"I believe that Luhmann is the only true genius in the social sciences alive today. By this, I mean that not only is he smart, extremely productive, and amazingly erudite, though all this is true enough, but also that he has, in the course of an improbable career, elaborated a theory of the social that completely reinvents sociology and destroys its most cherished dogmas." So wrote Stephen Fuchs in his "Contemporary Sociology" review of Luhmann's major theoretical work, "Social Systems" (Stanford, 1995). In this volume, Luhmann analyzes the evolution of love in Western Europe from the seventeenth century to the present.
"Reviews"
"Luhmann's unique, monumental, theory-building effort is best described as a consistent attempt to deploy the tools and the inspirations of three strategies: modern information theory, structuralism, and evolutionary theory. . . . Perhaps nothing conveys more poignantly Luhmann's unusual blend of scientific precision with artistic sensibility than his replacement of Parson's 'reciprocity of perspective' with his own 'interpersonal interpenetration.' The first is cool, calculating, cognitive, and dispassionate; the second connotes a richness of relationship that leaves no human faculty unmoved. . . . Luhmann's work is important because, arguably, it comes closer than all other sociological strategies to restoring the lost link between academically reputable social theorizing and the subjective experience of life." "--American Journal of Sociology"
"There is a dearth of analytical writing about the emotions and sentiments that seem to motivate most human action, at least in everyday discussion, although some researchers are making some efforts to remedy this situation. Luhmann's "Love as Passion" is an outstanding contribution to this emerging trend . . . full of novel information and fascinating ideas." "--Contemporary Sociology"

The essays in this book - on Heinrich von Kleist, Joseph Eichendorff, Georg Buchner and Heinrich Heine, and on the novelists Gottfried Keller, Wilhelm Raabe and Theodor Fontane - were mostly written between 1936 and 1944, when Lukacs was in exile in Moscow. After the literary polemics of the earlier thirties, Lukacs increasingly turned to the literature he knew and loved best - the German classics and 19th century realists. His defence of realism against the crude simplicities of "socialist realism" and against all didactic literature, is implicit and occasionally explicit, throughout these studies. Lukacs appears in this volume as a literary historian, ready to make illuminating comparisons between Kleist and Schiller, Buchner and Shakespeare, Heine and Balzac, Keller and Tolstoy, Raabe and Dickens, or Fontane and Thackeray. He appears as a critic whose discussions and assessments of indivudual works, whether plays, novels, short stories or poems, are enlivened by the exploration of the relations betwen historical period, style and aesthetic form, which runs through all his literary work.

Siegfried Kracauer has been misunderstood as a naive realist, appreciated as an astute critic of early German film, and noticed as the interesting exile who exchanged letters with Erwin Panofsky. But he is most widely thought of as the odd uncle of famed Frankfurt School critical theorists Jurgen Habermas, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Max Horkheimer. Recently, however, scholars have rediscovered in Kracauer's writings a philosopher, sociologist, and film theorist important beyond his associations--and perhaps one of the most significant cultural critics of the twentieth century. Gertrud Koch advances this Kracauer renaissance with the first-ever critical assessment of his entire body of work.

Koch's analysis, which is concise without sacrificing thoroughness or sophistication, covers both Kracauer's best-known publications (e.g., From Caligari to Hitler, in which he gleans the roots of National Socialism in the films of the Weimar Republic) and previously underexamined texts, including two newly discovered autobiographical novels. Because Kracauer's wide-ranging works emerge from no rigidly unified approach, instead always remaining open to unusual and highly individual perspectives, Koch resists the temptation to force generalization. She does, however, identify recurring tropes in Kracauer's lifetime effort to perceive the basic posture and composition of particular cultures through their visual surfaces. Koch also finds in Kracauer a surprisingly contemporary cultural commentator, whose ideas speak directly to current discussions on film, urban modernity, feminism, cultural representation, violence, and other themes.

This book was long-awaited in Germany, as well as widely and well reviewed. Now translated into English for the first time, it will fuel already growing interest in the United States, where Kracauer lived and wrote from 1941 until his death in 1966. It will attract the attention of students and scholars working in Film Studies, German Studies, Comparative Literature, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Philosophy, and History."