The starting point for the first social history of the early modern period of Europe that was consistently oriented towards systems theory was the observation that in the three centuries between 1500 and 1800 there was a transition process from hierarchical to functional social differentiation, in the course of which the basic structure of modern society emerged.
Rudolf Schlögl, who taught early modern history at the University of Konstanz until 2021, firmly emphasized that this society had been described by his contemporaries in the early nineteenth century as a social order that required the formation of groups according to objective criteria, although his contemporaries still used the model of class society. At the same time, the author emphasizes that, despite all such disturbances, hierarchical and functional differentiation in European society had a long history of mutual stabilization, which only shifted significantly towards the formation of functionally defined systems from the middle of the seventeenth century.
Europe’s unlikely path to modernity
This fundamental change, which the author calls social evolution, is unique in history and ultimately gave rise to “dual modernity” in world society in the course of imperial globalization. But a development that should not be understood as European superiority, but instead shows the impossibility of modernity.
We could also put it like this: If we understand European society in the early modern period as one that had two primary differentiations in transition, then we are dealing with a very fragile and highly contingent process of social meaning formation, the interaction of which produced an era-specific identity that went beyond the mere temporal sequence of rulers, states, and religions. Therefore, it is about the integrated (and not arbitrary) relationship of different things or, as the author puts it, about the “simultaneity of different things”, which makes Europe’s path to modernity impossible.
The first of two chapters of this monograph – consistent with systems theory – is dedicated to communicative and media conditions in the early modern period of Europe. Communication between those present, the logic of which the author has examined in a fundamental study, emerges on its own, as does a “new” anthropology of communication based on moral philosophy, which still seemed highly skeptical in the eighteenth century.
Why modern systems theory?
The analytical added value of systems theory becomes clear in this chapter, especially when it comes to media transformations referred to as simple successful media. For example, the ritual mutated from a successful medium to a distributed medium as the increasing practice of writing gradually weakened its performance. At the same time, morality loses its social relevance because it cedes its duties to functionally defined and symbolically generalized media of success such as power, money, and law. Honorary (hierarchical) communication, in turn, faces competition from politeness (egalitarian) communication.
The second chapter changes perspective and follows the formation of social systems, also consistently in systems theory. The focus is on the thesis that the transition to functional social differentiation is associated with shifts in the formation of the system itself – after all, the establishment of hierarchies in the system strengthens the social dimension compared to the factual one.
But this means that this chapter primarily addresses the question of what the reproduction of the two primary types of differentiation of early modern society meant for the formation of systems at lower levels: for example, for systems concerned with interaction such as the family or for organizational systems such as managed government or institutionalized spirituality – and last, but not least, for the functional differentiation of law and economics.
The randomness of modern achievements
What is striking, according to the author, is the high level of learning, systematic adaptation to changing world and environmental conditions. However, the violent destruction of power structures in the French Revolution – as a reaction to the increasing tension between the hierarchical order and the functional sphere – resulted in a prolonged crisis of adaptation in the implementation of changing codes of political power at the lower levels of system formation. Against this background, it is not necessary to emphasize that the author does not simply “distribute” his “empirical material” in encyclopedic fragmentation – or even transform it into narratives of apparent immediacy, but rather “translates” it in a system-theoretical way.
However we imagine historians dedicated to the early modern period, reading this monograph makes one thing clear: European society in the late eighteenth century was shaped by the structures of modernity. However great modernization theory – and systems theory – may be, its skepticism: early modern historical research that ignores this is missing its “time”. And maybe not just their era. The final sentence of the monograph, which preoccupied the reviewer and continues to preoccupy him like few other books, is: “The randomness of modernity, because of its legacy and dynamics, remains a problem that modern world society must confront.”
