Love: A Sketch

by Niklas Luhmann, Kathleen Cross (Translator), André Kieserling (Editor)

Love seems like the most personal experience, one that touches each of us in a unique way that is more personal than social, and hence it is not surprising that it has been largely neglected by sociologists and social theorists. While it has long been a central preoccupation of writers and novelists, love has rarely attracted anything more than the most cursory attention of social scientists.

This short text, originally written in 1969 by the eminent German social theorist Niklas Luhmann, goes a long way to redressing this neglect. Rather than seeing love as a unique and ineffable personal experience, Luhmann treats love as a solution to a problem that depends on a wider range of social structures and forms. Human beings are faced with a world of enormous complexity and they have to find ways to order and make sense of this world. In other words, they need certain facilities for action Ð what Luhmann calls ‘media of communication’ Ð that enable them to select from a host of alternatives in ways that will be understood as meaningful by others. Love is one of these media; truth, power, money and art are others. With the development of modern societies, greater demands are made on this medium of love, altering the relationship between love and sexuality and giving rise to the distinctive difficulties we associate with love today.

This short text by one of the most brilliant social theorists of the 20th century will be of great interest to students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities. It is a concise and pithy statement of what is still the only sociological theory of love we have.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, Philosophy, Relationships

100 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist, and a prominent thinker in systems theory, who is increasingly recognized as one of the most important social theorists of the 20th century.

Luhmann wrote prolifically, with more than 70 books and nearly 400 scholarly articles published on a variety of subjects, including law, economy, politics, art, religion, ecology, mass media, and love. While his theories have yet to make a major mark in American sociology, his theory is currently well known and popular in German sociology and has also been rather intensively received in Japan and Eastern Europe, including Russia. His relatively low profile elsewhere is partly due to the fact that translating his work is a difficult task, since his writing presents a challenge even to readers of German, including many sociologists. (p. xxvii Social System 1995)

Much of Luhmann's work directly deals with the operations of the legal system and his autopoietic theory of law is regarded as one of the more influential contributions to the sociology of law and socio-legal studies.

Luhmann is probably best known to North Americans for his debate with the critical theorist Jürgen Habermas over the potential of social systems theory. Like his one-time mentor Talcott Parsons, Luhmann is an advocate of "grand theory," although neither in the sense of philosophical foundationalism nor in the sense of "meta-narrative" as often invoked in the critical works of post-modernist writers. Rather, Luhmann's work tracks closer to complexity theory broadly speaking, in that it aims to address any aspect of social life within a universal theoretical framework - of which the diversity of subjects he wrote about is an indication. Luhmann's theory is sometimes dismissed as highly abstract and complex, particularly within the Anglophone world, whereas his work has had a more lasting influence on scholars from German-speaking countries, Scandinavia and Italy.

Luhmann himself described his theory as "labyrinth-like" or "non-linear" and claimed he was deliberately keeping his prose enigmatic to prevent it from being understood "too quickly", which would only produce simplistic misunderstandings.

Reviews

[Azimet Avcu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sosyolojik ve belirli yönlerde zorlayıcı bir metindi. Bunun çeviriyle mi yoksa bilimsel yönüyle mi olduğunu bilmiyorum. Onun dışında aşka; toplumsal, ailesel ve eşler arası olarak yaklaşarak nasıl işlevleri olduğuna dair tespitler yapmış. Güzel bir deneyimdi.

[Carmen Flores · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely a different perspective of love, as a product of stereotypes, a code rather than something just spiritual or sublime. Like it!

[Eva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dieser schmale, rote Band kommt unschuldig wie ein Geschenkbuch daher – doch wer nach leicht verdaulicher, oder leicht verschenkbarer Lektüre sucht, ist hier falsch. Für ein Seminar Luhmanns war dieses Werk die theoretische Grundlage, das es aus seinem Nachlass in eine Veröffentlichung geschafft hat. Dass „Liebe. Eine Übung“ in den wilden Siebzigern entstanden ist, hat ungefähr so wenig mit dem Inhalt gemein, wie der einladend rote, Einfachheit vermittelnde Einband.

Mehr auf: http://www.1jahr52buecher.de/niklas-l...

[Jonalibros · Rating 2 out of 5]

Me parece interesante, pero creo que le faltaron paginas, como si fuera la intro a algo mas, no sentí que transmitiere ideas muy contundentes, creo que seria interesante la lectura que le podria hacer al amor considerando por ejemplo las RRSS o como han cambiado las formas de relacionarse.

[Felix W. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Soziale Systeme, die sich im Hinblick auf Liebe strukturieren, stellen sich selbst unter die Forderung kommunikativer Offenheit für nicht im voraus festgelegte Themen - also unter hohes Risiko.

[Momo · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,15 Sterne.

[David Braimah]

2020

[Neslihan Elagöz]

pek bişiy anlatmiyi