Theory of Society, from history to evolution with definition, by Niklas Luhmann
Evolution enables no predictions, presupposes no teleology, is not a control theory, but explains the complexity of structural change
Niklas Luhmann wrote:
Volume 1
Chapter 3 EVOLUTION
1. Creation, Planning, Evolution
Society is the outcome of evolution. We can also speak of “emergence”. But this is only a metaphor, which does not explain anything but presents us logically with a paradox. Accepting this, we can describe evolution theories as transforming a logically insoluble problem into a genetic one. However unsatisfying the explanations offered by evolution might be by the logical, theory-of-science and methodological standards of causal explanation and prediction, no other theory today is in a position to explain how the structures of the social system develop and reproduce.
So far, I have only mentioned a word and referred to a rather confusing discussion. Our inquiry will be guided by the paradox of the probability of the improbable. … [Every] totality of characteristics, for instance, the particularity of a given person, is, if we consider the conditions for these characteristics to come together, extremely improbable: the result of a chance meeting. However, this holds in every case and is therefore quite normal. … For evolution theory … the resolution of this paradox is the point of departure. The improbability of isolated individuals or isolated families surviving is transformed into the (lesser) improbability of their structural coordination, which is when sociocultural evolution begins. Evolution theory shifts the problem to time and attempts to explain how it is possible that ever more demanding and ever more improbable structures develop and function as normal. The basic proposition is that evolution transforms low probability of origination into high probability of maintenance. This is merely another way of putting the more familiar question of how entropy can give rise to negentropy. To put it in still another way, it is about the morphogenesis of complexity. [Featured Footnote 1]1
This definition of the problem, involving time and geared to dynamics, precludes simply gauging evolution from its structural results, for example, from its effects on the distribution of energy and power or on the coordination of integration levels in society. Although it is important to take such results into account, for instance, in the form of the distribution of action potential among “levels” or “subsystems”, they are precisely what evolution theory has to explain. Describing the differences that come about is not itself a theory of evolution, not even if the material is ordered in historical sequence, presented as a succession. We therefore see the problem in the morphogenesis of complexity.
More recent evolution theories explain the morphogenesis of complexity neither in terms of a corresponding law (which can be empirically verified) nor in terms of the rationality advantages of complexity, which would suggest a purposive if not intentional interpretation of evolution. It is assumed rather that evolution behaves recursively, that is, applies the same procedure iteratively to its own results. But we must then define more precisely what sort of “procedure” we are talking about. In what follows, this is attempted with reference to the neo-Darwinian schema of variation, selection, and restabilization.
Another assumption for which we claim empirical evidence is that in the course of evolution, the biomass to be found on earth and, since the advent of language, the quantity of communicative events have increased. This is to begin with a purely quantitative statement and accordingly easy to verify. In explaining the finding, we must assume that quantitative increases of this sort are possible only through differentiation. And in the field of linguistic communication, it must be added that the possible amount will increase enormously if communication can also run negatively, that is to say, in the form of denying or rejecting communications. Behind the assumption of quantitative growth therefore lies the precondition of nonarbitrary structural differentiation. We can couch this in the usual terms of complexity enhancement, for example, with Darwin, in terms of the differentiation and specialization of parts, provided we drop the additional assumption that higher complexity serves to improve the adaptation of systems to their environment. This points us in certain directions but does not yet explain why improbabilities come to be transformed into probabilities and why such differentiation-driven quantitative increases take place. Evolution theory thus faces a problem, but this merely sets the framework within which solutions to this very problem are to be sought.
