This first volume of Niklas Luhmann's two-part final work was initially
published in German in 1997. The culmination of his thirty-year
theoretical project to reconceptualize sociology, it offers a
comprehensive description of modern society on a scale not attempted
since Talcott Parsons. Beginning with an account of the fluidity of
meaning and the accordingly high improbability of successful
communication, Luhmann analyzes a range of communicative media,
including language, writing, the printing press, and electronic media as
well as "success media," such as money, power, truth, and love, all of
which structure this fluidity and make communication possible. An
investigation into the ways in which social systems produce and
reproduce themselves, the book asks what gives rise to functionally
differentiated social systems, how they evolve, and how social
movements, organizations, and patterns of interaction emerge. The advent
of the computer and its networks, which trigger potentially far-reaching
processes of restructuring, receive particular attention. A concluding
chapter on the semantics of modern society's self-description bids
farewell to the outdated theoretical approaches of "old Europe," that
is, to ontological, holistic, ethical, and critical interpretations of
society, and argues that concepts such as "the nation," "the subject,"
and "postmodernity" are vastly overrated. In their stead,
"society"--long considered a suspicious term by sociologists, one open
to all kinds of reification--is defined in purely operational terms. It
is the always uncertain answer to the question of what comes next in all
areas of communication.
