Book Description
How do we use our mental images of the present to reconstruct
our past? Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) addressed this
question for the first time in his work on collective memory,
which established him as a major figure in the history of
sociology. This volume, the first comprehensive English-
language translation of Halbwach's writings on the social
construction of memory, fills a major gap in the literature
on the sociology of knowledge.
Halbwachs' primary thesis is that human memory can only
function within a collective context. Collective memory,
Halbwachs asserts, is always selective; various groups of
people have different collective memories, which in turn give
rise to different modes of behavior. Halbwachs shows, for
example, how pilgrims to the Holy Land over the centuries
evoked very different images of the events of Jesus' life;
how wealthy old families in France have a memory of the past
that diverges sharply from that of the nouveaux riches; and
how working class constructions of reality differ from those
of their middle-class counterparts.
With a detailed introduction by Lewis A. Coser, this
translation will be an indispensable source for new research
in historical sociology and cultural memory.
Lewis A. Coser is Distinguished Professor of Sociology
Emeritus at the State University of New York and Adjunct
Professor of Sociology at Boston College.
The Heritage of Sociology series
Customer Reviews:
Collective Memory.......2006-03-17
Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Translated and edited by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Memory reconstructs images from the past in the context of our social present. Maurice Halbwachs' important work on the formation of collective memory insists that any recalled events fundamentally exist as a function of group endeavour. These memories, and the different behaviours they sustain, rise from a selective process shaped by associations with classes, religions, and families. These social frameworks, he contends, provide the means to express memory through shared language and discourse. As such, all reconstructed pasts must draw on common conventions of beliefs and meanings. This stability accounts for the persistent strength of traditions, but also for changes to society that must first forge connections to past ways of understanding, in order to succeed.
Beginning with family, Halbwachs examines the social contexts that determine collective memory. Although the wider meaning of family structure comes from society in general, the individual experiences within a family play a crucial role in forming memories through association. Traditions, legends, and proverbs, as well as emotional connections to places, allow the family unit to penetrate into the meanings the individual constructs in all other areas of life. The narrative and logic of family life, derived and adapted from societal norms, thus influence the forms that memory can take. Looking at religion, Halbwachs contends that formal doctrine represents a collective memory composed of rites and beliefs. He finds in religions a historical narrative of major historical events, manifested in more or less symbolic forms. Focusing on the Catholic Church, he demonstrates how a collective memory can adapt to new interpretations while retaining great internal stability and persistence of vision. He then turns to social classes, which he sees as something akin to Weberian status groups. He examines the workings of class traditions and legitimacy in the transitions between old and nouveau riche elites, arguing that while function defines class groups, meanings and assigned qualities come from the wider social relationships in which they participate. As societal hierarchies experience change, he argues, presentist justifications draw from traditions to construct a new collective memory where the new structure seems stable and acceptable.
Evocative and thought provoking, Halbwachs' work offers an interesting approach to memory and its social construction. Similar to Hayden White's later argument of meta-narrative, he argues strongly, yet without much direct evidence, for the ubiquitous presence of societal pressures on individual creativity and personal spaces. Pierre Nora's work on memory in public history, and Eric Hobsbawm's on invention of traditions, further suggests the great influence of and legacy of Halbwachs. Nevertheless, several weak points stand out especially from the historian's perspective. In generalizing about religions, the annaliste-influenced author relies solely on evidence from a French author more conversant in Indo-Chinese Theravada traditions than in Chinese Mahayana Buddhism, and his argument then fails in wider application. Similarly, other historical cases lack specific evidence or detail and show a pronounced Eurocentric bias. For example, feudalism appears as the essential institution from which social classes emerge, yet this does not then explain how classes formed in the non-European world that did not experience the feudal structure. Yet criticizing a sociologist for writing bad history only goes so far, as on the whole he succeeds in presenting a useful model for understanding memories changing over time.
From a philosophical and psychological approach, Halbwachs offers scholars a persuasive argument on the collective nature of memory and the recollection of the past as shaped by the present. Weak on history, he nonetheless provides important social considerations for investigating cultural memory. Halbwachs emphasizes the familial, class, and religious roots of individual knowledge of the past, and successfully explains how we select the images associated with historical events.
