Niklas Luhmann on Love and Intimacy: Position, Problems and Perspectives

The goal of this dissertation is to investigate the contribution of Niklas Luhmann to the sociology of love and intimacy. Luhmann's systems theory carries the ambition to analyse all domains of social life using one and the same conceptual apparatus. His specific contributions to the topic, however, cover rather different contexts and phases in the development of his general social theory. This causes gaps that prove to be a test for the internal consistency of both his theory of intimacy and his theory of social systems (and the theory of society in particular). These gaps appear more pronounced in the confrontation with the analyses made by other sociological theorists (e.g. Durkheim, Weber and Simmel) on the subject. Through theoretical comparison, Luhmann's position within this broader tradition of research is specified, and its internal challenges are highlighted. Challenges are situated at three levels in particular. Firstly, the question can be asked of how a systems theory of personal and intimate relationships may look like, given the major paradigmatic shift from people (and relationships between people) to communications as the basic elements of social systems. A second challenge consists in clarifying the conceptual relation between love as a symbolically generalized medium of communication on the one hand, and the different types of intimate systems it seems to facilitate on the other hand (love systems, family systems, friendship systems). Thirdly, an answer is needed to the question of how exactly love as a medium is involved in the reproduction of the Intimate system. It does not dispose of some of the structural properties (code, programme) which allow other media to be succesful in the context of the autopoiesis of other modern function systems (money for the economic system, power for the political system, truth for the system of science). For each of these challenges, internal theoretical possibilities are explored, both with regard to the further development of the general theory of social systems and with regard to optimizing the relevance of the theory for the study of intimacy.status: accepte