By Niklas Luhmann

This primary quantity of Niklas Luhmann's two-part ultimate paintings was once in the beginning released in German in 1997. The end result of his thirty-year theoretical undertaking to reconceptualize sociology, it bargains a complete description of recent society on a scale now not tried given that Talcott Parsons. starting with an account of the fluidity of which means and the hence excessive improbability of profitable communique, Luhmann analyzes quite a number communicative media, together with language, writing, the printing press, and digital media in addition to "success media," reminiscent of cash, strength, fact, and love, all of which constitution this fluidity and make communique attainable. An research into the ways that social structures produce and reproduce themselves, the booklet asks what offers upward push to functionally differentiated social structures, how they evolve, and the way social hobbies, enterprises, and styles of interplay emerge. the appearance of the pc and its networks, which set off almost certainly far-reaching tactics of restructuring, obtain specific cognizance. A concluding bankruptcy at the semantics of recent society's self-description bids farewell to the superseded theoretical techniques of "old Europe," that's, to ontological, holistic, moral, and significant interpretations of society, and argues that thoughts similar to "the nation," "the subject," and "postmodernity" are greatly puffed up. of their stead, "society"—long thought of a suspicious time period by way of sociologists, one open to every kind of reification—is outlined in only operational phrases. it's the constantly doubtful solution to the query of what comes subsequent in all parts of communique.