Theorising love in sociological thought: Classical contributions to a sociology of love

Love in the sociological tradition

An intellectually sensitive history of sociology can be only impressed by social thought’s cold indifference towards love. Due to reasons difficult to grasp – given love’s undeniable importance in articulating human relationships and structuring social life – sociologists have proved highly reluctant in stepping in the analytical realm of love. The question that troubled Cherubino from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro – ‘checosa è amor?’ – left sociologists largely indifferent. The answers to this grave question were left to the lyrical ramblings of poets and other literati, arcane speculations of theologians and philosophers, and later, in the hands of experimental psychologists. In De l’Amour, Stendhal (1947 [1822]) worked out a theory of falling in love that he likened to the process of mineral ‘crystallisation’. The theologian Anders Nygren (1953) established the distinction between eros (erotic love) and agape (unconditional Christian love) as diametrically opposed facets of love. Later on, in The Four Loves, CS Lewis (1960) enriched Nygren’s dual typology into a fourfold conceptualisation by adding, besides eros and agape – storge (affection) and philia (friendship). The taxonomy of love was further elaborated by John Alan Lee (1973), who completed the list of love’s facets to six: eros, ludus, storge, mania, agape and pragma. At the same time, the psychologist Harry Harlow (1958) attempted to penetrate experimentally into the ‘nature of love’ by studying the emotional attachment between baby monkeys (infants of rhesus macaque separated from their mothers immediately after birth) and their surrogate mothers.

In stark contrast to these rich strands of literary musing, theological meditation and psychological experimentation on the nature of love, there is a conspicuous lack of serious reflection on the topic of love in the classical sociological tradition. None of the discipline’s key classics had shown a systematic interest in love as a social phenomenon. The amorous history of sociology’s classical thinkers seems to be much richer than their own intellectual record on the sociology of love. More ink has been spilt on detailing the sentimental relationship of August Comte with Clotilde de Vaux than on the sociological interpretation of love (De Rouvre, 1920). Comte met Clotilde in 1844, and he was instantly hit by a coup de foudre. Clotilde’s death a couple of years later radically transformed Comte, who dedicated the rest of his life to developing a positive Religion of Humanity. Within this new universal secular religion, Comte sublimated Clotilde into a holy angel, while he assumed for himself ‘the role, and persona, of Pope of Humanity’ (Wernick, 2001: 24).

Even the sentimental history of Karl Marx and Jenny von Westphalen has made the subject matter of a number of monographs that explored every avenue of their relationship (Gabriel, 2012). In contrast, until very recently – see Eva Illouz’s (1997) work on Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism – the relationship between love and capital, the socio-emotional nature of romantic markets and the structure of matrimonial exchanges have not benefitted from a similar intellectual curiosity. Marx himself remained silent on questions of love. His only reflections on this topic are not to be found in his Capital and other published works but in the private correspondence with Jenny from the time he was deeply in love (Mah, 1986).

Whereas Karl Marx ignored love altogether as a topic of sociological reflection, Émile Durkheim touched love quite tangentially in his writings. The latter’s reflections on love are, to a large extent, concentrated in a single study on the origin of incest, published in L’Année Sociologique. In this study, Durkheim works out the contradistinction between family love and the passionate love of the couple. The two emotional types embody ‘the eternal antithesis between passion and duty’ (Durkheim, 1897a: 67). For Durkheim, family love stands under the mark of duty, as it is, first and foremost, an expression of social morality. The love between family members is a moral imperative and thus a family necessity, in the absence of which the institution of the family would fall apart. Passionate love between two individuals, in contrast, is free love – amour libre – the outcome of ‘the movement of spontaneous private sensibilities’ (p. 61). In contradistinction to the family members who are emotionally bound together by the dual imperative of duty and morality,

the man and the woman seek in this union [i.e., the passionate love of the romantic couple] their own pleasure and the society they form depends exclusively, at least in principle, on their elective affinities. They associate with one another because they like each other, whereas brothers and sisters are forced to like each other since they are associated within the family.

(Durkheim, 1897a: 61, own translation)

This is arguably all Durkheim had to say on the question of love. At the end of these assertions, it is difficult not to experience a feeling of intellectual disappointment as one realises the platitude of these remarks on love. Hardly could someone contest the conclusion that Durkheim’s pronouncements on love are incomparably less sociologically revealing than his insightful reflections on solidarity, the division of social labour, suicide and the sacred.