Just a word of advice for researchers.......2005-04-21
I have just received the book and the text seems to be great. I only think it should be worth advising readers that the first four chapters of "The social frameworks of memory" are abridged versions of the original French book (THey are considered - and probably they are indeed - "largely preparatory for what is to come in the rest of the book. Only relatively brief central pages if these chapters have been translated here" (p. 37). Not that this poses a problem for the comprehension of Halbwachs - since I trust the publishers, the translator and the editor -, I only think it might be useful information.
The foundation of the sociology of memory.......2001-02-15
Maurice Halbwachs, french sociologist and student of Durkheim, died in Nazi camps in 1945. His work can be considered as the foundation of the sociology of memory, and is rediscovered today in Europe and in the US. An essential reading for any scholar interested in the relationship between history, memory, and the past.
Book Description
The recent dedication of the World War II memorial and the sixtieth-anniversary commemoration of D-Day remind us of the hold that World War II still has over America's sense of itself. But the selective process of memory has radically shaped our picture of the conflict. Why else, for instance, was a 1995 Smithsonian exhibition on Hiroshima that was to include photographs of the first atomic bomb victims, along with their testimonials, considered so controversial? And why do we so readily remember the civilian bombings of Britain but not those of Dresden, Hamburg, and Tokyo?
Marianna Torgovnick argues that we have lived, since the end of World War II, under the power of a war complex—a set of repressed ideas and impulses that stems from our unresolved attitudes toward the technological acceleration of mass death. This complex has led to gaps and hesitations in public discourse about atrocities committed during the war itself. And it remains an enduring wartime consciousness, one most recently animated on September 11.
Showing how different events from World War II became prominent in American cultural memory while others went forgotten or remain hidden in plain sight, The War Complex moves deftly from war films and historical works to television specials and popular magazines to define the image and influence of World War II in our time. Torgovnick also explores the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the emotional legacy of the Holocaust, and the treatment of World War II's missing history by writers such as W. G. Sebald to reveal the unease we feel at our dependence on those who hold the power of total war. Thinking anew, then, about how we account for war to each other and ourselves, Torgovnick ultimately, and movingly, shows how these anxieties and fears have prepared us to think about September 11 and our current war in Iraq.
Customer Reviews:
elegant and original.......2005-10-05
THE WAR COMPLEX is a wonderful book--disturbing and illuminating, historicallly rich and politically timely. It begins with a startling and sweeping observation: the history of the twentieth century is a history of almost continuous war; "modernity" is virtually always "wartime"; and the accelerated violence of World War II, directed against military and civilian populations alike, is the centerpiece of our shared past. To understand the modern mind, then, we have to understand how it has been transformed by exposure to mass killing. We have to remember not only the storming of beaches and the liberation of capitals, but also the concentration camps, the firebombing of homes, the eradication of whole cities by atomic bombs.
One problem, of course, is that we remember World War II too much. It is invoked, for instance, as a justification for more war, as when politicians and media depicted 9/11 as a repetition of Pearl Harbor--at attack on America that demanded an old-fashioned, full-scale military response. Violence, experienced and remembered, begets violence. This is a symptom of what Torgovnick cals "wartime consciousness": overexposed to mass death, we organize the world according to antagonisms. It's always "us against them."
Torgovnick's daring and imaginative undertaking, in THE WAR COMPLEX, is to try to think her way through and out of "wartime consciousness." Some hawks and dullards will complain that the book is too personal, too meditative, that it turns to the imagination and the study of art when war is a matter of politics, when mass death is a matter of statistics. They will miss the point. When wartime is all the time, when our societies and our minds are built to be combat-ready, moving beyond these dominant patterns requires some unorthodox thinking. Therefore THE WAR COMPLEX considers, for example, "the kind of imaginative projections that novels can provide, their opening up of a space based on social realities, but not determined by them." And therefore, in her unconventional book--moving elegantly among the spheres of history and psychology, politics and the arts--Torgovnick adopts a personal, sometimes even confessional mode of writing. It's the opposite of self-indulgence. It's an effort to discover some grounds of "identification," some pattern of human connection beyond wartime.
