Synopses & Reviews
Niklas Luhmann is one of the greatest of contemporary social theorists, and his ultimate aim is to develop a conceptual vocabulary supple enough to capture what he sees as the unprecedented structural characteristics of society since the eighteenth century. Ours is a society in which individuals can determine their own sense of self and function rather than have that predetermined by the strict hierarchy of former times, and a key element in the modern sense of individuality is our concept of love, marriage, and lasting personal relationships. This book takes us back to when passionate love took place exclusively outside of marriage, and Luhmann shows by lively references to social customs and literature how a language and code of behavior were developed so that notions of love and intimacy could be made the essential components of married life. This intimacy and privacy made possible by a social arrangement in which home is where the heart is provides the basis for a society of individuals--the foundation for the structure of modern life. Love is now declared to be unfathomable and personal, yet we love and suffer--as Luhmann shows--according to cultural imperatives.
People working in a variety of fields should find this book of major interest. Social scientists will be intrigued by Luhmann's original and provocative insights into the nature of modern marriage and sexuality, and by the presentation of his theories in concrete, historical detail. His work should also be capital for humanists, since Luhmann's concern throughout is to develop a semantics for passionate love by means of extensive references to literary texts of the modern period. In showing our moral life in the process of revising itself, he thereby sheds much light on the development of drama and the novel in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Synopsis
This book takes us back to when passionate love took place exclusively outside of marriage, and Luhmann shows by lively references to social customs and literature how a language and code of behavior were developed so that notions of love and intimacy could be made the essential components of married life. This intimacy and privacy made possible by a social arrangement in which home is where the heart is provides the basis for a society of individuals--the foundation for the structure of modern life. Love is now declared to be unfathomable and personal, yet we love and suffer--as Luhmann shows--according to cultural imperatives.
Table of Contents
Preface to the English Edition
Introduction
1. Society and Individual
Personal and Impersonal Relationships
2. Love as a Generalized Symbolic Medium of Communication
3. The Evolution of Communicative Capacities
4. The Evolution of the Semantics of Love
5. Freedom to Love
From the Ideal to the Paradox
6. The Rhetoric of Excess and the Experience of Instability
7. From Galantry to Friendship
8. Plaisir and Amour
The Primary Difference
9. Love versus Reason
10. En Route to Individualization
A State of Ferment in the Eighteenth Century
11. The Incorporation of Sexuality
12. The Discovery of Incommunicability
13. Romantic Love
14. Love and Marriage
The Ideology of Reproduction
15. What Now?
Problems and Alternatives
16. Love as a System of Interpenetration
Notes
Index