In some of the obituaries published in European and US magazines following his death in 1998, Niklas Luhmann was described as one of the most important social theorists of the twentieth century (e.g. Fuchs, 1999). Yet, he is virtually unknown in much of the Anglo-Saxon world (Arnoldi, 2001; Beckmann & Stehr, 2002). Luhmann was born in Lüneberg, Germany in 1927. Between 1946 and 1949 he studied law, before entering public administration and spending ten years as an administrative lawyer. In 1962, he received a scholarship to Harvard and started an extremely productive academic career. In 1968 he was appointed Professor of Sociology at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, where he worked until his retirement. At the time of his death, at the age of seventy, he had published over 14,000 printed pages – more than 50 books and over 400 articles (Andersen, 2003).