Afterword

Anders la Cour

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos

pp. 284-288

in: Anders la Cour, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (eds), Luhmann observed, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

When we got together and decided to commission and edit this volume, we were certain about one thing: that we did not want to tell our contributors what to write and more specifically how to write. We were conscious of the fact that our strategy was rather risky and that our editorial "control" should find other ways of steering the various texts. We adopted, therefore, two observational strategies: first, to look deeper into Luhmann's theory and try and understand its various folds that contained, perhaps in a latent form, the potential of the theory itself. And, second, to look at existing secondary literature and try to pick the isolated offshoots of research that began from, ended with or circled Luhmann in one way or another, while at the same time pushing the limits of the theory further out, deeper into its environment. In that sense, this is a true anthology, at least in the term's etymology, where a bunch of blossoming offshoots are collected in order to create a heterogeneous but harmonic bouquet. The main mechanism of the encounter came post-facto, after having observed the various encounters that Luhmann performs in his texts, and the way Luhmann's theory has been consistently yet disparately brought up in various encounters, of a theoretical or applied nature, in some of the more radical secondary literature.