Ideas

Luhmann’s Serpent

A research project asking where sociology reaches its limits — and how the observer shapes what can be understood.

It grew from more than a decade of research into religion, using varied cultural perspectives and experimental methods. Questions that exceeded sociology’s original scope led the team toward an anthropology of time and a dialogue with Niklas Luhmann.

The project develops a “sociology of the observer.” It explores time itself as a philosophical observer, extending a question left open in Luhmann’s 1993 concluding lecture.