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outdated theoretical approaches of "old Europe"—that is, to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.
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