This study began in sociological wonder. Despite its undoubted importance in shaping human relationships and society at large, love is not a major topic in the thematic repertoire of classical sociology. Several tentative answers can be offered in response to the question why love did not occupy a more central place in sociology’s classical tradition. Love’s empirical evasiveness is one factor. As a private intersubjective phenomenon belonging to the emotional realm, often secret and clandestine, love poses methodological challenges that make it difficult to observe, let alone measure. Unlike marriage, with its objective institutional quality, love can be a fleeting subjective experience that does not necessarily leave a record on an emotional equivalent of the marriage registry. Second, love has long been perceived as a psychological phenomenon, or at best as a socio-psychological one, thus falling outside of the disciplinary purview of sociology. But so was suicide, which Durkheim (1951 [1897b]) did not hold back from tackling as the litmus test for his sociological programme.Or, even more ambitious in its sociologising agenda, was Maurice Halbwachs’ (1992 [1925]) bid at theorising individual memory as intrinsically social (see also Gensburger, 2016). These arguments suffice to hint towards love’s status as a thematic conundrum for classical sociology.

The fascination with love was slow to gain traction in sociologists’ hearts and minds, but it eventually burst out with the publication of works, such as Niklas Luhmann’s (1986) Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, Anthony Giddens’s (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy, and Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim’s (1995) The Normal Chaos of Love. These books were followed by other important contributions, such as Zygmunt Bauman’s (2003) Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds and Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation by Eva Illouz (2012), who have further articulated a sociological understanding of love. The project of a ‘sociology of love’ took shape only with these belated beginnings, more than a century away from the foundation of the tradition of sociological thought. Starting from this premise, this study sets out to unearth from the discipline’s intellectual history the contributions brought by the main figures of social thought to the articulation of a sociological understanding of love. The article explores the conceptions of love developed by Max Weber, Pitirim A. Sorokin and Talcott Parsons. With the notable exception of Sorokin, who stands out as the only one who developed a comprehensive conceptualisation of love, neither one of the remaining two sociological thinkers can be considered bona fide theorists of love. Save Sorokin, love was not to be found among their main theoretical preoccupations. Nevertheless, the other premise underpinning this study is that the classics’ reflections, notwithstanding their fragmentary nature and the marginal status they occupy with respect to their corpus of writings, promise to provide insightful perspectives for a sociological understanding of love.

Weber and the re-enchantment of the world through love

Like Durkheim, who approached the subject of love indirectly in the wider context of his studies on the sociology of the family, Weber came across love following a similar path, via his works on the historical sociology of religion. To be sure, love does not stand out as a central problematic in the intellectual preoccupations of the German sociologist. However, it appears at the very centrepiece of one of Weber’s key writings. His famous ‘Intermediate Reflections’ (Zwischenbetrachtung) from the first volume of The Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion (Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie) includes an essential analysis of the forms taken by ‘brotherly love’ (Brüderlichkeit) in salvation religions (Bellah, 1999; Weber, 1946: 323–357). Weber argues that the historical emergence of religions promising redemption – Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam – had profusely transformed the socio-moral bases of the communities in which these religions developed. Before the advent of these religions of salvation, kinship-based communities were regulated by a social ethic grounded on two fundamental principles. On one hand, there is the moral law of ‘simple reciprocity’ or the talion, as expressed by the sentence ‘as you shall do unto me I shall do unto you’ (Weber, 1946: 329). On the other hand, an ethics of neighbourliness, morally codified in the principle of the brotherly help for the friendly neighbour, provided the second pillar of the prevailing social morality. Weber argues that the religions of salvation had transformed this community’s ethics of neighbourliness into a universal ethics of brotherhood which promoted a fraternal ‘communism of love’ (p. 330). As the religiosity of salvation developed the idea of the universality of human suffering, the ethics of brotherhood extended the concepts of neighbourhood until it became coextensive with the entire humankind. This implied a universalisation of human solidarity to the level of the whole of humanity. Its radical consequences entailed that every single human being, and not only the friendly neighbour, was now worthy of being loved as a brother, on the basis of the universality of human suffering.

Proceeding in his usual style, Weber first drew out an ideal type of brotherly love as the expression of an ethics of religious love. This ideal type of brotherly love is defined by a set of five characteristics: (1) universality, as it includes all human beings, seen as united by a universal communion of suffering; (2) ethical personalism, as it promotes an intense personal preoccupation for each and every sufferer; (3) acosmism (world denial), that is, a radical rejection of the world based on the latter’s inherent flaws; (4) tensionalism, which implies the existence of an essential tension between brotherly love and other spheres of the social world, especially with the economic and the political realms; and (5) inner-worldly intransigence, expressed through a refusal to come to terms with the world (Symonds and Pudsey, 2006). After constructing this ideal type, Weber catalogues the four empirical types in which brotherly love manifested itself in various salvation religions through history and the world. He thus comes to develop a typology of fraternal love, which is classified as (1) puritan brotherliness, which is sectarian and is not based on the understanding of the other as a suffering being; (2) mystic brotherly love, epitomised in Buddhism, which although is preoccupated by the suffering of the other, deals with otherness in a completely abstract and impersonal way; (3) cosmic brotherly love, as it was that developed during the medieval Christendom under the influence of Thomas Aquinas, which was ready to compromise with the socio-economic and political world; and (4) charismatic brotherliness, found in the 2nd century BC community of the Essenes, which departed from the Weberian ideal type of brotherly love only in terms of its universality (Symonds and Pudsey, 2006: 147).

