ABSTRACT
Niklas Luhmann is professor of sociology at the University of Bielefeld. A prolific author, he is among many contemporary Europeans whose social thought has not yet garnered in the United States the attention it merits. The most thorough collection of his writing available in English remains The Differentiation of Society, translated by S. Holmes and C. Larmore (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). Luhmann is also among many contemporary Europeans whose social thought is persistently, perhaps even defiantly, elusive. At times, Luhmann can sound like the most dedicated of Durkheimian functionalists, the most dedicated contemporary theorist of the evolution of the modes of collective solidarity. At other times, perhaps more frequently, he can sound like the bleakest of Weberian diagnosticians of disintegration, the most irrepressible of the contemporary messengers of the modern death of "civil society," of "the lifeworld," of meaning itself. Another Luhmann lies somewhere in between such analytical and attitudinal extremes. That more moderate and more ambiguous Luhmann can acknowledge the substantive hollowness of Occidental modernity but still approve of the freedom of action and self-definition that what he calls the "functional differentiation" of modern spheres of value and action affords. The same Luhmann can recognize in Occidental modernity at once the symptoms and the source of widespread existential malaise but can also recognize in it the ideational chemistry of a possible existential relief. Such a Luhmann is the author of an analysis of the transition from the romantic "codification of intimacy" to a more current codification, from love as "amour passion" to love as "the validation of self-portrayal." Hence our excerpt from Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, translated by J. Gaines and D. L. Jones (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). Luhmann's analysis can be read simply as an "updating" of one facet of what Dumont and Macfarlane have already addressed. Luhmann's causal account of the "complex" that is treated in what follows would, however, be somewhat different than the account that either Dumont or Macfarlane could be expected to provide. Luhmann's methodology in what follows is for its part less functionalist than Weberian, and not especially Weberian, either. The functionalist, the social typologist, proves in what follows to be equally adept at the conceptual history that Koselleck, his colleague at Bielefeld, more exclusively pursues.
