How Is Social Order Possible?

The treaty attempts to interpret the mostly debated part of Luhmann’s social theory, the reflections on integration, and to unfold the possible answers for the critiques of Luhmann. The text explores the significance of changes in the three decades’ investigations of the concept of integration in luhmannian terms. In the course of that it deals with the importance of the language, the symbolically generalized communicational media, the moral and the peculiar rationality of subsystems as well as the stable and instable elements of structure construction by resolving the double contingency. It concludes that Luhmann in a late book of his great synthesis, In the Society of Society—probably also as a result of his debate with the representatives of critical studies and system theory since the late 80s—attributes more important role to the media promoting system integration out of the subsystems. It emphasizes that the revealed relevance of the symbolically generalized communication media, detailed firstly in this summary, does not overwrites those former references of system integration that also constitute the possible modes of resolving the double contingency. Finally, it interprets the notion of autopoiesis as well as the conceptions of Luhmann’s second larger working period, and meanwhile it reinterprets the self-references and the significance of Luhmann’s later work.