One of these forms of brotherly love – the puritan brotherliness – intimately associated with a specific ethos of work – the protestant ethic – led to the articulation of capitalism as a mode of production. To be sure, as Weber does not cease to stress, the advent of the capitalist spirit out of the puritan ethos of work was an unanticipated consequence. It was also undesired by the practitioners of the inner-worldly ascesis preached by Jean Calvin (Weber, 1992 [1930]). The birth of the capitalist modern world has been accompanied by an array of phenomena – individualism, rationalisation, secularisation and bureaucratisation – which continuously undermined the bases of the religious ethics of universal brotherly love. As the process of modernisation gained increasingly more momentum, the social world was undergoing growing differentiation, which led to the emergence of some quasi-autonomous spheres of activity (Lebensordnungen). In pre-modern societies, these spheres – the economic, political, erotic, aesthetic and intellectual – were largely embedded into and subordinated to the religious realm and its ethical principles. However, the modern revolution brings about an essential tension, a structural strain, between these spheres of human activity. Not only that these spheres tend to emancipate themselves from under the authority of the religious order, as every one of them claims its own functional autonomy, but also that the religious realm with its ‘ethics of brotherly love’ is increasingly colonised with the values and principles of other life spheres (for a schematised representation of Weber’s argument, see Appendix 1 at the end of this article).

Above all, the religious sphere with its specific ethics of brotherly love comes to loggerheads with the economic sphere organised on the basis of efficiency, calculability, predictability and instrumental reason. The altruism so inherent to the ethics of brotherly love saw itself undermined by the egoistic pursuit of material self-interest in a capitalist system. A similar tension had been induced between the religious morality and the political realm. In Weber’s (1946) words,

the bureaucratic state apparatus, and the rational homo politicus integrated into the state, manage affairs, including the punishment of evil […] in a matter-of-fact manner ‘without regard to the person’, sine ira et studio, without hate and therefore without love.

(pp. 333–334)

Since in a modern bureaucratic state, the political man acts just as the economic man, the political sphere comes under the value hegemony of impersonalism, pragmatism and the ‘reason of state’. As these economic values increasingly colonise the political realm, the latter is depleted from any trace of subjectivism, humanism and personal relationships. The structuring of the political order on the basis of these imperatives of bureaucratic efficiency and organisational formalism has the same subversive effect towards the ethics of religious brotherliness, which leads to ‘the mutual strangeness of religion and politics’, to the alienation of fraternal love from political power (Weber, 1946: 335).

The conflict is just as manifest between the religious and the erotic spheres. As Weber (1946) pointed out, ‘the brotherly ethic of salvation religion is in profound tension with the greatest irrational force of life: sexual love’ (p. 343). This is because passionate love for an erotic partner is exclusivist by default, and this feature of it undermines the universality and all inclusivism of brotherly love. For this very reason, the theologians of salvation religions struggled to domesticate passionate love by restricting it to the confines of marriage. Modernity brings this essential tension to a fever pitch, as sexual activity has been sublimated into eroticism. The eroticisation of sexuality implies the transformation of ‘the sober [sexual] naturalism of the peasant’ into a refined sensual art of carnal love (p. 344). Through its careful and deliberate cultivation, eroticism has raised sexuality from the state of naïve naturalism into a ‘sphere of conscious enjoyment’ (p. 355).

It is in this moment of argumentation that Weber inserts a claim of crucial importance. In a cold and impersonal world, he argues, disenchanted by instrumental reason and standardised by bureaucratic procedures, erotic love offers to those who experience it ‘the unsurpassable peak of the fulfilment of the request for love in the direct fusion of the souls of one to the other’ (p. 347). The sensual experience of love is so overwhelming that it is crowned as an ‘erotic sacrament’ (Weber, 1946: 347; see also Falco, 2007). That is to say, eroticism is sacralised and elevated to the status of a sensual religion, in which erotic love becomes a means of escape and a form of salvation from the prison of routinised formal relationships making up the social world, governed by impersonalism and instrumental reason.

The person who abandons him or herself to erotic love ‘knows [her/]himself to be freed from the cold skeleton hands of rational orders, just as completely as from the banality of everyday routine’ (Weber, 1946: 347). Charles Lindholm (1998) has picked up this idea and emphasised that as the modernisation process transformed sexuality into eroticism, erotic experience has become ‘a democratic form of experienced redemption – an ersatz ecstatic religion immediately available to all, one that does not require of the faithful any knowledge of dogma […]. All that it requires is the discharge of one’s sexual energy’ (p. 21). Along the same interpretive line, another exegete decodes the eroticism cultivated in the modern world as an ‘Erzatz to the quest for religious salvation’ (Bertilsson, 1986: 19).

