Love as Passion

Download or read book Love as Passion written by Niklas Luhmann and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-12-10 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this important book Niklas Luhmann - one of the leading socialthinkers of the late 20th century - analyses the emergence of‘love' as the basis of personal relationships in modernsocieties. He argues that, while family systems remained intact inthe transition from traditional to modern societies, a semanticsfor love developed to accommodate extra-marital relationships; thissemantics was then transferred back into marriage and eventuallytransformed marriage itself. Drawing on a diverse range ofhistorical and literary sources, Luhmann retraces the emergence andevolution of the special semantics of passionate love that has cometo form the basis of modern forms of intimacy and personalrelationships. This classic book by Luhmann has been widely recognized as awork of major importance. It is an outstanding contribution tosocial theory and it provides an original and illuminatingperspective on the nature of modern marriage and sexuality.