Download or read book The Radical Luhmann written by Hans-Georg Moeller and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-15 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) was a German sociologist and system theorist who wrote on law, economics, politics, art, religion, ecology, mass media, and love. Luhmann advocated a radical constructivism and antihumanism, or "grand theory," to explain society within a universal theoretical framework. Nevertheless, despite being an iconoclast, Luhmann is viewed as a political conservative. Hans-Georg Moeller challenges this legacy, repositioning Luhmann as an explosive thinker critical of Western humanism. Moeller focuses on Luhmann's shift from philosophy to theory, which introduced new perspectives on the contemporary world. For centuries, the task of philosophy meant transforming contingency into necessity, in the sense that philosophy enabled an understanding of the necessity of everything that appeared contingent. Luhmann pursued the opposite—the transformation of necessity into contingency. Boldly breaking with the heritage of Western thought, Luhmann denied the central role of humans in social theory, particularly the possibility of autonomous agency. In this way, after Copernicus's cosmological, Darwin's biological, and Freud's psychological deconstructions of anthropocentrism, he added a sociological "fourth insult" to human vanity. A theoretical shift toward complex system-environment relations helped Luhmann "accidentally" solve one of Western philosophy's primary problems: mind-body dualism. By pulling communication into the mix, Luhmann rendered the Platonic dualist heritage obsolete. Moeller's clarity opens such formulations to general understanding and directly relates Luhmannian theory to contemporary social issues. He also captures for the first time a Luhmannian attitude toward society and life, defined through the cultivation of modesty, irony, and equanimity.

Download or read book Luhmann Explained written by Hans-Georg Moeller and published by Open Court. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are systems? What is society? What happens to human beings in a hypermodern world? This book is an introduction to Niklas Luhmann's social system theory which explains specific functions like economy and mass media from a cybernetic perspective. Integrating various schools of thought including sociology, philosophy and biology Luhmann Explained results in an overall analysis of "world society". Special attention is given to the present-day relevance of Luhmann's theory with respect to globalization, electronic mass media, ethics, and new forms of protest.

Download or read book Luhmann Observed written by Anders La Cour and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-06-27 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, for the first time, brings Niklas Luhmann's work into dialogue with other theoretical positions, including Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, gender studies, bioethics, translation, ANT, eco-theories and complexity theory.

Download or read book Luhmann Observed written by Anders La Cour and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-06-27 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, for the first time, brings Niklas Luhmann's work into dialogue with other theoretical positions, including Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, gender studies, bioethics, translation, ANT, eco-theories and complexity theory.

Download or read book Art as a Social System written by Niklas Luhmann and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the definitive analysis of art as a social and perceptual system by Germany's leading social theorist of the late 20th century. It combines three decades of research in the social sciences, phenomenology, evolutionary biology, cybernetics, and information theory with an intimate knowledge of art history, literature, aesthetics, and contemporary literary theory.

Download or read book Theories of Distinction written by Niklas Luhmann and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume formulate what is considered to be the preconditions for an adequate theory of modern society. The volume starts with an examination of the modern European philosophical and scientific tradition notably the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.

Download or read book Niklas Luhmann Law Justice Society written by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-09-10 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to consider German sociologist Niklas Luhmann's social theory in a critical legal context. His theory is introduced here both in terms of society at large and the legal system specifically, and the book reveals the aporetic structure of autopoiesis, aligning it with postmodern approaches to law. Readers will find it operates both as an introduction to the relevance of Luhmann's social theory for law, as well as a critical response to autopoiesis.