Weber’s unsettling pessimism confessed in the epilogue of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which the modern world is famously depicted as an ‘iron cage’ of instrumental reason and economic efficiency that hedges the human spirit to its breaking point, is struck by an unbidden flicker of optimism. Erotic love is thus conceived as a redemptive means of re-enchanting the world and as promising modern individual a sensual religion of inner-worldly salvation.

The theme of ‘love as salvation’ resurfaced in recent sociological scholarship within Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim’s (1995) framework of the individualisation thesis. They argue that the societal upheavals brought about by the modernisation process released individuals from their normative obligations, forced them to reconsider their traditional gender roles and severed their ties with the kinship. Moreover, the forces of modernity deprived them of the ‘sacred canopy’ of securing certainties and taken for granted beliefs lying at the core of their socially shared worldview (Berger, 1967). In the wake of Nietzsche’s divine obituary that pronounced the ‘death of God’ and the crumbling of the external support systems (e.g. the kinship with its ascribed status and complementary gender roles, the Christian worldview with its promise of after life), individuals found themselves confronted by existential questions, ontological anxieties and the terror of meaninglessness. Against this hollowing background brought about by the individualisation process that reached its apex in late modernity, men and women took refuge in love and resorted to their romantic partners as ‘inner anchors’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995: 41). Where Weber spoke of adulterous love as an erotic ekstasis, a sensual epiphany conceived of as a fleeting escape from the monotonous grinds of conjugal life, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim see romantic love as such as a permanent ‘religion after religion, the ultimate belief after the end of all faith’ (p. 12). In a society of individuals uprooted from their social, institutional and existential certainties, interpersonal love becomes a ‘secular religion’, ‘the central pivot giving meaning to their lives’ (p. 170).

Sorokin and the political economy of love

Of the sociologists born at the fin-de-19th-siècle who can be assimilated into the classical tradition, it was only Pitirim A. Sorokin (1889–1968) who struggled to develop a systematic theory of love. Appointed director of the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism (1949–1959), Sorokin launched an ambitious programme for studying love as an energetic force that has the transformative power to remould human personality and society alike. Through ‘love’, Sorokin understands people’s altruistic capacity of self-transcendence and of embracing otherness with generosity, care and goodness. After he had made a name for himself in the interwar American sociology thanks to his sound empirical studies on social stratification and mobility, Sorokin became a sort of pariah in the scholarly community once he shifted his interests towards the study of love and ‘creative altruism’. In an increasingly empirically dominated, indeed Lazarsfeldian, field of study, Sorokin’s mystical-religious view on love pushed him to the margins of the professional ranks. Through these mystical lenses, love was conceived of as an energy force endowed with redemptive potentials not only in the after life (as promised by Christianity) but also hic et nunc, promising to redeem the social world of the here and now. In Altruistic Love, Sorokin (1950) praises the virtues of selfless love in terms imbued with what sounds as a redemptive therapeutics:

[I]n this book, […] it will be shown that love is literally a life-giving force; […] that love annuls loneliness and is the best antidote to suicidal morbid tendencies; that love-experience is true cognition; that love-experience is beautiful and beautifies anything it touches; that loves is goodness itself; that love is freedom at its loftiest; that love is fearless and is the best remedy for any fear; that love is a most creative power; that it is an accessible and effective means to a real peace of mind and supreme happiness; that it is the best therapy against hate, insanity, misery, death and destruction; that, finally, it is the only means of transcending the narrow limits of our Lilliputian egos and of making our true self coextensive with the richest Manifold Infinity.

(pp. v–vi)

The excerpt reproduced above in extenso depicts Sorokin as a mystagogue of redemptive love rather than as a sociologist of romantic feelings. The mystical orientation so salient in Sorokin’s approach is largely due to some of his biographical details. Born in tsarist Russia, Sorokin wandered through the country sides along with his father and uncle, working as an icon painter and restoring churches. An Andrey Rublyov of the fin-de-19th-siècle, Sorokin absorbed the mysticism of eastern orthodoxy from his numerous encounters with the rural clergy. For a short period in his youth, Sorokin embraced eremitic monasticism, dedicating himself to a life of a hermit (Sorokin, 1963: 39–40). This breaking with the world was shortly followed by a passionate worldly involvement in Russia’s revolutionary politics, which brought him several imprisonments. After the October Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks sentenced him to death (p. 163 and passim). He managed to escape this capital sentence by emigrating to the United States, where he founded in 1930 the Department of Sociology at Harvard University.