Shameful.......2005-08-18
Unfortunately, this "book" is not a very enlightening read !!. Fortunately, I didn't buy the book, it was checked out of our university library. I found it difficult finishing this drivel. On too many occasions Torgovnick states her unsound opinion as absolute fact. She proceeds to mistakenly develop her point of view on the basis of that egregious erroneous opinion . (Big error there!!) Her conclusions usually are drawn on nefarious and/or abnormal rational that border on the absurd. Very close to being out of touch with reality!! All in all, it appears the dictum "publish or parish" got the upper hand for this professor
The Holocaust of War Complex?.......2005-08-02
The book was interesting as a study in writing style. The title of the book does not cover the military industrial establishment or tease out how real WWII combat vets feel about our current politico-military juggernaut. While reading I couldn't help but think this is an English Prof showing me how conscious she is of her own consciousness. Unfortunately the book is a big digresson about the holocaust and Adolf Eichman's role as person who was a functionary and organized the logistics of killing millions Jews. R.J. Lifton has already clearly described bureaucratic distancing from killing in modern techno-war. So what's new? The book does not contain any information about the current military industrial establishment and its influence on U.S, politics and the relationship to the war in Iraq if there is one. Go to a book store and read the brief conclusion.
Relevant book for our times.......2005-06-04
World War II holds a unique place of privilege in the American, and Allied, historical imagination. It was the war of the greatest generation; the uncontroversial war, the just war; the last war when good and evil were clearly delineated in the minds of Americans. World War II is the shorthand reference used to evoke moral high ground and uncomplicated patriotism.
History is written by the victors, as the adage goes, with all that implies of selectivity of memory. Which history, and which war, one chooses to invoke, is a matter of politics. For instance, before the American invasion of Iraq in 2002, both opponents and proponents resorted to analogies to earlier conflicts to serve their argument. For opponents, the specter of the quagmire of Vietnam was raised, with its searing images of civilian suffering. For proponents, WWII was relentlessly presented as the glorious model, with Pearl Harbor and Munich the ready references.
But the legacy of World War II may not be as uncomplicated or as controversial as we choose to remember it in America and much of Western Europe. In "The War Complex", Duke professor Marianna Torgovnick explores the images of D-Day, the media spectacle of the Eichmann trial, the emotional legacy of the Holocaust, Hiroshima and the A-bomb, to discover how the selective process of memory still shapes our picture of the conflict and of subsequent conflicts, including the response to September 11th.
Torgovnik examines the narratives of D-Day, and how they played into the image that Americans want to see of themselves: "good versus evil, American multiculturalism (within limits, since racial segregation was still in place) versus the homogenous racial Ûbermensch or `Jap,' citizen soldiers fighting a necessary war against the forces of totalitarianism, us versus them." She argues that our carefully constructed cultural memory of war, and the cumulative state of mind called wartime consciousness, persisted well beyond the end of hostilities right through the Cold War and remained ready to be reanimated after September 11.
"The war on terrorism...promises an indefinite prolongation of wartime states of mind. That prolongation suggests one strong reason why you should read this book. `The War Complex' probes the cost of sustained wartime consciousness on a society and a culture, which are more than military." That is only one argument for the relevance and timeliness of this insightful, wide-ranging study that balances solid scholarship with lively, accessible writing. Torgovnik brilliantly combines history, psychology of war, memoir, and imaginative literature, to expose the construction of the war complex and to imagine a way out based on an ethics of identification
Book Description
This is a masterful volume on remembrance and war in the twentieth century. Jay Winter locates the fascination with the subject of memory within a long-term trajectory that focuses on the Great War. Images, languages, and practices that appeared during and after the two world wars focused on the need to acknowledge the victims of war and shaped the ways in which future conflicts were imagined and remembered. At the core of the “memory boom” is an array of collective meditations on war and the victims of war, Winter says.
The book begins by tracing the origins of contemporary interest in memory, then describes practices of remembrance that have linked history and memory, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century. The author also considers “theaters of memory”—film, television, museums, and war crimes trials in which the past is seen through public representations of memories. The book concludes with reflections on the significance of these practices for the cultural history of the twentieth century as a whole.
