André Kieserling – författare

Love seems like the most personal experience, one that touches each of us in a unique way that is more personal than social, and hence it is not surprising that it has been largely neglected by sociologists and social theorists. While it has long been a central preoccupation of writers and novelists, love has rarely attracted anything more than the most cursory attention of social scientists. This short text, originally written in 1969 by the eminent German social theorist Niklas Luhmann, goes a long way to redressing this neglect. Rather than seeing love as a unique and ineffable personal experience, Luhmann treats love as a solution to a problem that depends on a wider range of social structures and forms. Human beings are faced with a world of enormous complexity and they have to find ways to order and make sense of this world. In other words, they need certain facilities for action Ð what Luhmann calls ‘media of communication’ Ð that enable them to select from a host of alternatives in ways that will be understood as 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 the relationship between love and sexuality and giving rise to the distinctive difficulties we associate with love today. This short text by one of the most brilliant social theorists of the 20th century will be of great interest to students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities. It is a concise and pithy statement of what is still the only sociological theory of love we have.

Love seems like the most personal experience, one that touches each of us in a unique way that is more personal than social, and hence it is not surprising that it has been largely neglected by sociologists and social theorists. While it has long been a central preoccupation of writers and novelists, love has rarely attracted anything more than the most cursory attention of social scientists. This short text, originally written in 1969 by the eminent German social theorist Niklas Luhmann, goes a long way to redressing this neglect. Rather than seeing love as a unique and ineffable personal experience, Luhmann treats love as a solution to a problem that depends on a wider range of social structures and forms. Human beings are faced with a world of enormous complexity and they have to find ways to order and make sense of this world. In other words, they need certain facilities for action Ð what Luhmann calls ‘media of communication’ Ð that enable them to select from a host of alternatives in ways that will be understood as 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 the relationship between love and sexuality and giving rise to the distinctive difficulties we associate with love today. This short text by one of the most brilliant social theorists of the 20th century will be of great interest to students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities. It is a concise and pithy statement of what is still the only sociological theory of love we have.

A Systems Theory of Religion, still unfinished at Niklas Luhmann's death in 1998, was first published in German two years later thanks to the editorial work of André Kieserling. One of Luhmann's most important projects, it exemplifies his later work while redefining the subject matter of the sociology of religion. Religion, for Luhmann, is one of the many functionally differentiated social systems that make up modern society. All such subsystems consist entirely of communications and all are "autopoietic," which is to say, self-organizing and self-generating. Here, Luhmann explains how religion provides a code for coping with the complexity, opacity, and uncontrollability of our world. Religion functions to make definite the indefinite, to reconcile the immanent and the transcendent.Synthesizing approaches as disparate as the philosophy of language, historical linguistics, deconstruction, and formal systems theory/cybernetics, A Systems Theory of Religion takes on important topics that range from religion's meaning and evolution to secularization, turning decades of sociological assumptions on their head. It provides us with a fresh vocabulary and a fresh philosophical and sociological approach to one of society's most fundamental phenomena.

A Systems Theory of Religion, still unfinished at Niklas Luhmann's death in 1998, was first published in German two years later thanks to the editorial work of André Kieserling. One of Luhmann's most important projects, it exemplifies his later work while redefining the subject matter of the sociology of religion. Religion, for Luhmann, is one of the many functionally differentiated social systems that make up modern society. All such subsystems consist entirely of communications and all are "autopoietic," which is to say, self-organizing and self-generating. Here, Luhmann explains how religion provides a code for coping with the complexity, opacity, and uncontrollability of our world. Religion functions to make definite the indefinite, to reconcile the immanent and the transcendent.Synthesizing approaches as disparate as the philosophy of language, historical linguistics, deconstruction, and formal systems theory/cybernetics, A Systems Theory of Religion takes on important topics that range from religion's meaning and evolution to secularization, turning decades of sociological assumptions on their head. It provides us with a fresh vocabulary and a fresh philosophical and sociological approach to one of society's most fundamental phenomena.

