Heinz von Foerster and Niklas Luhmann: The Cybernetics of Social Systems Theory

I offer a broad comparison between classical and neocybernetic epistemology and sketch the redescription of the subject/object relation as the system/environment relation. I situate von Foerster and Luhmann on the latter side of this comparison and suggest that their shared commitments to a constructivist epistemology informed von Foerster's approval of Luhmann’s reworking of Maturana and Varela's concept of autopoiesis