journal of the philosophy of history 8 (2014) 243–264

brill.com/jph

The Meaning of Evolution and the

Evolution of Meaning

Jaap den Hollander

Haren
j.c.den.hollander@rug.nl

Abstract

A major lesson to be learned from narrativist philosophy of history since Danto is that
history and science differ in the organization and presentation of knowledge rather
than in their subject-matter. This insight is most often seen as a decisive argument in
favour of the ‘literary’ or ‘cultural’ character of history. However, if their subject-matter
does not create an insurmountable barrier between history and science, the insight
leaves room, too, for a ‘historical’ approach to issues ordinarily believed to belong to
the domain of ‘science’. A case in point is the subject of evolution. Thus the leading
evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr considers the nature of evolution to be historical
rather than scientific. This might invite historians to overcome their fear of social
Darwinism and to apply their own (narrativist) tools for organizing knowledge to evo-
lutionary theory. This essay attempts to show that Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social
evolution does just this by satisfying the criteria of historical representation as
defended by narrativist philosophy of history. Luhmann’s system concept will be inter-
preted as a ‘colligatory concept’ in the sense meant by William Walsh. Furthermore,
Luhmann’s idea that social systems are ultimately based on meaning processing will
be shown to agree with the fundamental role assigned to meaning in Ankersmit’s
recent work on historical representation.

Keywords

social evolution – historicism – meaning – narrativist philosophy of history – systems

theory – historical representation – Frank Ankersmit – Niklas Luhmann

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi 10.1163/18722636-12341274

244 den hollander

Introduction

This paper is motivated by the belief that Niklas Luhmann’s social theory may
become for socio-cultural history what Charles Darwin’s theory has already
proved to be for natural history, namely a framework for discussing evolution-
ary problems. Historians should not discern in this proposal a threat to the
autonomy of their discipline. On the contrary, I shall argue that any theory
of social evolution requires the instruments of historical representation. The
first section gives a short introduction to the contemporary debate on evolu-
tion. The second section summarizes the debate about the nature of historical
representation in the narrativist philosophy of history. The third section applies
these insights to Luhmann’s theory of social evolution and ends with the conclu-
sion that this theory is not at variance with how historians represent the past
and that valuable results may be expected from future discussions between
evolutionary theorists and historians about the nature of evolution.

Social Evolution: Status Questionis

Theorizing on socio-cultural evolution is an evolutionary process in its own

right, growing from simplicity to complexity. The process started with a sim-
ple observation made by moral philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment,
namely that human actions may have uninentended consequences which
result in spontaneous or unplanned social order.1 This observation marked
nevertheless a break with the Aristotelian tradition of practical or moral
philosophy, which had focused mainly on the intentional aspect of human
actions. Thus Adam Ferguson wrote in his Essay on the History of Civil Society
from 1767: ‘. . . nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the
result of human action, but not the execution of any human design’.2 Another
well-known quote is Adam Smith’s description of the ‘invisible hand’: ‘[every
individual] intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other
cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his

1 Friedrich Hayek pays much attention to the Scottish philosophers in his work. He also
gives due credit to the Anglo-Dutch precursor Bernard Mandeville, author of Fable of the
Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714). See his ‘Lecture on a Master Mind: Dr. Bernard
Mandeville’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 52 (1966), 125–141.
2 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society. Cambridge Texts in the History of
Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 119.

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the meaning of evolution and the evolution of meaning 245

intention.’3 Lesser-known, perhaps, is the fact that Smith’s ‘invisible hand’

inspired Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’.4 This is worth mentioning here, because
it partly explains why historians kept aloof from evolutionary thought since
the eighteenth century. Associating the issue of unintended consequences
with Hegel’s much criticized philosophy of history German historians such as
Johann Gustav Droysen clung, by way of reaction, to the traditional view that
history is made up of intentional actions which should be studied in a herme-
neutical way. Another explanation, preferred by historians themselves, is that
existing theories of social evolution are, generally speaking, rather simplistic
and inadequate for historical research.
There is indeed much to criticize in the evolutionary theories that have
been proposed over the last two centuries. A part of them is not even evolu-
tionary in the proper sense of the word, if we take Darwin’s idea of selection as
the decisive criterion here. For example, many Hegelian inspired stage theories
(Stufentheorien) offer a periodization of ‘the historical process’ or ‘the develop-
ment of humankind’ without paying any attention to the mechanism of evo-
lutionary change.5 Theories on socio-cultural evolution explicitly embracing
Darwin’s principle of natural selection do not fare any better either, tainted
as they are by biological reductionism and ideological bias. The reprehensible
political practices inspired by Social Darwinism even made the E-word taboo
among human scientists for a time. In the course of the twentieth century
interest revived, when anthropologists picked up the thread of pre-Darwinian
thought and developed new insights into the evolution of primitive cultures,
but historians and sociologists still do not see how these insights may help
understand the complexity of modern society.6
Understandable as the existing doubts and hesitations on the subject of
social evolution are, they should not blind us to new developments in the

3 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1979), 456.
4 John B. Davis, ‘Smith’s Invisible Hand and Hegel’s Cunning of Reason’, International Journal
of Social Economics 16-6 (1989), 50–66. James P. Henderson and John B. Davis, ‘Adam Smith’s
Influence on Hegel’s Philosophical Writings’, Journal of the History of Economic Thought 13
(1991), 184–204.
5 Niklas Luhmann, ‘Geschichte als Prozeß und die Theorie sozio-kultureller Evolution’ in:
Idem, Soziologische Aufklärung, Vol. 3 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1981), 178–198.
6 The term Social Darwinism gained widespread currency through Richard Hofstadter’s Social
Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1944). A good survey of socio-cultural evolutionary thought from an anthropological per-
spective is Tim Ingold, Evolution and Social Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986).

