How Society Changes: Sociological Enlightenment and a Theory of Social Evolution for Freedom
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How Society Changes: Sociological Enlightenment and a Theory of Social Evolution for Freedom Mitsuhiro Tada 1 Accepted: 27 September 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This article clarifies the relationship between individual freedom and social order by relying on Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory and thereby defines sociology’s contribution to social evolution as sociological enlightenment, which seeks otherwiseness in living experience and action. For this purpose, Luhmann’s theory will specifically be compared with Emile Durkheim’s and Alfred Schutz’s sociological theories. Durkheim, a “child of the Enlightenment,” considered freedom a collective ideal of moral individualism and conceived that the rational state realizes freedom by spreading the civil-religious human ideal for modern social order. In contrast, Schutz, following Henri Bergson, who criticized rationality for spatially fixing inner time, regarded freedom as a given in the individual’s underlying duration, not as a shared ideal. Yet, unlike Bergson, he continued relying on rationalism, and he thought that the sociological observer observes how something appears to people with the epoché of natural attitude, not what it objectively is. Inheriting this phenomenological subjectivism, Luhmann showed that the self-referentiality of consciousness also applies to society: A social system, which path-dependently emerges itself from a double contingency, observes the world in its own way based on its self-referentially constituted eigen-time. On account of this system closure, and contrary to Durkheim’s illuminist belief, there is no controlling entity in a highly evolved society, where freedom results from the enlarged, diversified possibilities of living experience and action (contingency). Thus, sociological enlightenment doubts self-evidence so that society brackets the taken-for-granted social order or social reality and amplifies individuals’ deviations to evolve toward freedom. Keywords Niklas Luhmann . Emile Durkheim . Alfred Schutz . Path-dependency . Eigen-
time of self-referential system . Contingency
* Mitsuhiro Tada [email protected]
1
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Kumamoto University, 40-1, Kurokami 2 chome, Chuo-ku, Kumamoto 860-8555, Japan
The American Sociologist
[T]he history of the human spirit is the very history of the progress of free thought. —Émile Durkheim (1897: 430). [A]ll free-living systems are nonequilibrium systems. —Stuart Kauffman (1995: 21).
Introduction This paper aims to clarify the relationship between individual freedom and social order, thereby redefining the role that sociology can play for further freedom in society. For this purpose, the following argument specifically relies on Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems, which characterized sociology’s contribution as sociological enlightenment, an enlightenment that enlarges the room for new kinds of “living experience (Erleben)” and “action (Handeln)” by revealing the path-dependency of the existing, taken-for-granted social orde
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