This was the title of my trial lecture for the job interview at the department of sociology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. I really enjoyed to go back to my sociological roots and prepare this 45 minute lecture, which I built on the well-known conflict between Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action and Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. If you want to take a look at the slides, you can do so. I have prepared one set as a PDF document (including my commentaries that I used as cues for my talk) and another set as a QuickTime movie (you have to click into the movie to advance to the next slide – there is no audio track, however).