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 played a role in nineteenth-century educational debates in the Netherlands. Recent contributions to the historiography of universities in Germany corroborate this finding by situating the relevance of Humboldt’s ideas in the twentieth rather than the nineteenth century. This outcome, however, would not have been possible without the engagement of various stakeholders in the articulation of the research question and intense interactions with scholars from various disciplines.