A Luhmannian Perspective on Levels of Analysis.

Levels of analysis have been discussed in international relations for over fifty years and are an indispensable concept in scholarly efforts to describe social phenomena. Many scholars have engaged in theoretical discussions of them in efforts to clarify their relationship to the agent-structure debate. In this paper I enter this dialogue by offering a conceptualization of levels of analysis from the perspective of the social theory of Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann’s version of complexity theory is based on a radically constructivist epistemology and associated anti-realist ontology. He conceptualizes society as made up of various systems, such as psychic systems (individual human consciousness), the legal system, the political system, the economic system, etc. States, in this analysis, are subsets of the political system which can be seen as systems themselves, and which exhibit similarities that do not cut across other systems. A level of analysis, then, can be conceptualized as a system which is examined for its influence on another system. Systems appear in each other’s environments, but each system also constructs its environment in a contingent way which often does not perfectly overlap with the subjective constructions of other systems. The result is that the causal effect of a particular system on another is describable, yet inherently unpredictable. In engaging with scientific realists, who do much of the theorizing about levels of analysis and agency and structure, I underscore the pitfalls of agent-structure language and the benefits of instead thinking in terms of system and environment. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]