Sorokin’s most audacious attempt at theorising love as a transfigurative energetic force is found in his book, The Ways and Power of Love: Types, Factors, and Techniques of Moral Transformation (Sorokin, 2002 [1954]).In the pages of this impressive volume (544 pp.), Sorokin brings together various fields of knowledge, ranging from sociology and psychology to theology and philosophy, for articulating an integral theory of love. His view on love is intrinsically bound to a theory of human personality which, although inspired by Freud’s psychoanalysis, departs decisively from the trial model id–ego–super-ego. According to Sorokin, the structure of human personality is made up of a series of four overlapped strata, starting from the ‘biological unconscious’, moving through the ‘bioconscious’ and the ‘socioconscious’, and ending up with the ‘supraconscious’. The latter, argues Sorokin (2002), ‘manifests itself in the greatest creative victories of man in the fields of truth, beauty, and goodness’ (p. 97). Moreover, the supraconscious is ‘the fountainhead of the greatest achievements and discoveries in all fields of human creative activity: science, religion, philosophy, technology, ethics, law, the fine arts, economics, and politics’ (p. 98). This mysterious component of the human psyche works through an even more inscrutable ‘supraconscious intuition’ (p. 99). Within this theoretical construction, the superconsciousness is postulated by Sorokin as an ultimate source of love energy. It is from this fountainhead that the ‘eminent apostles of love’ – Jesus, Francis of Assisi, Mahatma Gandhi and so on – have drawn their spiritual strengths which allowed them to practice an ‘ethics of supreme love’ (p. 127).

Sorokin became convinced that the existential crisis of the modern ‘sensate’ world can be overcome only through altruistic love. In The Reconstruction of Humanity, he warns that if people continue to ignore the energetic reserves of love that rest unexplored in their supraconscious, this will spell disaster for humankind (Sorokin, 1948). Exasperated by his fellow sociologists’ indifference towards love’s transformative power, Sorokin cautions that if the love potential that lies dormant in men and women will not be harnessed, humanity will face a ‘real catastrophe’. ‘For the sake of man’s very survival’, passionately warns Sorokin (1948), ‘the governments, foundations, universities, private endowers of research funds, and science itself must shift the bulk of their resources and activities to this field’ (p. 196). In order to redeem mankind of its self-destructive crisis, Sorokin laid the ground for a new science of love that he named ‘amitology’, characterised as ‘an applied science of amity and unselfish love’ (Sorokin, 1951). Amitology was designed by Sorokin as a science of social good, as an ‘art of cultivation of amity, unselfish love, and mutual help in interindividual and intergroup relationships’ (p. 277). At the core of amitology lie two complementary high ideals: an anthropological end, aiming to discover the most efficient techniques for the altruistic transformation of human personality, and a societal ideal, aiming to reconstruct humanity as a universal community of altruistic love. At a micro-level, Sorokin strove for amitology to lead to the ‘creative altruisation’ of persons and groups, that is, to people’s characterial transfiguration through the power of love. On the macro-level of redeeming society of its evils and hate, conflict and war, violence and inequality, Sorokin (1951) imagined a political economy of love based on ‘finding and inventing the most efficient ways of production, accumulation, and circulation of love-energy in the human universe’ (p. 278). He argued that the spontaneous bursts of love energy in the world – incarnated in figures such as Jesus, Francis, or Gandhi – were positive accidents of history. Instead of waiting passively for such explosions of altruistic love to erupt spontaneously, societies should take active steps towards gaining mastery of their own untapped reserves of love. This will allow them to transform contingent events into a deliberately devised system of producing, accumulating and distributing love that will save them from their deep existential crisis which they currently face.

Sorokin’s integral theory of love sounds more like a mystical religious utopia than a proper sociological theory. As a prophet of altruistic love, he follows in the footsteps of Comte who came to abandon his project of a positive sociology in favour of a secular Religion of Humanity. Ultimately, Sorokin utterly failed in convincing the sociological community to follow him on the track of amitology. As one sympathetic commentator of his work bitterly pointed out, Sorokin’s research on love as creative altruism during his last 10 years spent at Harvard ‘is either ridiculed or completely ignored by most sociological commentators’ (King, 2004: 90). Avoiding both of these unfair treatments, this article nevertheless concurs with the scholarly consensus in the sociological community, in that Sorokin’s approach on love is congenitally flawed. Despite its occasionally intriguing insights, the author of this article joins the scholarly chorus of Sorokin’s harsh critics, who relentlessly stress that his work cannot set the ground for a contemporary sociology of love.

Parsons and the functionality of love

Situating Talcott Parsons in the category of the classics is a contestable decision, at least on chronological grounds. Parsons does not belong to the same generation as the classical European thinkers of social thought. He also lived on a ‘wrong’ continent. However, through his monumental synthesis of Vilfredo Pareto, Émile Durkheim and Max Weber accomplished in The Structure of Social Action (1937), Parsons assumed the status of inheritor and continuator of the European classical tradition on American soil. He came to be seen as such even if Sorokin, as a European émigré, was in a better position to claim that particular status. Parsons’ professional ascension during the 1930s brought him in an increasingly bitter conflict with Sorokin, as the two got involved in a power struggle for controlling the department. Eventually, in 1944, Sorokin was released from his position, and Parsons took over the directorship of the Department of Sociology from Harvard University. With this, the Parsonsian hegemony in American sociology received its institutional consecration (Johnston, 1986).

