Historicism, Hermeneutics, Second Order Observation: Luhmann Observed by a Historian

An element shared by sociology and history, and to a certain extent by social or cultural anthropology as well, is their claim to study society as a whole. Whereas economy, law, political science, religious studies or linguistics concentrate on a single aspect of society, the aforementioned disciplines aspire to integrate all aspects into a comprehensive and coherent picture. This requires, first, specialist knowledge about the several subsystems of society, which is provided by a great number of subdisciplines, and, second, a theory synthesizing all this knowledge and explaining how these subsystems hang together. The second requirement is hard to satisfy because of the great complexity of the task.