Download or read book Observations on Modernity written by Niklas Luhmann and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of five essays by Germany’s most prominent and influential social thinker both links Luhmann’s social theory to the question “What is modern about modernity?” and shows the origins and context of his theory. In the introductory essay, “Modernity in Contemporary Society,” Luhmann develops the thesis that the modern epistemological situation can be seen as the consequence of a radical change in social macrostructures that he calls “social differentiation,” thereby designating the juxtaposition of and interaction between a growing number of social subsystems without any hierarchical structure. “European Rationality” defines rationality as the capacity to see the difference between systems and their environment as a unity. Luhmann argues that, in a world characterized by contingency, rationality tends to become coextensive with imagination, a view that challenges their classical binary opposition and opens up the possibility of seeing modern rationality as a paradox. In the third essay, “Contingency as Modern Society’s Defining Attribute,” Luhmann develops a further and probably even more important paradox: that the generalization of contingency or cognitive uncertainty is precisely what provides stability within modern societies. In the process, he argues that medieval and early modern theology can be seen as a “preadaptive advance” through which Western thinking prepared itself for the modern epistemological situation. In “Describing the Future,” Luhmann claims that neither the traditional hope of learning from history nor the complementary hope of cognitively anticipating the future can be maintained, and that the classical concept of the future should be replaced by the notion of risk, defined as juxtaposing the expectation of realizing certain projects and the awareness that such projects might fail. The book concludes with “The Ecology of Ignorance,” in which Luhmann outlines prospective research areas “for sponsors who have yet to be identified.”

Download or read book Introduction to Systems Theory written by Niklas Luhmann and published by Polity. This book was released on 2012-12-10 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Niklas Luhmann ranks as one of the most important sociologists and social theorists of the twentieth century. Through his many books he developed a highly original form of systems theory that has been hugely influential in a wide variety of disciplines. In Introduction to Systems Theory, Luhmann explains the key ideas of general and sociological systems theory and supplies a wealth of examples to illustrate his approach. The book offers a wide range of concepts and theorems that can be applied to politics and the economy, religion and science, art and education, organization and the family. Moreover, Luhmann’s ideas address important contemporary issues in such diverse fields as cognitive science, ecology, and the study of social movements. This book provides all the necessary resources for readers to work through the foundations of systems theory – no other work by Luhmann is as clear and accessible as this. There is also much here that will be of great interest to more advanced scholars and practitioners in sociology and the social sciences.

Download or read book Social Systems written by Niklas Luhmann and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 692 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Germany's most prominent social thinker here sets out a contribution to sociology that aims to rework our understanding of meaning and communication. He links social theory to recent theoretical developments in scientific disciplines.

Download or read book A Systems Theory of Religion written by Niklas Luhmann and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-09 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Systems Theory of Religion, still unfinished at Niklas Luhmann's death in 1998, was first published in German two years later thanks to the editorial work of André Kieserling. One of Luhmann's most important projects, it exemplifies his later work while redefining the subject matter of the sociology of religion. Religion, for Luhmann, is one of the many functionally differentiated social systems that make up modern society. All such subsystems consist entirely of communications and all are "autopoietic," which is to say, self-organizing and self-generating. Here, Luhmann explains how religion provides a code for coping with the complexity, opacity, and uncontrollability of our world. Religion functions to make definite the indefinite, to reconcile the immanent and the transcendent. Synthesizing approaches as disparate as the philosophy of language, historical linguistics, deconstruction, and formal systems theory/cybernetics, A Systems Theory of Religion takes on important topics that range from religion's meaning and evolution to secularization, turning decades of sociological assumptions on their head. It provides us with a fresh vocabulary and a fresh philosophical and sociological approach to one of society's most fundamental phenomena.

Download or read book Genuine Pretending written by Hans-Georg Moeller and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genuine Pretending is an innovative and comprehensive new reading of the Zhuangzi that highlights the critical and therapeutic functions of satire and humor. Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio show how this Daoist classic, contrary to contemporary philosophical readings, distances itself from the pursuit of authenticity and subverts the dominant Confucianism of its time through satirical allegories and ironical reflections. With humor and parody, the Zhuangzi exposes the Confucian demand to commit to socially constructed norms as pretense and hypocrisy. The Confucian pursuit of sincerity establishes exemplary models that one is supposed to emulate. In contrast, the Zhuangzi parodies such venerated representations of wisdom and deconstructs the very notion of sagehood. Instead, it urges a playful, skillful, and unattached engagement with socially mandated duties and obligations. The Zhuangzi expounds the Daoist art of what Moeller and D’Ambrosio call “genuine pretending”: the paradoxical skill of not only surviving but thriving by enacting social roles without being tricked into submitting to them or letting them define one’s identity. A provocative rereading of a Chinese philosophical classic, Genuine Pretending also suggests the value of a Daoist outlook today as a way of seeking existential sanity in an age of mass media’s paradoxical quest for originality.