Dethroned from his leading position at the head of the department and marginalised in the power relations within American sociology, Sorokin took refuge in the study of love, at Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism, that he established in 1949 and led for 10 years until 1959. In contradistinction to his defeated rival, who threw himself into developing an integral theory of love, Parsons had touched upon the problematic of love only in his functional analysis of the American kinship system and the nuclear family. In a series of studies, Parsons (1943, 1955) articulates the thesis of the emergence of the nuclear family in modernity as a flexible unit fit to the system of industrial production through its structural isolation from the kinship network.

Parsons frames his argument in the historical process of structural differentiation in society. He departs from the premise that pre-industrial traditional societies in which ‘kinship “dominates” the social structure’ are structurally undifferentiated social systems (Parsons, 1955: 9). In this type of kinship-based societies, the kinship is a function-wise total institution, in the sense that it fulfils all basic needs of its members and of the wider society. Social differentiation which accentuated with the advent of modernity led to the emergence of specialised institutions (schools, business firms, professional associations, occupational structures) which deprived the kinship of its social relevance and institutional significance. This development entailed a loss of functions previously performed by the kinship system which had further driven the transformation of the total institution of the kinship into the specialised modern institution of the nuclear family.

The main driver behind this structural transformation was the industrial revolution with its adjacent reconfiguration of the occupational structure. Parsons argues that the modern industrial sector, with its meritocratic ideology of individual ‘achievement’, was at odds with the traditional ideology of ‘ascription’ that was constitutive to the kinship system. Therefore, a new type of family unit was a functional imperative of the modern industrial sector. Parsons contends that structural differentiation leads to functional specialisation, and the emergence of the nuclear family to fit the new productive environment is a clear illustration of this process. Against this process of social differentiation, the modern capitalist system of production brought about the structural isolation of the nuclear family from its prior kinship embedment. It implied, first, a residential isolation of the conjugal family accomplished via the neolocal pattern of post-marital settlement, which broke the geographical communion between the couple and the kinship. Second, it also involved a generational separation together with the nuclearisation of the family by its reduction to a minimum of two generations, that is, the parents and their dependent children. Third, these came with economic independence as the residentially remote conjugal family and the kinship were now managing autonomous budgets. A final aspect of the structural isolation of the conjugal family consists in its socio-emotional estrangement from the larger kinship network, as the move through marriage from the family of orientation to the family of procreation entailed a redirection of affection, loyalty and commitment along these social lines.

Parsons’ theorem of the structural isolation of the nuclear family from the kinship network includes an important functional corollary regarding the integrative role of love. Freed from the confinement of the kinship, the couple that forms a nuclear family and settles in a neolocal residence (i.e. outside of the households of their families of orientation) needs another type of force to keep it together. The ‘functional equivalent’ to the pressures of the kinship is precisely romantic love, which compensates the binding effect exerted from the exterior by the members of the extended family with a sentimental force impinging from within. Parsons argues that kinship systems inhibit the free expression of affection in their members. As such, the kinship unit is structurally detrimental to love. It bids to domesticate love’s emotional potential, to tame it in order to fit the group’s agenda and to subordinate it to the kinship’s own superior interests.

In Parsons’ (1943) words, the kinship

greatly limits the scope for ‘personal’ emotional feeling or, at least, its direct expression in action. Any considerable range of affective spontaneity would tend to impinge on the statuses and interests of too many others, with disequilibrating consequences for the system as a whole. (p. 31)

Following up on this idea, Gideon Sjoberg (1960) points out that ‘romantic love is, of all things, an expression of individualism, and as such it is at variance with the maintenance of a well-integrated extended kinship unit’ (p. 153). For Parsons, this containment of affectivity and erotic drives is a functional imperative, in that it works to maintain the solidarity of the kinship. It protects the group’s cohesion in the face of the disintegrating effects of passionate love’s inherent irrational egoism. Moreover, the couple relationship, embedded in the kinship system, is thus trapped in a binding field of constraining forces that work to keep it together. Two of the most important consequences of this functional imperative consist in (1) the separation of love from marriage in kinship-based societies and (2) the pattern of arranged marriages based on socio-economic interests in which the matchmakers (usually the parents) show an almost complete indifference towards the romantic feelings of the two future spouses.

In modern society, in which kinship was largely replaced by a system of nuclear families, these forces have lost their normative power. Under these circumstances,

a functionally equivalent substitute in motivation to conformity with the expectations of the role is clearly needed. It may be suggested that the institutional sanction placed on the proper subjective sentiments of spouses, in short the expectation that they have an obligation to be ‘in love’, has this significance.

(Parsons, 1943: 31)

In the case of nuclear families, conjugal love of the partners is the functional substitute of the external pressures exerted by the kinship. Love replaces external constraints, providing a sentimental glue that binds from within the marital relationship. Therefore, in the making and the maintenance of nuclear families, ‘the romantic love ideology may be seen as appropriate, even necessary, in a society where the external pressures on permanent unions through kinship are largely absent’ (Sjoberg, 1960: 139–140).

