Luhmann opens by asking why sociology has produced no theory of society since its founding generation. The classics escaped a circular difficulty by locating themselves historically and by taking individual and society as a settled pair — a distinction whose own unity was never posed as a problem, since society was simply assumed to consist of people.

His alternative is deliberately austere. Society is not composed of human beings and does not stop at national borders; it is a self-producing system of communication, and the concept he wants is neither humanist nor territorial nor realist about its object. Tying society to the nation-state, as he says Giddens effectively does, makes the term redundant and hands everything interesting to a separate notion of the global system.

The awkward consequence he accepts is autology. Sociology belongs to what it observes, so its theory is society describing itself, carried out in the mode of second-order observation.