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field. A major improvement in theory building is the concept of Universal or

Generalized Darwinism, which deals effectively with the problem of biological
reductionism by introducing a higher level of abstraction.7 An early proponent
was Donald T. Campbell. In a renowned article published in 1960, he argued
that the mechanism of V(ariation), S(election), and R(etention) is applicable
not only to the natural but also to the cultural world.8 Daniel Dennett took a
step further towards abstraction when speaking about an ‘algorithmic process’
characterized by substrate neutrality, underlying mindlessness and guaran-
teed results.9 A striking illustration is computer programs that ‘evolve’ in ways
resembling the process of natural selection. These ‘genetic algorithms’ can
solve complex problems which even their creators, the artificial intelligence
researchers, do not fully understand.10
Dennett’s characterization of the VSR-algorithm is significant in that it hints
at a functional equivalence with mathematics. In both cases we have to do with
formal models that are applicable to various aspects of reality. Incidentally, the
same goes for the system concept, which is another new development in evo-
lutionary thought that should be mentioned, particularly because Universal
Darwinists tend to exchange biological for psychological reductionism.11
Systems were of no importance in the gene-centred view of Neo-Darwinism,
which is also called the Modern Synthesis because it synthesized Darwin’s
evolutionary theory with Mendelian genetics. The Neo-Darwinist Richard
Dawkins makes this perfectly clear when picturing organisms as mere ‘vehicles’
for ‘selfish genes’. Genes use ‘us’ to reproduce themselves, instead of us using

7 The term Universal Darwinism was coined by Richard Dawkins. See his ‘Universal
Darwinism’ in: D. S. Bendall, ed., Evolution from Molecules to Man (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983). The less pretentious term Generalized Darwinism is in vogue
among economic evolutionists. See, among others, Howard E. Aldrich, Geoffrey M.
Hodgson, David L. Hull, Thorbjørn Knudsen, Joel Mokyr and Viktor J. Vanberg, ‘In Defence
of Generalized Darwinism’ Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 18 (2008), 577–596.
8 D. T. Campbell, ‘Blind Variation and Selective Retention in Creative Thought as in Other
Knowledge Processes’, Psychological Review, 67 (1960), 380–400.
9 Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1996), 48–52: ‘Natural Selection as an Algorithmic
Process’.
10 Melanie Mitchell, Complexity. A Guided Tour (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press,
2009), 127–145.
11 See, among others, B. Feltz, M. Crommelinck, and Ph. Goujon, ed., Self-Organization and
Emergence in Life Sciences. Synthese Library (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006); Fritjof Capra
and Pier Luigi Luisi, The Systems View of Life. A Unifying Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014).

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the meaning of evolution and the evolution of meaning 247

‘them’.12 A self-proclaimed Universal Darwinist, Dawkins applies the same

idea to the socio-cultural world, when he speculates on a selfish ‘meme’. He
describes the meme as a unit of information residing in the brain. This is the
neural ‘genotype’ having ‘phenotypic effects’ taking the form of words, music,
paintings, gestures, and so on. These cultural expressions are outward manifes-
tations of the memes in the brain. They owe their existence to the meme’s need
to replicate itself by hopping from brain to brain like a virus.
The gene-centred view of evolutionary biology has come under attack from
new findings in molecular biology and new insights from evolutionary devel-
opmental biology (evo-devo), as the geneticists Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb
explain in their very readable Evolution in Four Dimensions (2005).13 They argue
that evolutionary inheritance implies not only the transmission of genes, but
the transmission of other heritable variations as well. They suggest that such
variation can occur at four levels. First, there is the established physical level
of genetics, which remains basic but needs to be qualified. Second, during
development gene expression may change, and these (epigenetic) changes
can be transmitted to offspring. For example, during the process of nucleotide
methylation, which alters the accessibility of the DNA to transcription factors
and hence affects it potential activity, variations in DNA methylation may be
transmitted through sexual reproduction. Findings like these cast doubt on the
absolute character of the distinction between genotype and phenotype, which
Neo-Darwinists introduced but Darwin himself never made, and lend support
to the hypothesis of a second epigenetic level. At the third level we find behav-
ioural inheritance. The authors here discuss cases of animals that transmit
their food preferences from generation to generation by means of social learn-
ing. The fourth level consists of symbolic systems, which are inherited through
language and culture. The difference with the behavioural level lies in the
symbolic element, which can exist only in a self-referential network of signs.
The authors refer in this context to the works of Ernst Cassirer, Ferdinand de
Saussure and Terence Deacon.
The model of the four levels of inheritance suggests the possibility of an
interaction considerably complicating the picture of evolution. It implies,
for instance, that the socio-cultural domain indirectly influences the process
of genetic inheritance. This smacks of Lamarckism, which is anathema to

12 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
13 Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic,
Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2005). See also Yuval Laor and Eva Jablonka, ‘The Evolution and Development of Culture’,
History and Theory 52 (May 2013), 290–299.

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modern biologists. The authors are well aware of the Lamarckian overtone
of their interpretation and even present it in a provocative way thus making
their book very radical in the eyes of many colleagues.14 Although they do not
question the authority of the modern synthesis, they widen the scope of evo-
lutionary thought to a view far beyond that of most biologists. The chapter
on symbolic heritance elaborates this view, thereby indicating where histo-
rians and social scientists should take up the baton. As it stands, the chap-
ter deserves our fullest praise. It accounts for the holistic aspects of symbolic
communication and effectively criticizes the psychological reductionism of
Dawkins’s ‘selfish memes’ and the tendency of evolutionary psychologists to
divide the human mind into autonomous ‘mental modules’ for language, sense
of humour, numbers, and so on. What it does not offer and in all fairness can-
not be expected from it, is an elaborated theory of the evolution of symbolic
communication systems.15 For this is the responsibility of the social theorists.
Two names that come to mind in this context are Niklas Luhmann and Helmut
Willke. Luhmann laid the groundwork for a new theory of social systems far
superior to the theory that Talcott Parsons had developed around the middle of
the twentieth century.16 Willke amends Luhmann’s theory by highlighting the
symbolic nature of social communication systems with the help of Cassirer,
Saussure and Deacon, the same authors mentioned by Jablonka and Lamb.17

14 On the whole the reviews do not show a negative reception, though. For the ‘Lamarckian’
challenge to modern biology see further Snait B. Gissis and Eva Jablonka, ed.,
Transformations of Lamarckism. From Subtle Fluids to Molecular Biology (Cambridge,
Mass., London: MIT Press, 2011).
15 Elsewhere, Jablonka and others suggested a social development theory inspired by
C. H. Waddington. See: Iddo Tavory, Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka, ‘Culture and
Epigenesis: A Waddingtonian view’ in: Jaan Valsiner, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Culture
and Psychology (Oxford etc.: Oxford University Press, 2012), 662–676; Iddo Tavory, Simona
Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka ‘The Reproduction of the Social: a Developmental System
View’ in: Linnda Caporael, James Griesemer and William Wimsatt, ed., Developing
Scaffolds in Evolution, Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 307–325.
16 Luhmann’s main works are Social Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) and
Theory of Society. 2 vols. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012–2013). A good German
entry to his work is: Oliver Jarhaus, Arnim Nassehi, and others, ed., Luhmann Handbuch.
Leben – Werk – Wirkung (Stuttgart, Weimar: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2012). For Luhmann’s
place in sociology’s recent orientation on complexity science see, among others, Brian
Castellani and Frederic William Hafferty, Sociology and Complexity Science. A New Field of
Inquiry (Berlin Heidelberg; Springer-Verlag, 2009), 171–180.
17 Helmut Willke, Symbolische Systeme: Grundriss einer soziologischen Theorie (Weilerswist:
Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2005).

