[...] Habermas’s partial incorporation of systems theory – the recognition of a technocratic claim to dominance over certain sectors of society, analogous to relativity theory conceding a limited applicability to classical mechanics – depoliticizes the economic, narrowing it down to a unidimensional emphasis on efficiency, as the price for smuggling a space for politicization into a post-materialist theory of ‘modernity’. The fundamental insight of political economy is forgotten: that the natural laws of the economy, which appear to exist by virtue of their own efficiency, are in reality nothing but projections of social-power relations which present themselves ideologically as technical necessities. The consequence is that it ceases to be understood as a capitalist economy and becomes ‘the economy’, pure and simple, while the social struggle against capitalism is replaced by a political and juridical struggle for democracy [...]

Habermas developed his ‘Theory of Communicative Action’ in large measure through an immanent critique of Luhmann’s work

In this way, without wanting or planning it, Germany controversially became the European hegemon, until further notice.