Evolution theory does indeed operate with causal assumptions, but it renounces explaining evolution in terms of causal laws. On the contrary, nonrepeatability assumptions are built in, and in this sense, it is a theory of the historically unique development of systems. For evolution comes about through the use of transitory, impermanent conditions. This very possibility provides the opportunity for developing an improbable order over time. Evolution is, as it were, a theory of waiting for useful chances, and this requires systems capable of persisting and/or reproducing, and that can maintain themselves—and wait. Time is accordingly one of the essential preconditions of evolution, and this means among other things that close temporal ties between environmental states and system states have to be interrupted. …
Evolution hence means that the number of preconditions on which an order can depend increases. Through a process of self-reinforcing deviation from basic assumptions of even distribution, an order emerges in which positions, dependencies, and expectations can be expected with greater or lesser certainty in dependence on this same order. If meaningful communication becomes possible at all, every specific utterance being equally probable at every specific point in time becomes improbable. Specific probabilities condense into expectabilities, but given that all expectations are fundamentally uncertain, they are in themselves still evidently improbable.
There are various theories on offer relevant to this problem against which evolution theory has to hold its own. People have long admired the world’s complexity and produced creation theories in response. [i.e. cosmologies] With hindsight, this had a major theoretical advantage. One could distinguish the world, describe it as a work, as the unity of the totality of all visible and invisible things, while always explicitly or implicitly recalling another side to the distinction: God. The genesis of complex order was ascribed to an intelligent cause and uncomprehending admiration of the world diverted into uncomprehending admiration of God. Order is the execution of a plan. The unity of order is mentally duplicated in cause and effect. The cause is God the Creator, and the effect, in which the cause reveals itself, is the world. But this explanation satisfies only those who believe in it.
Creation theories have to be elaborated in sufficient detail to allow both redundancy and variety to be derived from them. They have to help process the diversitas temporum and be open to both positive and negative aspects. Only thus can they generate information under the impact of daily events. The traditional distinctions between good and bad events and between the perfection and corruption of nature did justice to these demands. They could be supplemented by theological theories about the special providence of God, which, for example, give sense to prayer. In the early modern age, these plausibility conditions dissolved under the theoretical and methodological pressure exerted by the demands of both research in the natural sciences and the human scope for action.
The Aristotelian theory of natural final purposes was abandoned. The thesis of the divine creation of the world therefore lost all resonance as a complement to everyday experience and action. It no longer generates information and serves only—as it were, to spare traditional religion—as concluding formula for indicating the otherwise unobservable unity of the world. After a protracted phase of religious quarantine and search for new symbioses, evolution theory asserted itself from the second half of the nineteenth century despite its theological offensiveness. Creation theory renounced explaining the world and withdrew into theology. Specific problems now arose in this domain. The “nothing” of creatio ex nihilo could not be left in the past. It was constantly needed to allow being to be being. Creatio continua requires constant re-creation, also from nothing. But evolution theory has no need to concern itself with this.
Another obstacle lay in the ontological cognitive presuppositions of tradition, combined with the low resolution capacity of science. One spoke of the species and genera of living beings that had to be treated in accordance with the schema being/nonbeing. Nature and creation had fixed forms of being and substances. Variation was possible only in the domain of the accidental. Event-like breaches were understood as “miracles”—as naturally improbable happenings by means of which God drew attention to Himself. More or less legendary mixed forms went by the name of “monster”, but they were denied any classificatory value. At best, they had the function of providing roundabout proof of the perfect order and harmony of nature: this is what you get when something goes wrong! It was this order of species that had blessed rabbits with enough offspring to feed foxes, something that theologically could not otherwise be explained.
Ontology and its bivalent logic also dictated that a distinction was to be drawn between moveable and immovable (between mutable and immutable) things. All theories of change had taken this distinction as their point of departure, which was summed up in the paradox of the unmoved mover and was at this point implemented in concepts of potency (will, power) and interpreted religiously (omnipotence). It was simply out of the question (as long as the movement concept was retained) to think of everything as moved and to forgo any counterconcept. Or one was obliged to introduce a two-sided form into the concept of movement, distinguishing between faster and slower movement.
