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Where can the Liberals go? Asks Patrick Lavelle.

Article Excerpt
Charles Richardson covers the developing crisis in the Australian political landscape particularly with regard to the Liberals (Arena Magazine No. 60). He illustrates the importance of the passage of events and their timing on the decline of what was originally a well-founded and structurally relevant political entity serving the community.

Fortunately for me and as an example of the interplay of events and their timing, I recently read Chris Thornhill's article `Systems theory and legal theory' (Radical Philosophy Nov.-Dec. 2002). Chris succinctly summarises Luhmann's social systems theory together with a review of Heidegger's concept of `being and time'.

I quote from Thornhill's reference to Luhmann's sociology:

Luhmann's theory of social systems hinges on the argument that each system of society is a closed or antipoetic unity of operations, and that no system is permeable to normative perspectives from outside it. Each system obtains a code which enables it to differentiate itself from its environment and to develop its own operations as an autonomous unity of self-referential responses to external events.

This is not to say that the systems have no means of learning about their...

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