Niklas Luhmann

Abstract

Niklas Luhmann's social systems theory undoubtedly presents itself as a curious case of reception by exclusion and subsequent, uncritical canonisation that should give the experts in the sociology of science pause for thought. Not so much because of the exceptional nature of the movement to which it has been subjected, which on the contrary has always been included in the repertoire of strategies available to that constructor of orthodoxies that is the academy. Rather, it is because of the subtle game of denial through which it has been clumsily challenged, the clearest image of which remains that sketched by Freud in 1925 in Die Verneinung: "This I have not thought or this I have not (ever) thought".