Niklas Luhmann: 95th Birthday on December 8, 2022

On December 8, 2022, Niklas Luhmann would have celebrated his 95th birthday.

Luhmann was born in Lüneburg in 1927 and is considered one of the most important German representatives of sociological systems theory. At the age of 17, he was conscripted to the army and subsequently became a prisoner of war of the American forces in 1945. Between 1946 and 1949 Luhmann studied law in Freiburg. He first set up his famous Zettelkästen (»slip boxes«, a note-taking method) in 1952. In 1960, he was awarded a research fellowship at the University of Harvard, after having worked at the Higher Administrative Court in Lüneburg and later for Lower Saxony’s ministry of education and cultural affairs for a few years.

The sociologist and social theorist published his first book, Funktionen und Folgen formaler Organisation, in 1964. After roughly 30 years of research, his opus magnum Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft was published in 1997. In the meantime, he had become a department head at the Social Research Centre in Dortmund, obtained his doctorate at the University of Münster as well as his qualification as a professor and published various other wbooks. Between 1968 and 1993 he was a professor of Sociology at the University of Bielefeld. In 1988, Luhmann received the Hegel Prize, awarded every three years by the city of Stuttgart to a person who has made a contribution to the development of philosophy or the humanities.

Luhmann died in Oerlinghausen in 1998. In 2004, the Bielefeld Science Prize, endowed with 25,000 euros, was established in his memory. Suhrkamp Verlag most recently published Luhmann’s work Die Grenzen der Verwaltung from his estate.