Luhmann's Book and the Books of Man

When the two Franciscan friars Cotrugli and Pacioli wrote their treatises on the
new form of double-entry bookkeeping more than 500 years ago, they set in motion a worldwide expansion of production of numbers in sums. The history of accounting challenges an important structural argument in Niklas Luhmanns theory of the advent of our contemporary functionally differentiated society. By recurring to the history of dissemination media and accountings early
ecclesiastical application, the design deficiency in the construction of ‘semantics’ in Luhmann’s research program is uncovered. The rise of numerical accounting challenges contemporary forms of political communication on a global scale. It poses a challenge not only to politics, but to the strongest theory of society, science has yet developed.