In this volume, Niklas Luhmann, the leading exponent of systems theory, explores its implications for our understanding of law. The volume provides a rigorous application to law of a theory that offers profound insights into the relationships between law and other aspects of contemporary society, including politics, the economy, the media, education, and religion.

"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...

This is the definitive analysis of art as a social and perceptual system by Germany's leading social theorist of the late twentieth century. It not only represents an important intellectual step in discussions of art--in its rigor and in its having refreshingly set itself the task of creating a set of distinctions for determining what counts as art that could be valid for those creating as well as those receiving art works--but it also represents an important advance in systems theory. Returning to the eighteenth-century notion of aesthetics as pertaining to the -knowledge of the senses, -...

In The Reality of the Mass Media, Luhmann extends his theory of social systems--applied in his earlier works to the economy, the political system, art, religion, the sciences, and law--to an examination of the role of mass media in the construction of social reality. Luhmann argues that the system of mass media is a set of recursive, self-referential programs of communication, whose functions are not determined by the external values of truthfulness, objectivity, or knowledge, nor by specific social interests or political directives. Rather, he contends that the system of mass media is...

The essays in this volume by Germany's leading social theorist of the late twentieth century formulate what he considered to be the preconditions for an adequate theory of modern society. The first two essays deal with the modern European philosophical and scientific tradition, notably the ogy of Edmund Husserl. The next four essays concern the crucial notion of observation as defined by Luhmann. They examine the history of paradox as a logical problem and as a historically conditioned feature of rhetoric; deconstruct the thinking of Jacques Derrida, especially his language-centered...

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...

Der Nachlass des 1998 verstorbenen Soziologen und Systemtheoretikers Niklas Luhmann enthielt eine Reihe nahezu fertiggestellter Buchmanuskripte, darunter auch Das "Erziehungssystem der Gesellschaft". Es gehört in die viel beachtete Reihe von Abhandlungen, die sich unterschiedlichen Bereichen der Gesellschaft zuwenden, wie Wissenschaft, Recht, Kunst, Wirtschaft und - zuletzt erschienen - Religion und Politik. Mit "Das Erziehungssystem der Gesellschaft" liegt dieser zentrale Komplex von Luhmanns Werk nun vollständig vor. Gleichzeitig stellt diese Monographie eine Erweiterung und teilweise...