Introduction

The present book is in line of the research conducted in a series of books published by one of the leading sociologists of the twentieth century Niklas Luhmann (1927–98). Among his numerous publications (see bibliographies of Luhmann’s works in German in Baraldi, Corsi, and Esposito 1997 and of his works translated into English in Moeller 2006), there are two major general expositions of his social systems theory (SST) and a series of what may be called case studies, that is, studies of individual social subsystems. The former group is comprised of general SST works: Soziale Systeme: Grundriss einer allgemeinen Theorie (1984, in English translation: Social Systems, see Luhmann 1995) and Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (1997, The Society of Society ¹ ). The latter group includes monographs on the economy (Die Wirtschaft der Gesellschaft, 1988), science (Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, 1990), law (Das Recht der Gesellschaft, 1995), art (Die Kunst der Gesellschaft, 1995), religion (Die Religion der Gesellschaft, published post-humously by André Kieserling, 2000), education (Die Erziehungssystem der Gesellschaft, published posthumously by Dieter Lenzen, 2001) and others (see also Runkel and Burkart 2005, 7, 11). The second type of Luhmann’s publications, where SST is applied to individual social function systems, serves as a model for the present monograph, and, consequently, the latter aspires to continue Luhmann’s original series by adding a systemic description of one more social function system—the translation system.