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the meaning of evolution and the evolution of meaning 249

With Luhmann and Willke we can make the step from evolution to his-
tory, envisaged by Jablonka and Lamb. But before doing so an obstacle has to
be removed, namely the apparent tension between social theory and historical
narrative. Luhmann was aware of it, but saw no obvious conflict. He suggested
a division of labour, in which social theorists would sketch great struc-
tural changes, while historians would fill in the gaps with causal narratives.18
However, his critics discerned a real problem here manifesting itself even in
his own work.19 N. Katherine Hayles characterized the problem as the differ-
ence between the circle and the line.20 The circle stands in this context for
the circular nature of self-referential systems, resisting any suggestion of there
being beginnings or endings. It seems at odds with the linear causality of his-
torical narratives, ranging back from ultimate origins and beginnings down to
the present – and from there even into the future. However, we should ask our-
selves the question as to whether there is any inconsistency here. This I shall
deal with below. Since both Luhmann and his critics seem to have a rather
naive understanding of what is a historical narrative, I will draw upon narrativ-
ist philosophers of history to accommodate Luhmann’s evolutionary theory to
history and historical writing.21

The Nature of Historical Representation

Although neither Luhmann nor his critics state explicitly what they mean by
a narrative, they seem to think of a story that describes causally related events
arranged chronologically. But this everyday understanding of storytelling does
not capture what is specific to historical narratives. It is true that historians
describe past events, but it may be doubted that causality and temporal order
are their guides when they do so. According to narrativist philosophers of
history the narrative itself provides the historian with his models for how to

18 Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society. I (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 343–344.
19 N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Making the Cut: The Interplay of Narrative and System, or What
Systems Theory Can’t See’, Cultural Critique 30 (1995) 71–100; Albrecht Koschorke,
‘Die Grenzen des Systems und die Rhetorik der Systemtheorie’ in: Widerstände der
Systemtheorie: Kulturtheoretische Analysen zum Werk Niklas Luhmanns, ed. Albrecht
Koschorke and Cornelia Vismann (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999), 49–60; Geoffrey
Winthrop-Young, ‘On a Species of Origin: Luhmann’s Darwin’, Configurations, 11 (2003),
305–349.
20 Hayles, ‘Making the Cut’, 90: ‘The Circle versus the Line: A Disjointed Articulation’.
21 I will briefly discuss the ideas of successively Arthur Danto, William Walsh, Louis Mink,
and Frank Ankersmit.

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organize our knowledge of the past. Instead of passively following a course

of events historical narratives actively develop a frame within which events
are ordered.
From a historical point of view narrativist philosophy of history was a reac-
tion against two older philosophies of history, the tradition of hermeneutics
and the neopositivist philosophy of the Covering Law Model (CLM). The prob-
lem with hermeneutics was its focus on intentional actions and its neglect of
‘the law of unintended consequences’ put forward by the philosophers of the
Scottish Enlightenment such as Adam Ferguson. The problem with the CLM-
proposal was its attempt to put history into the straightjacket of scientific,
law-like explanation. This made many historians return to the neo-Kantian
distinction between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften. But the
problem of this strategy was that the debate thus threatened to get stuck on
the issue of the ontological differences between nature and history. This is
where Arthur Danto came in.
Danto insisted that the difference between science and history does not so
much depend on the subject matter as on the language they use: ‘The differ-
ence has to do with the kind of organizing schemes employed by each. History
tells stories’.22 A striking feature of historical accounts is their use of the
past tense. To bring out the difference between sentences about the pres-
ent and those about the past Danto used the thought experiment of an Ideal
Chronicle that contains a complete description of all past events.23 The idea is
that each time an event takes place an all seeing chronicler immediately adds
a new set of sentences – in the present tense – to an ongoing account. The
result is an all-encompassing chronicle from which each individual historical
account could be said to offer a selection. In this way The Ideal Chronicle could
be argued to be a truthful copy of the past. So it seems, at least, according
to the thought experiment. However, what is missing in the Ideal Chronicle
is a specific category of sentences essential to all historical narrative. Danto
has in mind here what he describes as ‘narrative sentences’ that can only
retrospectively be known as true. Take the sentence ‘The author of Principia
Mathematica was born at Woolsthorpe on Christmas Day 1642’, which could
be written only after 1685, the year in which the Principia was published. Such
narrative sentences could never be part of The Ideal Chronicle since they can
only be written after the events recorded by them. The conclusion must be

22 Arthur C. Danto, Narration and Knowledge (including the integral text of Analytical
Philosophy of History) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 111.
23 Ibidem, 143–183.

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the meaning of evolution and the evolution of meaning 251

that The Ideal Chronicle is an inconsistent idea and that the same holds for the
view that historians should try to approximate it as closely as possible.
At the risk of getting ahead of my argument, at this point I already venture
to say that according to the criterion of Danto, evolutionary theories belong
to the realm of historical knowledge, for the simple reason that they include
narrative sentences.24 An example from evolutionary biology is the process of
speciation. This could never be part of an Ideal Chronicle. It is rare to witness
the coming into being of a species, if only because the process usually takes
several generations.25 As soon as we spot a new species, it is, usually, already
there. This argument lends support to the idea that evolutionary biology is to
a certain extent a historical science.26 Since I am primarily interested in the
theory of socio-cultural evolution, I will not pursue this matter further here.27
The forceful argument of the narrative sentences triggered the narrativ-
ist movement in the philosophy of history, even though Danto himself had
restricted his attention to narrative sentences only and had not troubled to
investigate narrative as a whole. He took, at most, a step in this direction with
his notion of the so-called project verbs and temporal wholes. Project verbs are
phrases like ‘planting a rose’ or ‘writing a book’. Used in narrative sentences,
they refer to projects that have been finished and can be conceived of as tem-
poral wholes. If a project is still in progress, such verbs merely express a prom-
ise of the future. After all, the cutting may not actually grow into a rose, and
perhaps the book will never be completed. Present continuous sentences with
a future meaning (‘I am planting a rose’ or ‘I am writing a book’) may be belied
by the actual course of history and are therefore historically contingent.