Book Description
In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida deftly guides us through an extended meditation on remembrance, religion, time, and technology—fruitfully occasioned by a deconstructive analysis of the notion of archiving. Intrigued by the evocative relationship between technologies of inscription and psychic processes, Derrida offers for the first time a major statement on the pervasive impact of electronic media, particularly e-mail, which threaten to transform the entire public and private space of humanity. Plying this rich material with characteristic virtuosity, Derrida constructs a synergistic reading of archives and archiving, both provocative and compelling.
"Judaic mythos, Freudian psychoanalysis, and e-mail all get fused into another staggeringly dense, brilliant slab of scholarship and suggestion."—The Guardian
"[Derrida] convincingly argues that, although the archive is a public entity, it nevertheless is the repository of the private and personal, including even intimate details."—Choice
"Beautifully written and clear."—Jeremy Barris, Philosophy in Review
"Translator Prenowitz has managed valiantly to bring into English a difficult but inspiring text that relies on Greek, German, and their translations into French."—Library Journal
Customer Reviews:
the fever that motivates this review..........2007-02-06
Anyone who keeps a blog or produces any type of content will find value in understanding the archive. Where does this desire, this passionate fever for remembering arise and what sustains it? The archive has now become an accessible tool that changes the nature of the "event". That is to say that the archive is a door to the future which is waiting to be uncovered or rearranged to create a new logic. It is receptive and passive in the way that its original authors are now capable of answering to the future. The archive isn't an ultimate pronouncement as hidden archives offer archeological evidence for counter-arguments that answer lingering or unasked questions. As personal archivists in our own lives we become aware of the way meaning can be interpreted through our methods of archivation. If you are an archivist and like to record things in order to remember or make permanent the past, you may find Derrida's theories interesting.
Customer Reviews:
A good resource........2004-07-08
Definitely intriguing and disturbing how humanity can be so cruel and evil to fellow humans. "Genocide in Rwanda" offers multiple views on the genocide from different people, not just the authors. The book is an excellent place to start if you are have not learnt much about Rwanda. You watch the genocide through various lenses and angles. Rwanda (and every other country in the world) should realize that only it has the power to change itself for the better or worse. Ultimately, they (Hutus and Tutsis) should take responsibiltty for what they did to themselves and to their own country.
The origins of the genocide in Rwanda started on the day the Germans colonized the country. The Belgians further polarized the once unified country into Hutu, Tutsi (and Twa). From then on the whole country was on a down-hill spiral. The culture of impunity set in, and the country was never able to recover. One thing let to the other...then BOOM, April 1994 came. UNAMIR was never meant to be their salvation. Neither was the "international community" - which heartily ignored the genocide. The Somalia situation is often used as an easy excuse as to why the world did not intervene...which is quite ridiculous. How does this same "international community" explain why the genocide in Sudan today has been ignored for decades? This should teach individual countries to resolve their own problems and to frown on external/foreign reliance.
Vital Perspective.......2003-08-21
This is the story of the genocide in Rwanda in all its power and horror expressed by the people who experienced it - Rwandans themselves. Therefore, it is the most important of all of the books on the subject. The others are also important and some may be more eloquent as literature, but none match Genocide in Rwanda for sheer unvarnished and unfiltered honesty and integrity. The book also provides an invaluable chronology of Rwanda that illuminates a vital perspective on the political and tribal conditions that precipitated the killing.
Invaluable addition to literature on the Rwandan genocide.......2000-08-25
For anyone with an already-primed interest in the terrible events of 1994 in Rwanda, this book is tremendously valuable.
It seeks to filter as little as possible the views of Rwandans. There are, in this book, some deeply disturbing survivor's accounts of the genocide, transcribed, unvarnished, from their own testimony. It is all the more powerful for the directness of its expression.
Most valuable to me was the material explaining the colonial origins of the division between Tutsis and Hutus. It is extraordinary to me that when Rwanda and Burundi were "assigned" to Germany in the 1880s, no European had even set foot in those lands. When they came, their pursuit of control caused divisions where previously - on this evidence - none had existed. Blame for the genocide must be seated in the Belgian colonial rulers in general (they took over after 1916), and the missionary churches in particular. This book explains why.
