132 Habermas: An intellectual biography
important critical reception of the systems theory of his fellow
sociologist and ‘58er, Niklas Luhmann. The Auseinandersetzung
with Luhmann is beyond the scope of this study, but a few remarks
can be made. Already in his 1973 Legitimation Crisis, Habermas
professed to consider Luhmann’s systems theory dangerous:
“[In Luhmann] the belief in legitimacy thus shrinks to a belief in
legality: the appeal to the legal manner in which a decision comes
about suffices.”^188 According to Habermas, Luhmann “... is here
following the decisionistic legal theory founded by Carl Schmitt.”^189
Revisiting Luhmann in his major 1992 work, which is the subject
of Chapter 5 , Habermas wrote similarly about the systems theory
viewpoint: In it, law is detached from all “internal relations” to
morality and politics, “... reduced to the... administration of law,”
and one misses the “... internal connection... to the constitutional
organization of... political power.”^190 Luhmann’s sociology of law
is interesting, writes Habermas, “... merely as the most rigorous
version of a theory that assigns law a marginal position (as compared
with its place in classical social theories) and neutralizes the phe-
nomenon of legal validity by describing things objectivistically.”^191
The threat of a decisionistic politics set free from questions of the
good life was the subject of his inaugural lecture at Marburg in 1961.
For all the changes of method and form in the interim, his magnum
opus of 1981 was written very in much the same spirit.(^188) Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, 98.
(^189) Ibid.
(^190) Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 50.
(^191) Ibid., 48.