ABSTRACT
Like Howard S. Becker, Niklas Luhmann has written only one book, albeit a very thorough and large one, concerning the world of art, among a very broad oeuvre that finds strong cohesion within the author’s system-theoretical thought. Educated as a jurist, he started his career as a scholar in the 1960s, with publications in the field of law and the organization of government administration. Already in the titles of those works his system-theoretical approach can be seen: Funktionen und Folgen formaler Organization (1964), Grundrechte als Institution (1965) and Zweckbegriff und Systemrationalität (1968). This line of investigation ends in his synthetic study Das Recht der Gesellschaft (1993). Between the 1970s and the 1980s, however, he works out his general thoughts, elaborated in Soziale Systeme. Grundriss einer algemeinen Theorie (1984), in very comprehensive studies on the religious system (1977), the educational system (1979), the economic system (1988) and, finally, the art system, entitled Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (1995) (translated into English as Art as a Social System, 2000). It goes without saying that this last publication is the most important for discovering Luhmann’s possible contribution to the present study, all the more so because in this book he once again presents and partly updates his general views on social systems, as developed in 1984.