Rwanda, more than any other event since WW2, makes us consider the question put eloquently here by one of the witnesses: what is humanity? Who is included? Who is left out? For the world not to have acted effectively to have prevented the Rwandan cataclysm stands to its shame. Kofi Annan has admitted as much, but the real fault lies with everyone and we should all be ashamed.
The compilers of this book have acted bravely in including an apologia from the authors of the genocide. We hear their voices. We must be sickened by them. We must acknowledge that we were warned; the voices existed long before the worst of the genocide began.
Knowing what we know about the world, would we prevent it next time? Be honest now; would we?
An account of the Rwandan genocide by Rwandans........1999-10-28
This interesting historic document allows the often ignored voice of the Rwandan people to be heard. Witness testimony is horrifyingly poignant when the victim is made known so clearly to the reader. It is as if I could see their faces and feel their fears. I have read many reference works on the genocide in Rwanda but none so accurately put me in the shoes of the victims. The killers are also represented, as are the international community and their failures, the actions of the church, the former government, the current government and members of the Rwandan Patriotic Army. This book really made me feel for the writers, the Rwandans themselves who have suffered so much through the failings of the international community.
Book Description
"This book will provoke intellectually, ideologically, and emotionally loaded responses in the U.S., Germany, and Israel. Barnouw's critique of the 'enduringly narrow post-Holocaust perspective on German guilt and the ensuing fixation on German remorse' questions taboos that the political and cultural elites in those three countries would rather leave alone. . . . [Barnouw] makes us understand why the maintenance of a privileged memory of the Nazi period and World War II may not survive much longer."
---Manfred Henningsen, University of Hawai'i
Sixty years after the defeat of the Nazis and the discovery of Auschwitz, the impact of WWII on the German people remains a subject that is difficult to broach in public discourse. The experiences of Germans civilians were little studied, as if the memories of the defeated were not deserving of preservation.
In Germany 1945, an examination of Allied photography of postwar Germany, Dagmar Barnouw demonstrated one of the means by which the victors sought to impose the burden of responsibility for World War II and the Holocaust on the German people as a whole. Now, in The War in the Empty Air, she demonstrates how deeply that narrative took hold and the silence it imposed. In Germany, the reemergence of memories of wartime suffering is being met with intense public debate. In the United States, the recent translation and publication of Crabwalk by Guenter Grass and The Natural History of Destruction by W. G. Sebald offer evidence that these submerged memories are surfacing.
Taking account of these developments, Barnouw examines this debate about the validity and importance of German memories of war and the events that have occasioned it. Steering her path between the notions of "victim" and "perpetrator," Barnouw seeks a place where acknowledgment of both the horror of Auschwitz and the suffering of the non-Jewish Germans can, together, create a more complete historical remembrance for postwar generations.
Customer Reviews:
A fresh, thoughtful look at the World War II historical narrative.......2007-09-14
Given the central role of World War II in American culture, most Americans know surprisingly little about its impact on German civilians at the end stage of the war. More, the Germans themselves, copying the American view of W.W.II as the absolutely "good, clean, just war we won" over the absolutely bad and collectively guilty Germans, have shown little interest in remembering their own war experiences. Since the Allies' goal to get rid of a criminal regime had been good, very few if any questions were asked about their means, such as the American and British fire-bombing, especially late in the war and using new and devastating technology. It is still controversial in the U.S. and in Germany to discuss the wholesale destruction of German cities and the mass killing of civilians in terms other than the richly deserved punishment of the defeated. But the extent and manner of this destruction was an important part of that arguably worst war in Western historical memory and it needs to be analyzed and remembered as such. Based on a wealth of new historical and contemporary documents, Barnouw's new book The War in the Empty Air discusses the political uses of the memory of W.W.II in their impact on the history of the German and American experience of that war. Anticipating accusations that German interest in their own memories meant disrespect for the uniqueness and centrality of the Holocaust, the German intellectual and political elites have over many decades censored them so that they only recently began to be discussed more openly. Barnouw welcomes this beginning of a more inclusive, more questioning, more historical narrative of W.W.II, not only in Germany, because it might enable more people to learn more about and from that huge human disaster that was W.W.II. Instructively, one of her topics is the invocation in the post-war era of the Good, Just W.W.II to justify America's unjust wars and war-like interventions, a prime example being the invasion of Iraq. To quote from one of the reviews at Amazon.co.uk: "Barnouw's book covers the ground thoroughly. It is a book for the thoughtful reader." Given the catastrophic situation in Iraq and the current critical interest in the politics of the Israel Lobby, it is also a very timely book.