24 This is also argued in Herbert Schnädelbach, ‘Geschichte als kulturelle Evolution’, in:
Johannes Rohbeck, Herta Nagl-Docekal, ed., Geschichtsphilosophie und Kulturkritk
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003), 306–329.
25 It is possible under laboratory circumstances, if the speciation process involves hybridiza-
tion followed by duplication of chromosomes (the products are called allopolyploids).
These processes can take place in one generation and lead to a reproductive barrier
between the newly formed allopolyploid and the parental species (direct information
from Professor Jablonka).
26 Ernst Mayr, What Makes Biology Unique? Considerations on the autonomy of a scientific
discipline (Cambridge, etc.: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 32–33: ‘Evolutionary biol-
ogy is a historical science’. An important caveat is, that Mayr does not go so far as later
narrativist philosophers like Mink and Ankersmit would have it.
27 Jeroen Schreurs has developed this argument in a masterful, but unfortunately unpub-
lished master thesis at the University of Groningen, Biological Narrativism. Historical
Narrativism and the Science of Biology (2011), written under the supervision of Frank R.
Ankersmit & Fred Keijzer. I owe some useful insights to this thesis.

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252 den hollander

In order to obtain a grasp of large temporal wholes like ‘the Industrial

Revolution’ or ‘the Romantic Movement’ we should turn to the notion of the
‘colligatory concept’. The Victorian polymath William Whewell had introduced
the neologisms ‘consilience’ (jumping together) and ‘colligation’ (binding
together) to explain the process of inductive inference in science.28 In his An
Introduction to Philosophy of History of 1951 William Walsh applied Whewell’s
colligation to history and defined it as ‘the procedure of explaining an event
by tracing its intrinsic relations to other events and locating it in its historical
context’.29 In his later work Walsh associated colligation with interpretation
rather than with explanation.30 However, he never went so far as to consider
interpretation as the only cognitive instrument of the historian.
Louis Mink achieved a synthesis between the positions of Walsh and Danto
by combining the former’s idea of colligation with the latter’s idea that the
distinction between history and science is a matter of language. His notion of
‘configurational comprehension’ – tying together the elements mentioned in a
historical narrative within a single complex of concrete relationships – widens
the scope of colligation to the narrative as a whole and strictly distinguishes it
from scientific explanations.31 Mink, for example, pointed out that historians
do not use each other’s results in the same way that scientists do. They do not
rely on conclusions or abstracts but dutifully read entire books and articles.
There is no other way to make oneself familiar with the argument proposed
by some other historian. Narratives are truly indivisible wholes, from which no
parts can be detached without loss of meaning.
Mink’s idea of configurational comprehension has two important implica-
tions. The first is that historians do not blindly obey the chronological order of

28 ‘Consilience’ is an issue among evolutionary biologists. See Stephen Jay Gould’s attack
on the sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson in The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox
(New York: Harmony Books, 2003). Gould’s idea of consilience is near to the historian’s
idea of colligation.
29 W. H. Walsh, An Introduction to Philosophy of History. Reprint of the 1961 edition (Bristol:
Thoemmes Press, 1992), 59. The first edition is from 1951.
30 W. H. Walsh, ‘Colligatory Concepts in History’ in: W. H. Burston and D. Thompson, ed.,
Studies in the Nature and Teaching of History (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1967), 65–84.
31 Louis O. Mink, Historical Understanding, Brian Fay, Eugene O. Golob and Richard T.
Vann, ed. (Ithaca (N.Y.), London: Cornell University Press, 1987), 38: ‘Speaking roughly,
one might say that theoretical comprehension emphasizes the relations that may hold
between universals and particulars, configurational comprehension the relations that
may hold between particulars and particulars, and categoreal comprehension the rela-
tions that may hold between universals and universals.’ The three modes roughly cor-
respond to the methods of science, history, and philosophy respectively.

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the meaning of evolution and the evolution of meaning 253

the past. They can relate events in ways that would have been incomprehen-
sible to contemporaries. Mink’s famous observation on this runs as follows: ‘To
comprehend temporal succession means to think of it in both directions at
once, and time is no longer the river which bears us along but the river in aerial
view, upstream and downstream seen in a single survey’.32 The second implica-
tion is that historical narratives do not refer to the past. Individual sentences
may have a referring capacity, but this does not entail that the configuration of
these sentences has that same capacity and intent. It is, admittedly, tempting
to believe that structures between narrative sentences should correspond with
structures between past events, which is another way of saying that the past
should have a narrative structure of its own and that people live, so to speak,
their own story. Mink emphatically rejected this idea with his well-known dic-
tum ‘stories are not lived, but told’.
The idea of the past as untold story is deeply rooted in Western civiliza-
tion. It belonged to the belief in a universal history of mankind, which the
Enlightenment inherited from the Christian tradition. Although this belief
has dwindled, the presupposition of a universal history lives on according to
Mink. One of the reasons may be that historians find it hard to accept that their
detailed investigations do not add up to a larger picture of the past and are
doomed to remain fragmentary. On the face of it, historical knowledge should
be aggregative, but its being organized narratively renders this impossible.
Historical narratives are subject to the literary rule of closure. They cannot be
combined without losing their individual character.
The conclusion is that we should give up the idea of the past as untold story
and accept that there is no direct correspondence between our narratives and
the past. This is tantamount to saying that it makes no sense to speak about
the truth or falsity of a narrative taken as a whole. If a narrative were a mere
conjunction of past-referring statements, narrative truth would be no problem
at all. However, historical narratives cannot be reduced to the level of indi-
vidual sentences. They are ‘a product of imaginative construction, which can-
not defend its claim to truth by any accepted procedure.’33 As a matter of fact,
Mink himself felt uneasy about this conclusion, because it threatened to blur
the distinction between history and fiction.34 Unfortunately, he died too early
to work out a satisfactory solution for this difficulty.

