Towards a Post-Luhmannian Social Systems View

In sociology and social sciences there has been for long a debate on whether actions and agents play the role of the explanans in sociological or social scientific explanations or structures and rules. In this contribution it will be argued that introducing the concept of self-organisation that relates agency and systems enables the divide between both strains of thought to be rendered obsolescent. This reconceptualization of the central issue in social science in terms of self-organization is able to resort to and integrate important ideas and insights of recent attempts to overcome the dichotomy in social theory which do not explicitly refer to an evolutionary systems theory of society. However, it differs fundamentally from the Luhmannian type of approaching social systems while being consistent with various other perspectives on evolutionary systems inside and outside the human realm — in particular, with Bertalanffy’s General System Theory.