As long as living beings, like all things, were defined in terms of fixed generic characteristics, they preserved the memory of their origin. With the transition to evolution theories, indeed, even with Lamarck, things, so to speak, lost their memory. They owe what they are to some variations or other, which repeat themselves in other forms and can lead to other forms. This means history! Evolution theory offered scientific proof for this—thus rousing the theological ire of the nineteenth century and its progeny. The eighteenth century had already extenuated much. To avoid entanglement in theological dogmatics, the Creator was now called “Providence”. And he was allowed time. He had not created the whole world all at once. He was still at it. But no longer with works and wonders, no longer with “signs”, but with an “invisible hand”. At the same time “history” was discovered. Finally, the increasing resolution capacity of geological/biological research also called the typological rigidity of species and genera into question. On the one hand, it was and remained clear that there were narrow limits to cross-breeding. This corresponded to a new concept of the population as a polymorphous unity. On the other hand, history provided more and more evidence of the variation and diversification of species. And this imposed the idea of seeing evolution theory as a theory of history. In Darwin, it dissociates itself from the assumption of a compact creation of species and genera as a gradualistic concept of evolution, which understands the coming into being of species and genera as a gradual, continual process. [Featured Footnote 2]2 Finally, coordination, the possible coexistence of the differentiated, is explained historically—and not as the result of a corresponding intention. It is this that makes it interesting for the contemporary theory of society. The “invisible hand” is now replaced by the invisible forces of history, the subliminal changes of evolution, the latent motives and interests, which can be rendered visible only with the aid of scientific theories.
But what alternative is there to creation theories? What distinction can replace the unity of origin and the difference between moved and unmoved as the lead distinction in the theory of historical change? From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, a semantic alternative had initially been sought in theories of progress. Today, this is considered behind the times, not least in evolution theories. The emergence of evolutionary advances cannot be assigned to any consistently evaluated line of progress. But if progress is not to be assumed, what then is the architecture of an evolution theory? Even biology had found it difficult for almost a century to comprehend the complex design of natural selection. As the systemic contours of the course of life became apparent, the distinction between natural and artificial that had initially guided Darwin was succeeded by a distinction between outside and inside, so that the concept of natural selection came to mean external selection. When taken up by the theory of society, this concept blends with existing notions about historical processes (in the plural or singular), the nineteenth century tending to adopt a fatalistic view of history and no longer simply to accept that “man makes history”.
Since the eighteenth century, this problem had been contemplated in the form of stage models of historical development. Although not quite consistent with the meaning of the term, I shall be calling them development theories. What is involved is a sort of “operationalization” of progress theories—for how is one to prove progress empirically other than by comparing different stages of the historical process? The unity of the history of society is reconstructed as a distinction between epochs, and what does not fit is incorporated with the anomaly-absorbing concept of the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous.
This corresponds to the notion of history as a process, which gained binding form in Hegel’s philosophy of history. It was still based on the idea of a hierarchy of lower and higher activities extended into the temporal dimension. On the basis of the distinctions this brings, the theory can show the same to be acting in different domains. It incorporates—in the guise of logical metaphysics—the element of negation, by which the higher domain in awareness of itself interprets for itself the lower domain as insufficient, as deficient, as pain, as something to be overcome. In this negation, it discovers and realizes its “freedom” as its own. It thus discovers a contradiction in itself and can choose to perish by this contradiction or, as philosophy advises, to “sublate” it. Such inner reflection requires “mind” as the principle of becoming. The mind moves by its ability to distinguish, including the “absolute” final ability to distinguish itself in itself. The mind thus only enriches itself, it deletes nothing. It forgets nothing. Nor does it forgo the realization of possibilities. It is perfect because in the end only exclusion is excluded and everything possible becomes real.
No theory has ever again attained this closed form, and all later theories have therefore to be distinguished from it. All post-Hegelian theories must accordingly provide not for the exclusion of exclusion but for the inclusion of exclusion. In the empirical sciences, which, without being preoccupied by the mind, operate with inductive concepts of epoch, the notion of process unity has given rise to innumerable controversies that are no longer relevant today—for example, on the characterization (and then naturally on rejection of the characterization) of this process as continuous, as unilinear, as regular, as necessarily progressive. [Featured Footnote 3]3 Where such definitions are advanced in evolution theory, they can only be rejected. But they are based on a confusion that can probably be rectified with a minimum of conceptual care.
