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Portrait of Niklas Luhmann

20th century · 1927–1998

Who influenced Niklas Luhmann?

Influences

Systems theory of society as communication without subjects.

Niklas Luhmann was influenced by Max Weber. That is 1 line of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.

Read on Wikipedia Portrait: Universitätsarchiv St.Gallen (HSG), CC BY-SA 4.0 See the whole map

Who was Niklas Luhmann?

Niklas Luhmann is among the most influential German sociologists of the 20th century. He built a functionalist systems theory meant to describe every social phenomenon in one consistent language, in which social systems are networks of communication independent of the people in them.

He distinguished three kinds of social system: interaction, organisation and society. Modern society, in his account, is a single world society divided into self-governing functional areas such as politics, law, the economy, science, religion and art, and no centre can coordinate them.

Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.

Who influenced Niklas Luhmann?

1 direct influence on this map, earliest first.

The line of teachers behind Niklas Luhmann

The longest documented line of influence ending at Niklas Luhmann runs 26 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.

  1. Thales of Miletus
  2. Anaximenes of Miletus
  3. Anaxagoras
  4. Socrates
  5. Antisthenes
  6. Diogenes of Sinope
  7. Crates of Thebes
  8. Zeno of Citium
  9. Seneca
  10. Tertullian
  11. Augustine of Hippo
  12. Anselm of Canterbury
  13. Peter Lombard
  14. Thomas Aquinas
  15. René Descartes
  16. Thomas Hobbes
  17. Baruch Spinoza
  18. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
  19. Christian Wolff
  20. Immanuel Kant
  21. Johann Gottlieb Fichte
  22. F. W. J. Schelling
  23. Georg W. F. Hegel
  24. Ludwig Feuerbach
  25. Karl Marx
  26. Max Weber
  27. Niklas Luhmann

Two steps away from Niklas Luhmann

Indirect influences

Contemporaries of Niklas Luhmann

Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of Niklas Luhmann, with no direct line between them.

Niklas Luhmann by the numbers

Direct influences
1
Direct followers
0
Thinkers upstream
94
Thinkers downstream
0
Wikipedia languages
38 — #62 of 84 among 20th-century philosophers
Card rarity
Rare

Questions about Niklas Luhmann

Who influenced Niklas Luhmann?
Max Weber.
Who did Niklas Luhmann influence?
No later thinker on this map is recorded as drawing directly on Niklas Luhmann.
When did Niklas Luhmann live?
1927–1998. The map files Niklas Luhmann under the 20th century.
How rare is the Niklas Luhmann card?
Wikipedia carries an article on Niklas Luhmann in 38 languages, which makes it a Rare card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.

More 20th-century philosophers

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