Trust and Power predate Luhmann’s autopoiesis turn

Evidence

Both Trust and Power come from the pre-autopoietic period in Luhmann’s work. Although Luhmann had already begun to elaborate his vision for a theory of society, his main theoretical terms gravitated around concepts like system, meaning (in the phenomenological sense), action, generalized symbolic media, and functionalism. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 25

Categorization

• DEFINE: Places ‘generalized symbolic media’ and the pre-autopoietic vocabulary contextually, which the reader needs to accurately characterize Luhmann’s trust-as-medium claim.