ABSTRACT
The reflective spiral of the reciprocal observation of the other’s self-observations does not escape the circle in which both
external observation and self-observation are always a system’s own observation; it does not penetrate the darkness of mutual
opacity…. Luhmann’s depiction of the self-legitimation of a politics anchored in a state apparatus begins to fall apart if
systems theory is confronted with the task of ‘conceiving the theory of the state from the perspective of an ethically
responsible and responsive society’. Habermas 1996:347, 342
All that matters for the realization of society is that the component autopoietic systems should satisfy certain relations regardless of the actual structures (internal processes) through
which they realize them. Accordingly, hypocrisy plays an important role in the realization of human societies, permitting
human beings under stress to feign having certain properties which they abandon as soon as the stress is removed. This is
why in a human society a social change takes place as a permanent phenomenon only to the extent that it is a cultural
change: a revolution is a revolution only if it is an ethical revolution.