32 Ibidem, 57.
33 Ibidem, 198.
34 Richard T. Vann. ‘Louis Mink’s Linguistic Turn’, History and Theory, 26 (1987), 1–14.

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Frank Ankersmit compares Mink’s attack on the idea of Universal History

with Donald Davidson’s attack on the notion of a Conceptual Scheme.35 He
points out that both authors criticized the belief in some sort of framework
that could help us to establish the epistemological relation between language
and reality. In Mink’s case it was the belief that historical truths can be seen
as ‘quotes’ from a Universal History. The truth is, however, that there are no
Conceptual Schemes nor Universal Histories legitimizing scientific or histori-
cal claims to truth. All we have are scientists discussing Nature and historians
discussing the past – and as the impressive results of both science and history
prove, that seems enough. This does not mean that there is nothing more to say
about the relation between narrative and reality. In fact, Ankersmit has made
a life’s work out of it.
From his first book onwards Ankersmit has consistently challenged the phil-
osophical dogma that all questions about the representation of reality can be
reduced to the level of propositions. Following Mink he distinguishes two nar-
rative levels, the descriptive level of individual sentences, which can be true
or false, and the representational level of narrative structures, which cannot
claim to be true or false since they do not refer to the past.36 In other words,
sentences in a narrative have a dual function. On the one hand they describe
reality in the approved manner of epistemology, on the other they define the
narrative representation in a recursive and self-referential way. The network of
relations between the individual sentences of a historical text constitutes the
narrative as ‘a whole that is more than the sum of its parts’. This whole can be
understood only in contrast with other, comparable wholes. In addition to the
meaning of its own sentences a narrative also acquires meaning from agree-
ments and differences with other narratives.
In his recent Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation
(2012) Ankersmit draws some general conclusions from his earlier work. By
dealing with meaning in general, he steps beyond the linguistic framework of
the historical narrative. An important conclusion is that we should distinguish
between propositional and representational meaning. Most philosophers fail
to make this distinction, because they focus only on the propositional level.
If they discuss representational meaning at all, they consider it secondary
to propositional meaning and the rules of reference and truth applying to it.
Ankersmit turns the tables by arguing that representational meaning comes

35 Frank Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation (Ithaca (NY):
Cornell University Press, 2012), 13.
36 Frank R. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language (The
Hague and London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983).

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the meaning of evolution and the evolution of meaning 255

first. This is easily overlooked, because we have to do with a primitive concept

that is undefinable. Each attempt to define meaning would already presup-
pose meaning. Ankersmit refers to Saussure’s theory of linguistic meaning to
explain this further.37
Saussure rejected the nomenclature theory of language, which assumes a
direct reference from word to thing and takes language as an inventory of the
world. The archetype is the Genesis story of Adam giving names to all the ani-
mals. To get around the traditional dichotomy of language and reality Saussure
proposed a theory of the sign based on three notions: (1) the signifier, which
is the phonemic or graphemic outer shape of a linguistic sign (2) the signified,
which is sometimes labelled meaning and sometimes concept (3) the sign,
which combines signifier and signified. The last point is important, because we
usually associate a sign with the outer form only, with the signifier. For exam-
ple, ‘tree’ is not a sign. This becomes apparent when we substitute other signi-
fiers such as ‘arbre’ or ‘Baum’ for it, as we go from one language to another. It
is the tie between a signifier and its signified which turns such a combination
into a linguistic sign. On the basis of this threefold distinction Saussure could
argue that meaning does not reside in the relation between word and thing but
in the relation between signifiers. Though meaningless themselves, phonemes
or graphemes help to create meaning by being distinctive and through mutual
opposition. By referring to each other in an essentially negative way they estab-
lish a self-referential network, in which parts and whole constitute each other
in a circular way.
Ankersmit’s idea of representational meaning is roughly similar to
Saussure’s idea of linguistic meaning. Instead of opposing representation and
reality Ankersmit introduces a third element analogous to the signified. He
begins by distinguishing between represented reality and those aspects of rep-
resented reality that are highlighted by a representation. In order to keep both
apart from each other, he calls the former ‘the represented’ and the latter ‘the
presented’. So representation is a three-place operator consisting of (1) repre-
sentation (2) a presented and (3) represented reality. The presented gives us an
aspect of represented reality, for example what we see of a town if seen from a
certain point of view or those aspects of part of the past that are singled out by
some historical narrative.
Now, in the first place Ankersmit equates these aspects or presenteds with
Saussure’s signifieds since they acquire their contours only thanks to the pres-
ence of the aspects singled out by other representations. Representations
are like social beings in the sense that they need each other. Next, he argues

37 Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth, and Reference, 141 sq.

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256 den hollander

that these aspects can meaningfully be compared to models, albeit that we

should distinguish here between two kinds of model. In the social sciences
models are models of reality; in this case we should think, rather, of math-
ematics and the exact sciences where things are exactly the other way round
and where the world or reality is a model of some abstract calculus. Think of
how certain natural phenomena such as electro-magnetism or hydrodynam-
ics can be said to be models, or interpretations of the formulas developed by
Maxwell or Bernoulli. The main point is that historical representations seem to
be functionally equivalent to mathematics, when they throw light on aspects
of the past with the help of colligatory concepts. To quote Leibniz, they are
both instances of the human ‘cogitatio caeca vel symbolica’ (blind or symbolic
cognition).38
Ankersmit is convinced that the intuitions of the historicists from the early
nineteenth century were basically right and deserve to be reformulated with
the philosophical instruments of today. Historicists were the discoverers of
historical change. Opposing the pre-modern ontology of eternal essences
they introduced a new and radical view of change, which seemed to do away
with the idea of unchangeable substances. This view clashed, however, with
the common-sense logic that change must always be attributed to something
that is unchangeable. Since the historicists could not solve this problem, sub-
stance thinking lived on in historical thought as a kind of stowaway. Herder, for
instance, fell back on the Aristotelian notion of entelechy, which he illustrated
with the well-known example of an acorn growing out into a mighty oak. The
drawback of this idea was, that it applied to species and not to individuals. To
express through change the identity of an individual nation, state or cultural
period, Ranke and Humboldt used the notion ‘historical idea’. We are expected
to think here of a temporalized and individualized kind of platonic form like
‘Volksgeist’ or ‘Zeitgeist’. Historical ideas are to historians what numbers are to

