This second volume of Niklas Luhmann's two-part final work was first
published in German in 1997. The culmination of his thirty-year
theoretical project to reconceptualize sociology, it offers a
comprehensive description of modern society. 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. 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 triggered potentially far-reaching
processes of restructuring, receives 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farewell to the outdated theoretical approaches of "old Europe"--that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.