The intermediary conclusion that can be drawn is that love – or the ‘romantic love complex’, to use Parsons’ own terminology – fulfils a series of functions for the maintenance of the modern social system. One of these, detailed above, could be named the post-marital function of love, consisting of the integration of the conjugal couple in the absence of the bounding constraints exerted by the kinship system. A second function, chronologically prior to the one just mentioned, is the pre-marital function of love. In modern societies, ‘falling in love’ is a functional equivalent to the marital arrangements performed by the kinship. Romantic love thus makes redundant the need for any arrangements, as love itself works as an informal matchmaking device. What is important to point out is that this ideology of romantic love, based on the free choice of romantic mates, does not pose any threat to the status quo, that is, society’s social structure, stratification system and the existing socio-economic order. As William J. Goode (1959) has made clear, the modern romantic matrimonial market, despite its open and free nature, is nevertheless structurally self-regulated so as people fall in love with and end up marrying the people they are supposed to do so, in terms of class, race, ethnicity, religion and socio-economic status. That is to say, the romantic market, although organised upon the liberal principle of free choice, is structured by powerful homogamic principles that work towards the structural reproduction of society even in the absence of arranged marriages based on economic interests.

Another strand of Parsons’ sociological thought pointed to the factors accountable for the emergence of the ‘romantic love complex’ in modern industrial societies. The romantic love complex is the result of an entanglement of cognitive beliefs, emotional states and normative expectations specific to the modern western societies. On the cognitive part, it consists of several (irrational) beliefs, or cognitive biases, regarding the nature of love and of one’s romantic partner. One of these is in the random nature of love, which is thought to strike anyone at any time in any place. Second, there is the belief in the fatality of love or, what we suggest calling ‘the unique romantic qualification belief’, that is – the belief that there is one and only one for each man and woman in the universe, and that they are destined for each other. These are completed by a third belief that love is a universal remedy for all problems, a true panacea that leads to the Cornucopia of happiness. Moreover, at the root of the romantic love complex lies the idealisation of the romantic partner, a cognitive process Stendhal had described as ‘crystallisation’. It consists in the embellishment of the loved one by both accentuating his or her qualities and projecting upon him or her features that s/he does not possess, while remaining blind to his/her faults and defects. Besides this set of beliefs which characterises the emotional state of being in love – or ‘limerence’, in Dorothy Tennov’s (1979) terms – the romantic love complex is also defined by the normative expectation regarding the institutionalisation of romantic love in marriage (Greenfield, 1965: 363–365).

Parsons accounts for the emergence of this romantic love complex in terms of the structural transformation which led to the decomposition of the kinship system into nuclear families. As already mentioned, Parsons is convinced that the kinship unit suppresses the expression of spontaneous affections (i.e. passionate love), which would disturb the equilibrium of the social system. As a consequence, kinship-based traditional societies control romantic passions and prevent the outbreak of love through an array of means, ranging from child marriage to preferential mating on a kinship basis and from the sexual segregation of youth to devising intricate courtship rituals performed under the supervision of the parents (Goode, 1959). On the contrary, the ‘structural isolation of the conjugal family tends to free the affective inclinations of the couple from a whole series of hampering restrictions’ exerted by the kinship (Parsons, 1943: 31).

The root cause of the historical emergence and normative institutionalisation of the romantic love complex thus lies in the structural isolation of the nuclear family from the larger kinship network. This emancipation was driven by the modernisation process triggered by the industrial revolution, which reshaped the occupational structure and, consequently, the nature of work in modern industrial societies which required flexible and mobile family units. The decline of the kinship in modern societies and the accompanying advent of individualism brought about a matrimonial market functioning on the basis of romantic passions and free choice of mating partners as opposed to economic interests and arranged marriages. This new matrimonial liberal economy was ‘needed’ by the modern industrial sector as a functional imperative for its proper running. This argument was most clearly formulated by Sidney M. Greenfield (1965), who concludes her functional analysis of love and marriage in modern America by asserting that

the function of romantic love in American society appears to be to motivate individuals – where there is no other means of motivating them – to occupy the positions husband-father and wife-mother and form nuclear families that are essential not only for reproduction and socialisation but also to maintain the existing arrangements for distributing and consuming goods and services and, in general, to keep the social system in proper working order and thus maintaining it as a going concern. (p. 377)

It was in this matrix of socio-economic factors that the ‘romantic love complex’ historically emerged and was normatively institutionalised in modern western societies. Parsons argues that the structurally isolated nuclear family is both a consequence of the emergence of the modern occupational structure and a functional prerequisite for its smooth operation. The modern occupational structure developed in industrial societies did more than to simply bring about the shift from the kinship system to the nuclear family. It also patterned the nuclear family according to a complementary model of family roles, defined in terms of a strict sexual division of labour within and outside the household. The breadwinner model of the family took shape, in which the husband–father – the sole or primary income earner – is the ‘instrumental leader’, while the wife–mother takes up the ‘expressive role’ of providing emotional support besides running the internal affairs of the household (Parsons, 1955: 13–14). Parsons (1955) ties up love first to the conjugal couple, and then to this sharp and complementary division of sexual roles within the marriage:

A mature woman can love, sexually, only a man who takes his full place in the masculine world, above all its occupational aspect, and who takes responsibility for a family [i.e., is a breadwinning husband to her]; conversely, the mature man can only love a woman who is really an adult, a full wife to him and mother to his children, and an ‘adequate’ person in her extramarital roles. (p. 22)

Through his conjugal conservatism, Parsons turned out to be an unfaithful disciple of his German sociological master. If Weber saw in romantic adventures a means of inner-worldly redemption, especially in adultery a possible erotic religion of carnal salvation from the world of routinised conjugality, Parsons sees in extramarital love a danger to the social order endorsed by the institution of marriage. Whereas Weber discerned the possibility of an erotic escape from the iron cage of conjugality, Parsons diagnoses a social dysfunction endowed with anomic potential to the status quo.

Conclusion

Until the recent upsurge of sociological interest in love, the subject of love has been a heavily undertheorised topic in sociology. This conspicuous disregard of love as a major topic in the classical tradition of social thought is all the more intriguing, giving love’s importance in social life. It not only profoundly shapes people’s subjective and emotional realms, but, as pointed out by William J. Goode (1959), love also has structural importance. Due to its intrinsic connection with the institution of marriage in modern western societies, love is a factor that has an impact on the social structure, social stratification and the structural reproduction of society. The chronic scarcity of sociological reflection on love until the turn of the twenty-first century, when authors like Luhmann, Giddens and Bauman took up the subject was compensated by some rather contingent but insightful discussions by some of the discipline’s classical thinkers. This study has explored these sparse thoughts on the social nature of love existing in the classical sociological tradition. It focused on the sociological work on love found in the writings of Max Weber, Pitirim A. Sorokin and Talcott Parsons. Other classical social thinkers who were left outside of the scope of the analysis have either not approached the topic (this is the case of Émile Durkheim and especially Karl Marx) or, the case of Georg Simmel (1984 [1904]), have treated the subject in a fragmentary, elusive and elliptic fashion.

Although the three sociologists with whom we have been concerned in this article – Weber, Sorokin and Parsons – have shed light on different dimensions of love, their disparate thoughts nevertheless share a basic feature. All of them discuss love – with its effects, potentials and promises – in the larger frameworks of their historical sociologies. Weber theorises love in the context of his historical account of the rationalisation process transforming modern society into an iron cage of cold and impersonal bureaucratic order. Against this depressing background, Weber sees erotic love as an irrational counterforce to the rationalisation of society that can provide a sensual escape from the routinised social world. In contradistinction to Weber, Sorokin developed a sui generis theory of love. However, Sorokin’s conceptualisation of love is nevertheless embedded in his philosophy of history detailed in Social and Cultural Dynamics (Sorokin, 1937). The dominion of ‘sensate culture’ (materialism) at the expense of an ‘ideational culture’ (spirituality) had thrown western civilisation in a state of moral crisis. The herein redemption of society can come only from altruistic love and from organising the social world in terms of a political economy of love. Like Weber, Parsons discusses the ‘romantic love complex’ in the wider theoretical framework of the sociology of the family. He argues that the structural isolation of the modern nuclear family from the kinship unit frees the couple from the pressures exerted by their kin that kept them together. Romantic love emerged as a normative emotional complex to act as a functional equivalent to these now absent kinship pressures and to bind the conjugal couple from within.

As already alluded to in the introduction, the sociological study of love was hindered by the private, often covert, nature of this emotional interpersonal relationship as well as by love’s understanding as a putative psychological phenomenon. After reviewing some of classical sociologists’ theorisings of love, another of its challenging aspects can be brought to the fore. As it became evident, the notion of love lacks any semantic consistency across the writings of classical sociologists. Weber discussed erotic love as an adulterous escape from the grips of marriage. His other notion of brotherly love is at odds with the former, since it stands for a humanitarian care for a universal ‘otherness’ impelled by religious concerns. Its semantics closely resonate with what Sorokin had in mind when he advanced his understanding of altruistic love. Parsons, however, unravels yet another facet of love, which he labelled as a ‘romantic complex’ leading to marriage. All these various strands of theorising – further enriched by recent sociological scholarship with notions, such as Anthony Giddens’ (1992) ‘confluent love’ based on ‘pure relationships’ or Eva Illouz’s (1997) ‘erosic love’ grounded on emotional rationality – point towards the polysemantics of love that needs to be carefully unpacked if the term is to be saved from becoming an ‘essentially contested concept’ (Gallie, 1955). It is the hope of this article that our unravelling of the multifaceted nature of love will contribute to a deepened understanding of this intersubjective realm of feeling and action with significant consequences for the socio-political and emotional order.