Such divisions into epochs and development theories in general are seen with increasing skepticism. The same holds for the global process theories that have been inspired and borne by them. But whatever we might think of them, they are not evolution theories.
Another approach, which also does business under the name of evolution theory, pursues a quite different explanatory goal. At issue is the problem of differential evolution, that is, the question why some societies develop and others do not; for example, why “states” emerge in some societies and not in others. Certain variables, especially population growth, to which others are added (e.g., ecological conditions or social organization) typically serve as point of departure in explaining why differential development has taken place. Another schema also sold as evolution theory is the distinction between innovation and diffusion. The research interests pursued, particularly by archaeologists and prehistorians, are perfectly legitimate. It is only confusing that this also goes by the name of evolution theory, which blurs the line dividing it from theories addressing the morphogenesis of complexity.
Although these differences are now hardly recognized in social anthropology and sociology,23 from the Darwinian perspective they are quite clear. [Featured Footnote 4]4 Evolution theory (however far it may now have left Darwin behind) uses a quite different sort of distinction to replace that between moved and unmoved. It distinguishes not between epochs but between variation, selection, and restablization. It explains, to use the old terminology, the origin of forms of being and substances in accident. It frees the order of things from all ties to an origin, to a formative beginning. It simply reverses the conceptual framework of world description.
That a distinction is made between variation, selection, and restabilization makes sense in a way that conceals the distinction itself. The distinction explains that and how it is possible to use temporary and passing constellations. It serves to unfold the paradox of the probability of the improbable with the aid of another distinction. The concepts variation and selection shift the problem to another level and thus displace the question of the unity of the distinction between probable and improbable. They put the initial paradox in a more manageable form: naturally erratic, logically abstruse, creative. The paradox becomes less recognizable, it is rendered invisible, and its place is taken by another distinction that offers prospects of empirical inquiry. For we can now ask about the conditions under which the mechanisms of variation and those of selection separate and can then be distinguished by an observer.
As always, a distinction that serves for observation requires a blind spot. It finds it where the boundary has to be drawn that separates the two sides of the distinction. The dividing line has to be drawn unobservably because the observer has to connect to one side of the distinction or the other. In the case of the distinction between variation and selection and that between selection and restabilization, the boundary is called chance, which means negation of any systemic connection of evolutionary functions. We can accordingly not know (not observe) whether variations lead to the positive or negative selection of innovation; and just as little whether restabilization of the system after positive or negative selection will succeed or not. And the very proposition that one cannot know, cannot calculate, cannot plan characterizes a theory as an evolution theory.
As long as we proceed like Darwin on the assumption of “natural selection” by the environment, we have a certain guarantee of stability. [Featured Footnote 5]5 Not all, but well-adapted systems were therefore considered stable as long as the environment did not change. There was no question of a special function. This changes if we abandon the principle of natural selection and switch evolution theory to the co-evolution of structurally coupled, autopoietic* systems [*‘autopoietic’ may be taken to mean self-generating or self-producing and self-reproducing, or, as Luhmann sometimes claims, ‘self-organising’]. Such systems have to provide their stability themselves if they are to continue taking part in evolution. Three evolutionary functions or mechanisms are now needed, of which variation and selection refer to events, while restabilization refers to the self-organization of evolving systems as an essential precondition for variation and selection.
Considering two distinctions, between variation and selection and between selection and restabilization, is a first step toward resolving the problem of unobservability that we label “chance”, namely, in the form of the downstream concept of restabilization, which comes to bear only when variation and selection interact “by chance” and in turn reacts randomly (systemically uncoordinatedly) to this chance interaction as unity of the distinction. If the theory had had only one of these distinctions at its disposal, it would, so to speak, not have got past chance, and would have had to refer via this concept to the environment of the system. Only the coupling of two distinctions centered on the concept of selection allows the theory to conceive of evolution as an endless process in irreversible time, in which every stability achieved—the more complex it is, the more this holds true—offers a starting point for variation.