38 According to Leibniz, human beings have, contrary to God, not an ‘intuitive’ but a ‘blind
or symbolic’ grasp of reality. They have to make do with symbolic representation, which
works with the three-place operator ‘res’ (thing), ‘idea’ (concept), and ‘signum’ or ‘notio’
(sign). While the purely mathematical ‘expression’ of mapping works only with ‘res’ and
‘signum’, the interpretative act of ‘representation’ requires an external point of view in
the form of an ‘idea’. This third, cognitive element mediates between sign and thing.
See Sybille Krämer, ‘Symbolische Erkenntnis bei Leibniz’, Zeitschrift für philosophische
Forschung 46 (1992), 224–237; ‘Kalküle als Repräsentation. Zur Genese des operativen
Symbolismus in der Neuzeit’ in: H.-J. Rheinberger, M. Hagner, B. Wahring-Schmidt, ed.,
Räume des Wissens: Repräsentation, Codierung, Spur. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997),
111–122; Marc Kulstad, ‘Leibniz’s Conception of Expression’ Studia Leibnitiana IX-1 (1977),
55–76.

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the meaning of evolution and the evolution of meaning 257

mathematicians with a penchant for Platonism: a reality of some sort. Though

the doctrine of the historical ideas did not find much support, the idea that his-
tory pre-eminently deals with the individual or the particular became widely
accepted, as is shown among other things by the popularity of Windelband’s
distinction between ‘idiographic’ and ‘nomothetic’ sciences.
Ankersmit argues in favour of a re-interpretation of historicism according
to the new insights of narrativist philosophy. As has been said, narrativist phi-
losophers approach the distinction between the natural and human sciences
from a linguistic point of view. This seems to imply that the notion of the his-
torical idea must be located not so much in the past as in the historian’s language
about the past. Ankersmit uses Leibniz’ idea of individuality to substantiate this
idea. In a recent article he distinguishes between weak and strong individuals.39
Weak individuals are the individuals referred to in common language and in
logic. They are called weak, because they are defined with the help of general
predicates – a procedure in which their uniqueness, in what makes them the
individuals they are, gets inevitably lost. In modern logic individuals are even
reduced to the shadowy figure of the existential quantifier ‘∃x’. This intrusion
of the universal on the particular suggests the picture of a body with holes in
it. To find strong individuals we must go back to the scholastic tradition and
Leibniz’s monadology, which was based on it. Today, we have left substance
thinking so far behind, that it takes a considerable effort to understand the tra-
ditional philosophical view of the individuality of the individual. The core idea
was that a unique individual is internally defined by the complete set of its
own properties. This is the so-called predicate-in-notion principle of Leibniz,
which says that ‘in every true affirmative proposition, whether necessary or
contingent, universal or particular, the notion of the predicate is in some way
included in that of the subject’.40 With the help of this logical principle Leibniz
was able to transform the traditional notion of substance into a self-referential
system, which he called ‘monad’ from 1696 onwards.41
Leibniz’s notion of the monad may seem rather abstract and impractical,
but Ankersmit believes it to be a perfect model for historical representation.

39 Frank Ankersmit, ‘History as the Science of the Individual’ Journal of the Philosophy of
History 7 (2013), 396–425.
40 Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters. Edited and
translated by Leroy E. Loemker, 2d ed. (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1969), 337.
41 Werner Stegmaier, Substanz. Grundbegriff der Metaphysik (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt:
Fromann-Holzboog, 1977), 181: ‘. . . so ist die Substanz, in der Vermittlung von vollständi-
gem Begriff und der Einheit des Selbstbezugs, lebendiges, sich selbst verwirklichendes
System oder selbstbezügliche, sich selbst systematisch bestimmende Einheit.’

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258 den hollander

If we analyse the word ‘representation’, we can say that the ‘re‘ stands for the
representation of a reality that has vanished once and for all. At this level, cor-
responding to individual sentences describing states of affairs in the past, we
must locate the extensional dimension of representation. But if we ask what
is defined by all the sentences taken together, we get to the level of a represen-
tation’s intentional dimension. And here historical representations manifest
themselves as strongly individual. Like Leibniz’s monads historical representa-
tions are unworldly, in the sense of being outside space and time, but they can
be applied to the real world in a similar way as mathematics can.
This brings us, finally, to the domain of historical representation. Speaking
about colligatory concepts we usually think of typically historical examples
like ‘the Renaissance’, ‘the Industrial Revolution’, or ‘the Cold War’, but perhaps
there is more than that. Assuming that what narrativist philosophers of his-
tory told us is basically right, it might be worthwhile to see what this would
imply for general concepts such as ‘system’ or ‘evolution’ and see how they
are discussed in the kind of sciences using them. Obviously, this will compel
us to move from history to the social sciences. Equally, we shall then have to
focus above all on theories from the social sciences which either implicitly or
explicitly respect this continuity between history and the social sciences. As
I shall argue below, the systems theory developed by the German sociologist
Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) will provide us here with the most penetrating
and richest insights.

A Narrativist Approach of Luhmann’s Theory of Social Evolution

In the final section I want to show that Luhmann’s theory of social evolution
meets the criteria of historical representation put forward by the narrativist
philosophers of history. My main argument will be, that Luhmann’s system
concept resembles Ankersmit’s strong individual. Before explaining this, I
want to draw attention to another, more methodological line of reasoning that
I have touched upon elsewhere and will not pursue here.42 I mean Luhmann’s
idea of comparing various aspects of social reality from a functionalist point
of view, an idea that can be traced back via Ernst Cassirer to Leibniz.43 Here
is an interesting link with historicism, going back to Leibniz as well. Although

42 Jaap den Hollander, ‘Beyond Historicism: From Leibniz to Luhmann’, Journal of the
Philosophy of History, 4 (2010), 210–225.
43 Gregory B. Moynahan, Ernst Cassirer and the Critical Science of Germany, 1899–1919
(London–New York: Anthem Press, 2013), xxviii: ‘In sociology a further continuity with

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the meaning of evolution and the evolution of meaning 259

