Abstract
There is, as we saw, a fundamental need to discipline the double contingency of social life in order to provide a basis for interaction; in this framework, Luhmann’s is a description of how systems counter potential incommunicability. Systems are templates that absorb the double contingency of social life and thereby reduce complexity. This is no easy feat for the complexity is vast: double contingency is, in fact, a short-hand formula that stands in for a multi-dimensional overlap of contingencies. Social interaction may demand that one does not only expect expectations but expects expectations of expectations ‘and all this with a plurality of thematics, in the face of a plurality of people and with continuously changing relevance from situation to situation.’1 The dissections of these multiple possibilities are mapped by and stabilised by system-specific reductions. Each system organises the picture by turning, for itself, second-order into first-order contingency (contingencies (a) and (b), above). What is designated thus is a specific space for contingency that is a huge reduction in the scope of contingency of possible states. At the first-order level, the uncertainty remains. Something that is legal today may well be illegal tomorrow. But the space of that contingency is fixed through the reduction at the second-order level of what the uncertainty is about.
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Notes
Luhmann, 1972, 28
Luhmann, 1984, 406
Luhmann, 1988b, ps26-7
ibid., 31
Luhmann, 1992b, 79
Luhmann, 1988b, 27
Luhmann, 1993a, 91
First appeared in 1974 and included in Luhmann (1981)
Luhmann, 1972, 40ff, or pp24ff)
ibid., 77
For more detail see Luhmann, 1986b, 120 and Luhmann, 1993a 92
Luhmann, 1988b, 27
Luhmann, 1986b, 121
In Luhmann, 1993a, ch. 3; deemed ‘a slight variation’ 1986b, n.24. Cf. Teubner’s definition of ‘the central function of law: using the occasion of conflict to create congruently generalized expectations.’ (1992, 1459)
Luhmann’s term Sach-dimension has been translated variably as objective, substantive or material dimension. I will employ the last term.
Luhmann, 1984, 445. ‘Generalized expectations leave to a greater or lesser extent undetermined as to the content, what exactly is expected … Through temporal, objective and social generalizations is uncertainty taken up and absorbed.’
Luhmann, 1972, 64. Thus it is, at this second-order level, that in law one normatively expects normative expectations.
Schauer, 1991, 21
Smith, 1991, 333-334
Luhmann, 1988b, 20
Luhmann, 1972, 22
ibid., 38
Luhmann, 1989, 140
Luhmann, 1986b, 122
Luhmann is not alone in claiming this. Outwith the vast anthropological literature on the function of third parties in dispute settlement, Aubert makes a powerful argument similar to Luhmann’s here (1983, pp57-75). His central hupothesis is that ‘the development of legal thought is a concomitant to the intervention of a third party… When a conflict is turned into a law suit … the basic interaction changes from a dyad to a triad. Between these two transformations there exists a functional relationship.’ (pp63, 69) Aubert traces the shifts in the parties’interests, needs, wishes, etc, that accompany the transformation. He concludes that “with the third party the norm of objectivity has been institutionalized.” (71) He relates this to a most insightful distinction. He says: ‘Irrespective of the qualifications and mode of recruitement of the third person, it may be asked why this conceptualization [of the relationship with the third party] should tend to be normative and not causal or functional.’ Aubert ties his answer-although not in these words-to what he takes to be the emergent quality of the dispute as legal, which demands that the third party normatively co-expect (in his words take sides rather than “cure” the dispute which would mean looking at the causal not the normative).
On the distinction between social and interaction systems, see chapter seven above
Luhmann, 1972, 73
ibid., 62
Indeed we are approaching the same questions but integrating them in the dimension of time. By focusing on how expectations carry the system in time, the nature of systems as temporalised comes to the fore. The material dimension of expectations is, in other words, where observation meets operation.
Luhmann, 1972, 65
For the difference between programmes and values see Luhmann, 1984, pp432ff
Luhmann, 1984, pp433ff, my trans.
See Luhmann, 1972, pp70ff
‘I need not inquire into your motives deeper, there are laws for spouses that act as you do!’ Ego’s expectation of Alter is not qualified in the light of Alter’s action to expect something new next time, but is disappointed instead (normative not cognitive); the law designates what actions have this effect, and, although this will only be undersoot fully later, Ego reads in this not only a disappoinment of a right in law but one that re-enacts a disappointment of the love Ego had invested.
Luhmann, 1972, 70
No juridification due to colonising structures then, only due to excessive reliance on the legal system for political ends.
Luhmann, 1988b, 27-28
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Christodoulidis, E.A. (1998). Legal Expectations. In: Law and Reflexive Politics. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 35. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3967-0_9
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