Current German Thinking of World War II.......2006-03-13
This book is an examination of thinking about World War II from the German side. Right after the war a series of photographic essays were published by the Allies showing the concentration camps and the inhumanity shown by the Nazi's on conquered people. These images seem to have created a skeleton in the closet that in turn became difficult to discuss.
Now that sixty years have passed since the end of the war, and the integration of what were two Germanies into one, there appears to be an awakening of discussion about the war. Perhaps there will be a merging of the horror of Auschwitz with the horror of Dresden.
I notice though there is very little such discussion coming from Japan. Nothing appears to have been Japan's fault. They were going peacefully along when all of a sudden we started dropping atomic bombs on them.
Book Description
Is any war a “good war”? In Worshipping the Myths of World War II, the author takes a critical look at what he sees is America’s dedication to war as panacea and as Washington’s primary method for leading the world. Articulating why he believes the lessons of World War II are profoundly relevant to today’s events, Edward W. Wood, Jr., reflects on such topics as the killing of innocents, which became increasingly accepted during the war; on how actual killing is usually ignored in war discussions and reporting; on the lifetime impact of frontline duty, which he knew firsthand; on the widely accepted concept of “the Greatest Generation”; on present criteria for judging war memoirs and novels; on the fallacy that the United States won the war largely on its own; and on the effect that the Holocaust had on our national concepts of evil and purity. His final chapter centers on how the “war on terror” is different from World War II—and why the myths created about the latter hide that reality.
Customer Reviews:
Towards a World of Peace.......2007-02-27
This book is a well written testament to the author's thinking about war. He says that there are four myths about World War II that we need to abolish as a prelude to stopping our passion for war.
He makes some very good arguments, but I'm not so sure that I agree with him.
Myth #1: The Good War -- His argument is that this was not a 'Good War.' That this was a war about killing. Yes, he is right. On the other hand, would he have allowed the Holocaust to continue, to be a matter of policy for all of Europe under Nazi domination, should we have done nothing about Japan's Unit 731 which researched biological weapons by releasing them on Chinese towns? And if not by war, how would we have stopped them?
Myth #2: The Greatest Generation -- He is right again, each generation that fought a successful victorious war has been called something similar. This began with the Revolutionary War and continues.
Myth #3 -- We Won World War II Largely on Our Own. He is correct again. World War II was indeed a world war. Decisions were made early in the war that the US would be the 'Arsenal of Democracy.' We produced a significant percentage of the airplanes, tanks, ships, trucks, etc. used by the Allies. Our combat losses were small when compared with other countries.
Myth #4: When Evil Lies in Others, War is the Means to Justice. I haven't made the transition he has in thinking that the Holocaust, Unit 751 and the other evils could have been stopped in any other way. Should we do nothing in Darfur, Bosnia, and all the other places? I don't have the answer.
Average customer rating:
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Young Minds in Social Worlds: Experience, Meaning, and Memory
Katherine Nelson
Manufacturer: Harvard University Press
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Book Description
Katherine Nelson re-centers developmental psychology with a revived emphasis on development and change, rather than foundations and continuity. She argues that children be seen not as scientists but as members of a community of minds, striving not only to make sense, but also to share meanings with others.
A child is always part of a social world, yet the child's experience is private. So, Nelson argues, we must study children in the context of the relationships, interactive language, and culture of their everyday lives.
Nelson draws philosophically from pragmatism and phenomenology, and empirically from a range of developmental research. Skeptical of work that focuses on presumed innate abilities and the close fit of child and adult forms of cognition, her dynamic framework takes into account whole systems developing over time, presenting a coherent account of social, cognitive, and linguistic development in the first five years of life.