It is above all obvious that both positive and negative selection produces a stability problem. In the case of positive selection, a new structure has to be built into the system with consequences that have yet to prove their worth. In the case of negative selection, the system “potentializes” the rejected possibility. It has to live with its rejected option, even though it could have taken it and other systems have perhaps done so or would do so. This might have been a mistake, and this remains so. Selection does not necessarily guarantee good results. [Featured Footnote 6]6 In the long run, it has to pass the stabilizability test.
This account suggests that restabilization is the end of a sequence. But stability is also required for the start, as precondition for varying something. The third factor of evolution is therefore both beginning and end, a concept of its unity, which, because it amounts to structural change, can be described as dynamic stability. In a temporally abstract model, evolution theory describes a circular relationship. It thus also indicates that and how time intervenes as an asymmetricizing factor. From a superficial point of view—which, however, completely suppresses the initial paradox—it appears for this very reason to be a process.
Having clarified these points, it hardly needs to be stressed that evolution theory is not a theory of progress. It accepts the emergence and destruction of systems with equanimity. Darwin had also (albeit not completely consistently) refused to use expressions like “higher” and “lower” to characterize species. Even the idea that evolution improves the adaptation of systems to their environment cannot be understood as progress because we would have to assume that the environment changes continuously and triggers ever-new adaptations. It is just as doubtful whether specialization can continue to be seen as a sort of evolutionary attractor, which (but how in fact?) leads to more and more specific competencies, roles, organizations, systems being differentiated. It seems that the economic theory of the division of labor and the restriction of competition through market diversification has imposed itself on evolution theory and, above all, through Spencer, been generalized into a historical law—only to provoke evolution theory to discover the evolutionary advantage of the unspecified. Such ideas need not be rejected across the board; but with the aid of evolution theory, we must examine whether and to what extent they are tenable.
These definitional considerations have consequences for the explanatory goal of evolution theory. Evolution theory provides no interpretation of the future. It enables no predictions. It presupposes no teleology of history—with regard to either a good or a bad end to it. It is not a control theory, which could help in deciding whether we should let evolution be or correct it. It is concerned solely with how we explain that more complex systems develop in a world that always offers and retains other possibilities; and perhaps why such systems fail. In very simple terms, it is concerned with explaining structural changes.
Here one normally thinks of unplanned structural changes. However, planning theory offers no alternative to evolution theory. Evolution theory also deals with systems that plan themselves. There is no disputing that planning or, more generally, intentional anticipation of the future, play a role in sociocultural evolution. We then speak of forward induction. But, in the first place, the basis for forming intentions is typically, if not always, deviation from established routines (thus not at all a spontaneous self-realization of the mind); it is hence itself a result of evolution. Moreover, the future does not comply with intentions but only takes the intentionally created facts as the starting point for further evolution. Evolution theory therefore assumes—and is not far from reality in doing so—that planning cannot determine the state in which the system will end up as a result of planning. Planning, when it takes place, is accordingly an element of evolution, for even the observation of models and the good intentions of planners put the system on an unforeseen course. Evolution theory would say: what structures result will emerge through evolution.
If we wish to understand structural changes evolutionistically, we have to forgo the notion that structures are something “fixed” as opposed to something “in flux”. (An observer, however, can see it thus, but if we want to know what he sees as structure we have to observe the observer). Structures are conditions for restricting the area of connective operations, and are hence conditions for the autopoiesis [self-generation] of the system. They do not exist in abstraction, not independently of time. They are used or not used in progressing from operation to operation. They condense and confirm through repetition in various situations a wealth of meaning that eludes exact definition; or they are forgotten. Structures appear “stable” (to the observer) inasmuch as there are other structures that invite reuse. But structures always realize themselves only in directing (restricting the possibilities for) progression from operation to operation. And it is this operational context … that exposes the structures of society to evolution.
