Love (ePub)

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 D what Luhmann calls
'media of communication' D 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.