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.
