sociological enlightenment to clarify the turn from critique to second-order observation as a distinctive element of his sociology. It is concluded that Luhmann does not discard critique, but reformulates it in terms of reflective knowledge generated by secondorder observation.