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.
Niklas Luhmann and Jürgen Habermas are the two leading social thinkers in Germany today. Habermas's writings have come to be known earlier in the English-speaking world than those of Luhmann, but this imbalance is now rapidly being redressed. Love as Passion is one of Luhmann's most important and original books. It draws upon the general ideas which the author has established in his other books, but applies them in a very novel context--to try to understand the development of 'love' as a medium of the formation of personal relationships in modern societies. Mediaeval notions of love connected it with passion, a transport of delight; modern romantic love is a more banal, secular, yet pervasive ideal of 'togetherness' as a durable relation. The publication of this book in English will be an event of considerable significance. It will consolidate Luhmann's reputation in the English-speaking world, and it will make a very important contribution to social theory in general and to debates about marriage and sexuality in particular.--Anthony Giddens
