A Modernization Perspective on Dutch Universities in the Nineteenth Century:Theoretical Sociology Challenging Historiography

This chapter shows how Niklas Luhmann’s theoretical sociology, especially his work on self-organizing social systems, helped refine my examination of educational debates about the modernization of higher education in the nineteenth-century Netherlands. What the application of a discursive analytical approach based on systems theory allowed me to do in particular was to reconsider the presumed influence of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s educational philosophy in the Netherlands. One of the study’s surprising outcomes was that Humboldt’s world-famous ideas on university education as Bildung hardly playe... Mehr ...