Love: A Sketch

Love seems like the most personal experience, one that touches eachof us in a unique way that is more personal than social, and henceit is not surprising that it has been largely neglected bysociologists and social theorists. While it has long been a centralpreoccupation of writers and novelists, love has rarely attractedanything more than the most cursory attention of social scientists.

This short text, originally written in 1969 by the eminent Germansocial theorist Niklas Luhmann, goes a long way to redressing thisneglect. Rather than seeing love as a unique and ineffable personalexperience, Luhmann treats love as a solution to a problem thatdepends on a wider range of social structures and forms. Humanbeings are faced with a world of enormous complexity and they haveto find ways to order and make sense of this world. In other words, they need certain facilities for action what Luhmann calls'media of communication' that enable them toselect from a host of alternatives in ways that will be understoodas 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 therelationship between love and sexuality and giving rise to thedistinctive difficulties we associate with love today.

This short text by one of the most brilliant social theorists ofthe 20th century will be of great interest to students and scholarsthroughout the social sciences and humanities. It is a concise andpithy statement of what is still the only sociological theory oflove we have.