The relationship in the System: a comparison of Donati and Luhmann

The goal of the essay is to reconstruct differences and similarities between two paradigms: the relational paradigm, founded by Pierpaolo Donati, and system/environment paradigm, founded by Niklas Luhmann. The relational paradigm, introduced by the Italian sociologist, has many points of contact with Luhmann’s. Donati’s concept of relationship is beyond both the concept of agency (methodological individualism) and the concept of structure (methodological collectivism). Relational theory is a way of thinking that assumes that society’s problems are generated by social relations and seeks to understand not based on purely individual factors (voluntarism), nor in terms of collective factors (structuralism), but through new social relations and new relations of relations (relazionamenti di relazioni in Donati, 2009). Donati argues that the social is a: “relational property of the relationship between the observer (or agent) and is being observed or acted upon”. (Donati, 2009): from this perspective, the relational theory accepts the assumption of a constructivist paradigm which is also present in the thinking of Niklas Luhmann (von Foerster in Alferj and Pilati, 1990). According to the Italian sociologist: “The meaning of a meaning is a relationship.” (Donati, 2009) and relationships have the characteristic of deferring to other relationship. The relationships, therefore, cannot exist without collective representations. From this second observation point Donati accepts the concept of recursiveness of social phenomena, finding other points of contact with the systemic paradigm. Finally, the principle of relatedness exists not only socially, but also in the interconnections between other levels of reality: biological, psychological, ethical, political, economic. From this point of view Donati’s theory includes the concepts of differentiation and emergency developed from the General Systems Theory because each system is constituted by relations between parties capable of generating something different from the sum of the individual parts, and each system may interact with other systems in turn composed of sub-systems and so on recursively, generating additional complexity that needs to be controlled and reduced. The author of this draft paper wants to explain in detail the possible convergence between two schools of thought that, despite different assumptions, have a similar way of formulating abstractions.