No extraordinary effort is therefore required, as the classical theory would have to see it, to change structures despite their immanent stability. They can become obsolete if other channels of operational connections come to be preferred. Their use can be limited to certain situations or extended to new situations. Evolution is always and everywhere.
2. Systems-Theoretical Basis
[first paragraph only]
Recent developments in evolution theory since its Darwinian beginnings have been influenced above all by gradual realization of the extent to which evolution theory has to take recourse to systems-theoretical premises and has accordingly been drawn into the controversy between systems theories. Systems theory treats variation and selection as “sub-dynamics of the complex system”. The nineteenth century had preferred a semantics of demography, of populations, of heredity. The more uncertain the semantics of subjectivity and freedom, the more certain life and corporeality were. Without this background, Darwin’s interest and, above all, the interest of ideologies in Darwin are inconceivable. With the innumerable variants to be found, the individual serves as the final reference, and this also holds for attempts to combine action theory with evolution theory. This does not take us beyond the theories of the nineteenth century, which claimed the individual for the self-regulation of the evolutionary process, thus for development theories that present themselves as theories of history and often explicitly rejected the expression evolution. Even more than in the refusal of religious explanation, this appears to be the unifying element of most nineteenth-century theories of evolution or history (with the exception of Hegelian derivatives), and hence the undisputed starting point for all controversies. In comparison, systems theory imposes sharper abstractions but also greater conceptual precision. …
[MGH: There in the last sentence the problems begin, because conceptual precision does not itself generate or reflect empirical accuracy even about systems. As usual with Luhmann, almost every sentence is interesting or provocative and therefore fruitful. On the basis of this book first published in English in 2012-2013 I consider Luhmann to be the third most important social theorist of the twentieth century after Weber and Parsons not because his theory of society—of autopoiesis and communication—is ‘correct’ (it is not), but because various building blocks for it are solidly-constructed foundations with indispensable conceptual innovations, which any credible new theory of the long evolution of society must perforce build upon selectively.]
The Source:
Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society: Volume 1, originally published in German under the title Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, Band 1, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997, translated by Rhodes Barrett for Stanford University Press, 2012 [pp. 251-262]
[The exhibit here is the 1st section of 106-page Chapter 3. The section contains 30 footnotes. Some are edited below as ‘featured footnotes’ relevant to SSF themes.]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.
This is a quite common view. It ultimately goes back to Herbert Spencer’s famous formula of “change from a state of indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a state of definite, coherent heterogeneity”.
Today, this has been abandoned both in biology and in the theory of society in favor of a concept of occasional but abrupt structural changes now that we need no longer fear that this brings us too close to miracles of creation.
Herbert Spencer, who was at the heart of these controversies, was both cautious and careless in this regard. See, e.g., the criticism of such assumptions in Spencer, Principles of Sociology, vol. 1 (3rd ed., London, 1885), 93ff., and id., First Principles, 517, with the assertion “that Evolution can end only in the establishment of the greatest perfection and the most complete happiness”. A hundred years later, we can still accept this—albeit with the added remark: then it simply doesn’t end!
However, it should at least be mentioned that the concept of evolution came into fashion owing to Spencer rather than Darwin. Darwin himself uses it only quite casually and at any rate not to name his own theory. Even so-called social Darwinism can hardly cite Darwin himself, especially not The Descent of Man (1871).
Darwin himself held that the evolution of civilization cancelled natural selection. … This would have to mean that civilization as a product of evolution now had to guarantee itself.
See Julian S. Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942; 3rd ed., London 1974), 485: “we now realize that the results of selection are by no means necessarily ‘good’, from the point of view either of the species or of the progressive evolution of life. They may be neutral, they may be a dangerous balance of useful and harmful, or they may be definitely deleterious”.