CHAPTER 1

Differentiation

1. System Differentiation

Since its inception, sociology has been concerned with differentiation.The term alone deserves attention. It stands for the unity (or establishmentof the unity) of difference. Older societies, too, had naturallyobserved differences; they distinguished between town dwellers and countrydwellers, between nobles and peasants, between the members of onefamily and those of another. But they were satisfied to note the differingqualities of beings and ways of life and to form corresponding expectations,as they also did in dealing with things. The concept of differentiationallowed a more abstract approach, and this step toward abstraction is likelyto have been caused by the nineteenth-century tendency to see unities anddifferences as the outcome of processes—whether of evolutionary developmentsor (as in the case of politically united "nations") of purposive action.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, this concept of differentiationmade it possible to switch from theories of progress to structuralanalysis, while nevertheless adopting the economist's belief in the productivenessof the division of labor. Talcott Parsons's general theory of the actionsystem still built on this concept, which offered a key formula bothfor analyzing development (increasing differentiation) and for explainingmodern individualism as the result of role differentiation. It led GeorgSimmel to analyze money, Émile Durkheim to reflect on changes in theforms of moral solidarity, and Max Weber to develop his concept of the rationalizationof different orders of life such as religion, the economy, politics,and eroticism. The dominance of the differentiation concept provesuseful precisely because it does not exclude seemingly disparate theoreticalapproaches—to development, to individuality, to value criteria—butrather gives access to them. In sum, differentiation is necessary to maintaincohesion under conditions of growth.

The differentiation concept enabled modern society to admire andcriticize itself. It could regard itself as the irreversible outcome of historyand look to the future with a great deal of skepticism. For Simmel as forWeber, highly developed "form" is a correlate of differentiation, as is theemergence of individuality for practically all the classical sociologists. Atthe same time, however, form is not to be had without a disturbing loss ofmeaning: it always involves restriction and renunciation; and individualitydoes not make the individual what he would like to be, but producesthe experience of alienation. Together with individual particularity, awarenessdevelops of what this particularity does not entail, generating, sincethe end of the nineteenth century, various theories of a plural self, of conflictbetween personal and social identity, or of contradictory socialization.

This overdetermination through connectivity options is, however, atthe cost of conceptual clarity. I therefore limit the concept to the specialcase of system differentiation, thus making it more difficult to draw overhastyconclusions about individual behavior from structural problems insocietal differentiation. Naturally, this does not prevent us from speakingof role differentiation or differentiated taste, of conceptual differentiation,or of terminological differentiation in a quite general sense. Everythingthat is distinguished can, if we mean the result of the operation, also bedescribed as difference. However, my thesis is that other differentiationsarise from the differentiation of systems and can therefore be explainedby system differentiation; and this is so because every operational (recursive)connection of operations generates a difference between system andenvironment.

If a social system emerges in this manner, I speak of it differentiatingout [ausdifferenzieren] against what this process then makes into the environment.Such outdifferentiation can, as in the case of the societal system,take place in the unmarked space of meaningful possibilities (that can becomeopen to marking only through differentiation), hence in the otherwiseunlimited world. But it can also take place within already formedsystems. This is the only case I shall call system differentiation, or, whenconsidering the difference mentioned, internal differentiation of the systemconcerned.

System differentiation is thus nothing other than recursive system formation,the application of system formation to its own result. The system inwhich further systems arise is reconstructed by a further distinction betweensubsystem and environment. From the perspective of the subsystem, therest of the comprehensive system is now environment. For the subsystemthe overall system now appears to be the unity of the difference betweensubsystem and subsystem environment. In other words, system differentiationgenerates intrasystemic environments. To employ a now familiar term,we are dealing with the "reentry" of the distinction between system and environmentinto what has been distinguished, into the system.

It is important to understand this process with the necessary precision.It does not involve the decomposition of a "whole" into "parts," in eitherthe conceptual sense (divisio) or the sense of actual division (partitio). Thewhole/part schema comes from the old European tradition, and if appliedin this context would miss the decisive point. System differentiation doesnot mean that the whole is divided into parts and, seen on this level, thenconsists only of the parts and the "relations" between the parts. It is ratherthat every subsystem reconstructs the comprehensive system to which itbelongs and which it contributes to forming through its own (subsystem-specific) difference between system and environment. Through system differentiation,the system multiplies itself, so to speak, within itself throughever-new distinctions between systems and environments in the system.The differentiation process can set in spontaneously; it is a result of evolution,which can use opportunities to launch structural changes. It requiresno coordination by the overall system such as the schema of the whole andits parts had suggested. Nor does it require all operations carried out in theoverall system to be distributed among subsystems, so that the overall systemcan then operate only in the subsystems. Even a highly differentiatedsociety allows a great deal of "free" interaction. The consequence is a differentiationof societal system and interaction systems that varies with the differentiationform of society.

The differentiation process can thus begin somewhere or other andsomehow or other and reinforce the deviation that has arisen. One settlementamong many comes to be preferred where the advantages of centralizationare mutually reinforcing, so that finally a new distinction developsbetween town...