Luhmann recognizes the historical relationship between sociological func-

tionalism and historicism, he prefers the former over the latter because it is
more problem-oriented and because the system view has a wider scope than
the historian’s ‘colligatory’ concepts.
Luhmann’s system concept as such is also connected with the historicist
tradition. The German sociologist Alois Hahn places it resolutely in the tra-
dition of Wilhelm Dilthey, who was the first to write on the differentiation
of social meaning systems.44 The ‘cultural systems’ mentioned in Dilthey’s
Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883) are objective, supra-individual
meaning complexes, such as religion, politics, economy, science, and art. Max
Weber continued this line of thought, when he characterized modernization
as a fragmentation of the medieval religious world view into incompatible
‘value spheres’ each having its own ‘value rationality’. Departing from Weber’s
idea that sociology deals with socially meaningful actions, Talcott Parsons sub-
sequently formulated a theory of ‘action systems’ using new insights from the
development of cybernetics and general systems theory during the 1940s and
1950s.
Thus we arrive at Luhmann, who studied with Parsons in Harvard for a year
and took his action system as a model for his own theory. A significant dif-
ference between Parsons and Luhmann is, however, that Luhmann cut out
the action element. Although Parsons’s system concept was defined by social
meaning rather than by individual actions, it was still bound to the presupposi-
tions of action theory, as Luhmann argued. This he considered to be a problem,
because it prevented a clear understanding of the emergence of the social, the
problem that had been on the sociologist’s agenda since Emile Durkheim. To
achieve this understanding Luhmann took a radical step by declaring mean-
ing to be the basic concept of sociology.45 The model he used was Edmund
Husserl’s ‘monadic’ idea of consciousness, which is based on the notion of
intentional meaning or ‘aboutness’. The idea is called monadic, because Husserl
outlined a consciousness that functions in a recursive and self-referential way.

Cassirer’s early work is the “functionalism” of Talcott Parsons and later the systems theory
of Niklas Luhmann, which prove closely related to Cassirer’s early philosophy.’
44 Alois Hahn, ‘Verstehen bei Dilthey und Luhmann’, Annali di Sociologia. Soziologisches
Jahrbuch 8 (1992), 428. See also Alois Hahn, ‘Die Systemtheorie Wilhelm Diltheys’, Berliner
Journal für Soziologie 9 (1999), 5–24.
45 Niklas Luhmann, ‘Sinn als Grundbegriff der Soziologie’, in: Niklas Luhmann and Jürgen
Habermas, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie – Was leistet die Systemforschung?
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), 25–100. Translated as ‘Meaning as Sociology’s Basic Concept’
in: Niklas Luhmann, Essays on Self-Reference (New York: Columbia UP, 1990), 21–80.

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260 den hollander

Our experience of the world, like hearing a melody, is not of a series of uncon-
nected moments but of temporal wholes linking together different percep-
tions. Each perception refers by means of ‘retention’ and ‘protention’ to other
perceptions in past and future respectively.
It is impossible for me to explain here in brief how Luhmann applied
Husserl’s model to the domain of social communication, but the result is that
we are now confronted with two kinds of monadic systems being able to inter-
act through the medium of meaning.46 Talking about the individual and society
we should no longer think of them in terms of a part-whole relationship, but in
terms of systems that function as environments towards each other. In this way
Luhmann hoped to show that an autonomous social dimension emerges out
of myriads of individual consciousness systems. Important in this connection
is the notion of operational closure, claiming that a system can operate only
on the basis of its own operations, either in the domain of thought or in that of
communication. This by no means suggests that systems should also be closed
in other respects. The idea of operational closure is a sine qua non for a theory
of social evolution. If society is defined in terms of individual human beings,
socio-cultural evolution is made dependent on the natural evolution of the
human species, which is not very helpful in explaining the dramatic historical
changes over the period of the last 10.000 years.
It is tempting to compare Luhmann’s systems with Ankersmit’s strong indi-
viduals, because their recursive and self-referential character makes them
likewise indivisible. I should like to elaborate on this somewhat further by dis-
cussing the social and temporal identity of these individuals. In this context by
social identity I mean the demarcation line between system and environment,
particularly other systems. System and environment are correlative concepts.
We can identify a system only from the perspective of an environment, which
is an environment only from the perspective of a system. In other words, the
identity of a system S is a function of the distinction between S and its environ-
ment E, which is a profound statement, especially in Dirk Baecker’s short ver-
sion S= f (S, E).47 It is the central idea of Luhmann’s systems theory, explaining
among other things the many references to Spencer Brown’s calculus, which
starts with the precept ‘Draw a distinction’.48 It clearly corresponds with
Ankersmit’s idea that the meaning of a historical representation can be deter-
mined only in contrast with other representations. Ankersmit speaks here of

46 For a critical discussion see Seven-Eric Knudsen, Luhmann und Husserl. Systemtheorie im
Verhältnis zur Phänomenologie (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006).
47 Dirk Baecker, Wozu Systeme? (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2002), 86.
48 George Spencer Brown, Laws of Form, 5th ed. (Leipzig: Bohmeier Verlag, 2010). The first
English edition is from 1969.

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the meaning of evolution and the evolution of meaning 261

the fixing of meaning instead of the defining of meaning. As explained earlier

on, meaning is undefinable in that there is nothing prior to meaning in terms
of which it could be defined. However, that is not to say that we are unable
to determine or fix the content of the meaning of words, sentences or texts in
individual cases. The fixing process follows the same differential logic as we
found in the Saussure’s theory.
An interesting consequence of the fixing of meaning is that clusters of his-
torical representations seem to coagulate or harden during the process, with
the result that strong individuals tend to become ‘normal’ individuals. For
example, we speak nowadays about the Cold War as if it is a well-defined com-
plex of historical events, but this is the result of meaning fixing. In the 1960s
there were many contradictory interpretations of the relationship between
East and West bearing the label ‘Cold War’. Each of them showed a certain
aspect of the political reality of the day. In the course of the debate, however,
the different representations became clustered in a concept that seems gradu-
ally to acquire a referring capacity.
By temporal identity I mean the identity through time of a changing object.
We have seen that this idea involved the historicists in a dilemma. On the one
hand they believed in a change so radical that no substance would be left unal-
tered, on the other they were intimidated by the rule of standard logic that
change can be attributed only to a substance that itself is unchangeable. Today,
we can conclude that this logic is inadequate to understanding self-referential
systems. It works well for weak individuals, but fails as soon as we discuss strong
individuals like Luhmann’s systems. These systems are historical throughout,
in the sense of having no inner substance – they are substances. Substance
is not so much the condition as the result of historical change, as Herder put
it: ‘What I am is what I have become’.49 What we have here is the paradox of
self-description. As logic would have it, self-description requires a self that
describes and can be described, but in the real world the self emerges during
the process of self-description. Douglas Hofstadter has elucidated this para-
dox for the personal self, but we can also think of the social self-descriptions
written by historians.50 National histories provide a case in point. Writing the
history of a nation seems to presuppose the existence of a nation, but national
histories were in fact instrumental in the rise of the ‘imagined community’
that a nation is.51

49 Quoted in Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth, and Reference, 1–2.

50 Douglas R. Hofstadter, I am a Strange Loop (New York: Basic Books, 2007).
51 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).

