Niklas Luhmann stands out not just for his theories but also for his extraordinary scholarly output. Luhmann is a German sociologist, and is renowned for his contributions to systems theory.
He was famously productive, having authored more than 70 books (!) and 400 scholarly articles over his career. He wrote on an eclectic variety of subjects, including law, economy, politics, art, religion, ecology, mass media, and love. He was awarded a PhD on the strength of two books he’d already written and which then qualified him to take a professorship at the University of Munster.
His ability to produce such a vast body of work is often attributed to his disciplined personal methodology and his unique use of a Zettelkasten — a detailed, ‘slip-box’ note-taking system that allowed him to efficiently organize and retrieve accumulated knowledge and ideas. Some 90,000 handwritten index cards, it was his “kompetenten Kommunikationspartner,” which translates pretty much exactly as it sounds.
The notes have been digitized, but one wonders how much more he might have produced had he been able to adopt a digital version from the outset.
For sheer volume of output, at least, Luhmann’s results speak for themselves.
His writing style is apparently quite dense, which interestingly Luhmann claims is a deliberate choice “to prevent it from being understood ‘too quickly,’ which would only produce simplistic misunderstandings.” Now, a lot of academic writing can be impenetrable, and I’m not a fan of that style. I feel people should write to be understood. But I do find the notion of forcing a slower read onto the consumer interesting, because it’s the opposite of what we’ve been doing in the last ten or so years, especially online.
Image credit: User Universitätsarchiv St.Gallen (HSG) via Wikimedia Commons.