Abstract
The text presents and discusses the last two volumes of Teoria dos sistemas na prática, published in 2019 and 2020, respectively, by Vozes publishing house. The edition of this trilogy was based on the selection and translation of nine studies — which are equally distributed in each edition — out of a set of twenty-six works published by Niklas Luhman mostly over the course of the 1980s and 1990s. An anthology of sophisticated analysis of classical concepts of the sociological tradition, the texts gathered in Teoria dos sistemas na prática reveal the Luhmannian epistemological perception in the sense that the transformations of social structures — in this case, the transition from the stratified society of the Ancien Régime to the modern society, under the perspective of a functional differentiation of social systems’ primacy — necessarily entails transformations of the semantic structures. In principle, such implications demand from social sciences the construction of a unified theory, consistent with the modern society, which should be prevented against the imposition of previous conceptual conventions.
Keywords
Niklas Luhmann; theory of social systems; social structures; semantic