Niklas Luhmann osservatore del moderno. La costruzione della società fra osservazione e contingenza

Niklas Luhmann Observer of Modernity: The Construction of Society between Observation and Contingency. This paper focuses on the three conceptual axes of distinction, observation, contingency, which underpin Niklas Luhmann’s theory of communicative systems. The contribution com- pares Luhmann’s “second-order cybernetics” with the metaphysical semantics of historical temporality, as well as with the “philosophies of crisis” that mar- ked the 20th century, assessing the ways in which Luhmann’s constructivism elaborates the crisis of the concepts of meaning and rationality in history.