A Systems Theory of Religion, still unfinished at Niklas Luhmann's death in 1998, was first published in German two years later thanks to the editorial work of André Kieserling. One of Luhmann's most important projects, it exemplifies his later work while redefining the subject matter of the sociology of religion. Religion, for Luhmann, is one of the many functionally differentiated social systems that make up modern society. All such subsystems consist entirely of communications and all are "autopoietic," which is to say, self-organizing and self-generating. Here, Luhmann explains how religion provides a code for coping with the complexity, opacity, and uncontrollability of our world. Religion functions to make definite the indefinite, to reconcile the immanent and the transcendent.Synthesizing approaches as disparate as the philosophy of language, historical linguistics, deconstruction, and formal systems theory/cybernetics, A Systems Theory of Religion takes on important topics that range from religion's meaning and evolution to secularization, turning decades of sociological assumptions on their head. It provides us with a fresh vocabulary and a fresh philosophical and sociological approach to one of society's most fundamental phenomena.

Kaum ein Tag vergeht, an dem nicht in Talkshows und Zeitungen gefragt wird, was unsere Gesellschaft – noch – zusammenhält. Ob Arm gegen Reich, Ost gegen West, Land gegen Stadt, Jung gegen Alt oder der anhaltende Streit über Identitäts-, Glaubens- oder Genderfragen: Die gesellschaftliche Spaltung erscheint als ein Signum unserer Zeit.Jürgen Kaube und André Kieserling gehen dieser Diagnose auf den Grund: Schrumpft die Mittelschicht wirklich, und wie stellt man überhaupt fest, wer zu ihr gehört? Wenn das islamisch dominierte Viertel in Berlin-Neukölln eine Parallelgesellschaft ist, muss dann nicht auch das Villenviertel im Grunewald so bezeichnet werden? Waren frühere Gesellschaften tatsächlich stärker integriert, oder herrschten dort nur andere Konflikte und Ungerechtigkeiten? Die Gesellschaft, so kann man sagen, besteht wesentlich aus Ungleichheiten; gefährlich aber wird es, wenn Ungleichheit zu immer stärkerer Polarisierung, zu einem permanenten Gegeneinander führt. Was also ist nur mediales Gerede, und wo drohen echte Zerreißproben?Jürgen Kaube und André Kieserling sorgen in einer unübersichtlichen Lage für Orientierung – und liefern nichts weniger als eine schlüssige Deutung unserer gesellschaftlichen Gegenwart.

Die Beiträge dieses Bandes sind in der einen oder anderen Weise von zwei Begriffen aus dem Arsenal der soziologischen Systemtheorie Niklas Luhmanns und speziell seiner Organisationssoziologie inspiriert: dem Begriff der Grenzstelle und dem Begriff des Grenzsystems.

Die Beiträge dieses Bandes sind in der einen oder anderen Weise von zwei Begriffen aus dem Arsenal der soziologischen Systemtheorie Niklas Luhmanns und speziell seiner Organisationssoziologie inspiriert: dem Begriff der Grenzstelle und dem Begriff des Grenzsystems. Mit dem Begriff der Grenzstelle werden Abgesandte von Organisationen bezeichnet, die im Dienste von deren Zwecken und Bestandsinteressen auf eine relevante Gruppe von Nichtmitgliedern einwirken sollen, also etwa als Verkäufer auf Kunden oder als Pressesprecher auf Journalisten, und Grenzsysteme sind die aus diesem Anlass gebildeten Interaktionen, also etwa das Verkaufsgespräch oder die Pressekonferenz. Die Aufsätze behandeln unter anderem die Grenzstellen des Gesprächsleiters in der polizeilichen Vernehmung, des Diplomaten, des Verkäufers in seiner Nebenrolle als Aggressionsobjekt wütender Kunden, und zu den behandelten Grenzsystemen gehören Interaktionen wie Wohnungsbesichtigung und Vernehmung, Rettungseinsatz und Gerichtsverfahren.

Ein Interview von Armin Nassehi und André Kieserling über die Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne. Die zwei Soziologen diskutieren über die Definition von Lüge, zitieren bekannte Philosophen wie Augustinus, Nietzsche und Kant, gehen der semantischen Karriere des Lügenbegriffs auf den Grund und sprechen darüber, welche Funktion die Lüge haben kann.