ABSTRACT
Systems' are always prioritized over their component parts. Such holistic leanings are all the more manifest as Luhmann chooses to ground his social systems theory in the conception of autopoiesis: "Everything that is used as a unit by the system is produced as a unit by the system itself". As a consequence, at the level of social ontology, a consistent Luhmannian will encounter difficulties in spelling out the mechanisms through which "a change in a part may cause a qualitative change in the whole and conversely, as when an individual initiates a social movement, and when the latter drags along an individual". The Hayekian and Luhmannian approaches assume that "the subsystems of modern society can realize their self-organization independently and autonomous from the human being and other subsystems". In comparison, Bunge's composition-environment-structure-mechanism (CESM) model, along with his insistence on the principles of rational emergentism, is better suited to the study of emergent phenomena and systemic transformations.
