Aloys Winterling wrote his dissertation on dancing at the court of the Elector of Cologne, Clemens August, here on a painting by the court painter Rousseau.
Image: AKG
Historians are scientists who don’t like to be disturbed in their routines. Despite this, Aloys Winterling tried to familiarize his colleagues with Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory.
In an interview with the sociologist of religion Detlef Pollack in 1991, Niklas Luhmann frankly provided information on his sociological poetology: “I think primarily historically,” he stated frankly, “that means I must always be able to admit that certain statements are not valid in older societies .” The systems theorist’s commitment to the historicity of his observations was the motto of a farewell conference held at Berlin’s Humboldt University in honor of the ancient historian Aloys Winterling, who was retiring. Like no other in his field, he has repeatedly tried to take up suggestions from systems theory and to convince his colleagues of the value of working with it. As early as 2012 he organized a section at the Mainz Historikertag entitled “Functional Differentiation in Roman Antiquity”. Ten years later, the title is even more comprehensive: “System Theory & Ancient Society”.
Winterling, who originally comes from the early modern period, received his doctorate from the court of the Elector of Cologne and then transferred his knowledge to the ancient Aula Caesaris, initially stated that the ambitious goal of the conference was to bring together the historical and system-theoretical sides. So far, historical science has reacted with great reluctance to the theory, which has been denounced as “conservative” and “hypercomplex”, and has thus neglected an inspiring discussion partner. On the other hand, Luhmann himself repeatedly asked the question of structural changes and examined the difference between before and after social developments. This can be seen, for example, in Luhmann’s sense of the problem of modern self-descriptions through terms such as “people” or “sovereignty”, which were originally developed to implement programs and not to describe states of affairs. Winterling’s key dialectical question was then: what does one get in and what gets out of sight when one looks at pre-modern societies from the perspective of systems theory?