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262 den hollander

Systems theory and evolutionary theory seem to agree in that substance is

not the condition but the result of historical change. This seems to call for a
combination of both theories.52 From the perspective of Neo-Darwinism this
is tricky business. It entails among others things an application of the VSR-
algorithm to the internal working of systems. When biologists discuss adapta-
tion, they usually mean adaptation to an external environment. This may be
evident in the case of population genetics, but becomes problematic when we
bring systems into the discussion. From a system perspective, external adap-
tation is less significant because each operating system seems by definition
already adapted. The attention is focused rather on internal development
processes. This is not to say, that systems evolve all by themselves. We should
beware of polarizing the internal/external debate. Keeping in mind the dis-
tinction between system and environment we can safely conclude that adapta-
tion is always a two-way process.
Taking these points in consideration, Luhmann proposes to apply the VSR-
algorithm to the system itself, in such a way that variation manifests itself at
the elementary level, selection at the structural level and restabilization at the
level of the system as a whole. In the case of social systems the elementary
level consists of everyday communication in face-to-face contacts. Since indi-
vidual consciousness systems are operationally closed, communication can
easily lead to misunderstanding and even break down. This is prevented by
expectation structures guiding the selection of communication offers. Trust,
for example, is a common expectation structure. More institutionalized forms
are money, power and truth. Eventually, the system as a whole decides whether
a new structure will be accepted or denied. In both cases a restabilization of
the system will follow (or fail).
The interesting part of social evolution is the structural changes. Luhmann
discusses these changes in three huge steps roughly corresponding with the
three communication revolutions in the spoken and the written language and
the mass media from the printed book onwards. First, we have tribal or seg-
mentary societies, which are subdivided in segments of kinship groups claim-
ing formal equality because they descend from the same ancestor. Next, come

52 Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, vol. I (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012),
261 sq. System thinking has always been a relatively strong element in continental biologi-
cal thought. Luhmann refers in particular to the Austrian zoologist Rupert Riedl (1925–
2005), whose main work is Order in Living Organisms: A Systems Analysis of Evolution
(New York: Wiley, 1978). Another Austrian biologist, Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–
1972), became the spiritual father of General Systems Theory.

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the meaning of evolution and the evolution of meaning 263

the stratified societies, which are subdivided into different classes or castes.
As soon as elite groups become endogamous and fence themselves off as
‘nobility’, the rest of society sees itself automatically downgraded to ‘ordinary
people’. Finally, modern society arrives in early-modern Europe with a new
type of social differentiation, which involves the disembedding of functional
subsystems like religion, politics, economy, science and so on. These subsys-
tems are unequal in that they serve different purposes, but at the same time
equal in that they are not hierarchically ordered.
Although Luhmann’s evolutionary outline does not pretend to be a detailed
historical description, it is a historical narrative all the same, according to the
criteria of Mink and Ankersmit. It is true that Luhmann does not discuss the
origins of modern society or the modern state, but this need not surprise us.
If we accept that ‘modern society’ and ‘modern state’ refer to narrative con-
structs rather than to historical things, we should not be amazed at their hav-
ing no causes and beginnings. Like other historical representations Luhmann’s
‘social systems’ organize knowledge of events that can be dated on a chrono-
logical timescale. This does not mean, however, that the systems themselves
can be pinned down to the same timescale; they are of a different order.
A historical analogy mentioned earlier on is the Cold War. When historians
say they are writing on the Cold War, they seem to refer to a historical event
or state of affairs having the same name. This is a ‘language goes on holiday’
situation, as Wittgenstein used to call it. In fact, there is no Cold War to write
on, there are only interpretations of postwar politics using that name (the Cold
War of A, the Cold War of B, and so on). Consequently, it does not make sense
to try to find an exact starting date or guilty party for the Cold War as a his-
torical representation. Admittedly, the meaning of representations may in due
course become more fixed, with the result that a strong individual tends to
become a weak individual. This explains why there is at least consensus about
the end of the Cold War. When Bush and Gorbachov declared an end to the
Cold War during the Malta summit of 1989, historical representation became
to a certain extent historical reality. The same goes for social systems, which fix
themselves, so to speak, by means of self-description and self-representation.
A common self-description, for example, is the legal personality, which
enables organizations to proceed as collective actors. Due to the feedback of
(self-)representations into the process, systems seem to become a reality of
some sort, as described by the Thomas theorem. However, this does not yet
justify the conclusion that all social systems are man-made institutions ready
to be described in terms of historical causes and dates of origin. After all,
Ferguson’s maxim still holds good: indeed nations stumble on establishments,

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264 den hollander

which are the result of human action, but not of the execution of any human
design. We might conclude, then, that history shows an intricate pattern of
steering and evolution.53

Conclusion

Reverting to the problem of the circle and the line mentioned at the end of
the first section, I venture to conclude that there is no such problem. It is an
error to think that historical narratives simply follow the course of historical
events. This linearity is typical of chronicles; historical narratives are circular
if anything. It is true that historical narratives have a descriptive side as well,
but their characteristic feature is colligating various events under one concept.
Luhmann’s system concept has the same ‘colligatory’ function, in that it estab-
lishes equivalence relations between different domains of social reality. Since
this concept has a wider scope than the usual array of historical concepts, his-
torians would be well advised to incorporate Luhmann’s theory into their own
representation of the past. Maybe, this theory can become a platform for dis-
cussions among historians, comparable to the function of Darwin’s theory for
biologists.

53 The element of steering is emphasized by Willke, though at the expense of evolution.

According to Willke evolution gives way to steering as soon as symbolic meaning enters
the scene. See Symbolische Systeme, 23 and esp. 33. In my opinion, Willke’s valuable
insights into symbolic systems would be more effective if evolution and steering were
taken as parallel and complementary processes.

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