Nelson argues that a child's entrance into the community of minds is a slow, gradual process with enormous consequences for child development, and the adults that they become. Original, deeply scholarly, and trenchant, Young Minds in Social Worlds will inspire a new generation of developmental psychologists.
Book Description
“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 the seventeenth century to the present.
Reviews
“Luhmann’s unique, monumental, theory-building effort is best described as a consistent attempt to deploy the tools and the inspirations of three strategies: modern information theory, structuralism, and evolutionary theory. . . . Perhaps nothing conveys more poignantly Luhmann’s unusual blend of scientific precision with artistic sensibility than his replacement of Parson’s ‘reciprocity of perspective’ with his own ‘interpersonal interpenetration.’ The first is cool, calculating, cognitive, and dispassionate; the second connotes a richness of relationship that leaves no human faculty unmoved. . . . Luhmann’s work is important because, arguably, it comes closer than all other sociological strategies to restoring the lost link between academically reputable social theorizing and the subjective experience of life.” —American Journal of Sociology
“There is a dearth of analytical writing about the emotions and sentiments that seem to motivate most human action, at least in everyday discussion, although some researchers are making some efforts to remedy this situation. Luhmann’s Love as Passion is an outstanding contribution to this emerging trend . . . full of novel information and fascinating ideas.” —Contemporary Sociology
Customer Reviews:
This man is simply trying to do too much..........2005-10-25
First of all, this book is written in a most impossible language that is only accessible to anyone who has previous experience with and knowledge of "Systemtheorie". In short, it is just not pleasant to read. On top of that the book has a number of serious shortcomings. A major one of them is that Niklas Luhmann presupposes that love is love between woman and man. He also simply ignores the fact that women and men are not and were histroically not treated as the same or held/hold similar positions within society. He simply refers to the couple in love as Ego and Alter, interchangeably. Moreover he focuses his analysis on what he calls Western society and seemingly chooses examples for different periods in history from whatever country suits him best to justify his arguments. Also he takes his examples from history, sociology and literature and moves freely between them, and it's not persuasive. And although he has good points here and there, this man is simply trying to do too much in one slender volume. He should stick to what he knows and not generalize in a most manipulative and offensive way as he does in this book. For an analysis of love in our cultural history, I suggest reading something else. One recommendation would be Kristeva's "Tales of love"...
The code of love.......2000-03-30
Born in 1927, Niklas Luhmann died in 1998 leaving one of the most comprehensive works on sociology. Professor in Bielefeld, but graduated in law, he was a phenomenon: Ph.D. "honoris causa" by his writings, he developed the basis for new aproach in social theory. This work, as the tittle says, is about the codification of intimancy; undestanding love as a communication medium, Luhmann sees in his social use a form of making people to get closer; moreover, love as a code can be taken as part of the way love game occurs. If this is so, each time of history should read the code love differently. The code "love as passion" emerged in the France of the 18th century, suffering transformations when exported to Germany ("Sturm und Drang" movement in arts turns love into some individual feeling)and to England (Victorian morals separate marriage from love). To be read in one aftenoon...
Books:
- Oprah Winfrey (Biography (a & E))
- Philadelphia Chickens
- Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture
- Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture
- Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde
- Roadshow: Landscape With Drums: A Concert Tour by Motorcycle
- Saint John's Bible: Prophets
- Samurai Girl Real Bout High School Volume 6 (Samurai Girl Real Bout Highschool)
- Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything
- Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- The Elegant Solution: Toyota's Formula for Mastering Innovation
- Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
- Never Tear Us Apart
- Gone Fishin: The 100 Best Spots in New Jersey
- Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons
- Runny Babbit: A Billy Sook
- Marfil: La caza del elefante
- Programmer's Guide to Internet Mail
- ENGLISH ACCOUNTANCY A STUDY IN SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 1800-1954
- Ward's Business Directory 2004
How Societies Remember (Themes in the Social Sciences)
Memory, History, Forgetting
Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Cultural Memory in the Present)
Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present
History and Memory