Download or read book Social Theory written by Hans Joas and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-09 with total page 1088 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social theory is the theoretical core of the social sciences, clearly distinguishable from political theory and cultural analysis. This book offers a unique overview of the development of social theory from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the present day. Spanning the literature in English, French and German, it provides an excellent background to the most important social theorists and theories in contemporary sociological thought, with crisp summaries of the main books, arguments and controversies. It also deals with newly emerging schools from rational choice to symbolic interactionism, with new ambitious approaches (Habermas, Luhmann, Giddens, Bourdieu), structuralism and antistructuralism, critical revisions of modernization theory, feminism and neopragmatism. Written by two of the world's leading sociologists and based on their extensive academic teaching, this unrivalled work is ideal both for students in the social sciences and humanities and for anyone interested in contemporary theoretical debates.

Download or read book Theory of Society Volume 1 written by Niklas Luhmann and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-10 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Love written by Niklas Luhmann and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Love seems like the most personal experience, one that touches each of us in a unique way that is more personal than social, and hence it is not surprising that it has been largely neglected by sociologists and social theorists. While it has long been a central preoccupation of writers and novelists, love has rarely attracted anything more than the most cursory attention of social scientists. This short text, originally written in 1969 by the eminent German social theorist Niklas Luhmann, goes a long way to redressing this neglect. Rather than seeing love as a unique and ineffable personal experience, Luhmann treats love as a solution to a problem that depends on a wider range of social structures and forms. Human beings are faced with a world of enormous complexity and they have to find ways to order and make sense of this world. In other words, they need certain facilities for action Ð what Luhmann calls ‘media of communication’ Ð that enable them to select from a host of alternatives in ways that will be understood as meaningful by others. Love is one of these media; truth, power, money and art are others. With the development of modern societies, greater demands are made on this medium of love, altering the relationship between love and sexuality and giving rise to the distinctive difficulties we associate with love today. This short text by one of the most brilliant social theorists of the 20th century will be of great interest to students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities. It is a concise and pithy statement of what is still the only sociological theory of love we have.

Download or read book Niklas Luhmann written by Claudio Baraldi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-21 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an insight into the ideas of one of the world’s greatest sociologists: Niklas Luhmann. It explains, in clear and concise language, the basic concepts of Social Systems Theory and their application to the specific case of the Education System, which was considered by Luhmann as a primary subsystem of modern society. It illustrates the complex and sophisticated thinking that characterises Luhmann’s work and explains that Luhmann’s theory has given an important and original contribution to the study of education from a sociological point of view. His contribution has some resonance in recent social constructionist and relational approaches to education, as well as in studies of educational interaction. In addition, research methodologies, in particular mixed methods strategies, draw heavily on epistemological issues. The book finally argues that educationists can appreciate the extent of Luhmann’s contribution to the field of education, although their perspective cannot be fully harmonised with, nor reduced to, the sociological one. This divergence of perspectives can stimulate pedagogy to call into question its conceptual framework as well its approach to social situations in the classroom.

Download or read book Niklas Luhmann s Theory of Politics and Law written by M. King and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-09-16 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Niklas Luhmann's social theory stands in direct opposition to the dominant 'anthropocentric' traditions of legal and political analysis. King and Thornhill now offer the first comprehensive, critical examination of Luhmann's highly original theory of the operations of the legal and political systems. They describe how from the perspective of his 'sociological enlightenment' Luhmann continually calls to account the certainties, the ambitions and rational foundations of The Enlightenment and the idealized versions of law and politics which they have produced.