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1 Historical, social, and cultural perspectives of love
Love as a global phenomenon
Introduction
In this chapter, I set out to trace the histories of love. Where did love come from â if it even came from somewhere at all? I also set out to unravel the contributions sociology has made to love historically, and the contributions that it continues to make to understand love. Sketching out the historical context regarding love is important because one can then appreciate the differences and continuities of love across differing landscapes, cultures, places, and contexts. History is important. It reminds us of prior sacrifices, pains, and the trials and tribulations that have emerged across dissimilar time periods. Love is present in historical landscapes, and I attempt to locate it in particular geographical spaces. I focus on certain places because they either mean something to me personally, in that I experienced love in these places or that I witnessed someone whom I knew who experienced love in such places. Either way, these places are significant and resonate with my personal life. I focus on examining love within and outside of Great Britain by drawing on British scholars. More specifically, I focus on love in England and Wales given that I was originally born in Wales and then subsequently relocated to England, experiencing and observing love here. I also examine love outside of the UK context in places, such as Dubai and Pakistan, given that these are places that I have visited and observed love being limited, confined, and controlled. For example, the construction of homosexuality and love is tabooed; the expression of âgay loveâ in these places is forbidden, whereby in Dubai, if a man is caught engaging in homosexual activities or expressing love and intimacy with another man, he is susceptible to severe punishment that can range from 10 years in prison, fines, deportation and even the death penalty. Love, then, is governed in such places, making romantic relationships and the performance of love difficult and problematic. Love as an entity shapes our emotional and subjective realms; though, at the same time, love also has structural significance (Goode, 1959; Jackson, 1993; Plummer, 1978; Beall and Sternberg, 1995). In short, I attempt to provide an overview and some understanding of love in and outside of the UK by drawing on British and international scholarsâ works to understand love and structural inequalities. First, it is important to establish a history of love to recognize continuities and differences.
Sociologically historicizing love
The history of love reminds us that love was a deeply under-theorized concept in sociology. As Rusu (2017) states, âthe body of disparate sociological reflections that have been made on the social nature of love has been largely forgotten in the disciplineâs intellectual legacyâ (p. 1). The active neglect of love in sociology is sad given that sociology is majorly relevant and important in shaping our everyday lives, moulding the social worlds in which we situate. Love is included in our social worlds; it is unavoidable, it is omnipresent. Tracing the histories of love, then, is important to make sense of how we have got to the present regarding love and what route love is likely to take in the future. In order to set up to account for the modernization process, concepts with respect to love were historically ingrained in wider theoretical constructions (Rusu, 2017). Here, I detail this historical process of love in the sociological tradition given my sociological training, my devotion to sociology, and the usefulness sociology can provide to outlining a historical approach to love so as to âset the sceneâ for the discussions in later chapters.
There was no systematic discussion nor interest in the sociology of love, and so love as a social and cultural construct, by the key âfathersâ of sociology, including Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Talcott Parsons. I do not provide an overview of their major and important works in this book due to space, or an exhaustive analysis of their important contributions to sociology. They often overlooked the importance of love as a social phenomenon while missing the connections between masculinities, sexualities, and love. Some have argued that they were sexist because they used male pronouns instead of non-sexist alternatives (see, for example, Webber and Bezanson, 2016; see their book also for an overview of these key thinkersâ works). Rusu (2017: 2) states that, âMore ink has been spilt on detailing the sentimental relationship of August Comte with Clotilde de Vaux than on the sociological interpretation of loveâ. When Marx was doing work on capitalism, seeing capitalism as a progressive historical phase that would eventually be followed by socialism, and examining the relations of production so the relationship between those who own the means of production (i.e. capitalists or bourgeoisie) and those who do not (the workers or the proletariat), he missed the links between capital and love, the structure of matrimonial exchanges, and the socio-emotional nature of romantic markets. It was found that Marx was in love himself, but he certainly was silent on questions about love, intimacy, and emotion, within a private and personal correspondence with Jenny from the time he was deeply in love (Mah, 1986). Perhaps Marx was too much blinded by love to question the phenomenon as a critical thinker? Perhaps love is, as they say, âblindâ. He was surely critiqued for being âgender blindâ (Webber and Bezanson, 2016). His work, nonetheless, provided important insights into class inequalities, class struggles, and the divide between the ruling and working class. I still teach students Marxism, after all. His legacy is unforgotten.
In his writings, Emile Durkheim briefly touched upon love. Published in LâAnnĂ©e Sociologique (1897), Durkheim focused on a single study on the origin of incest where he briefly introduced the notion of love. Durkheim plays around with the differentiations between the passionate love of the couple and family love in this work. For Durkheim, the two emotional types enact âthe eternal antithesis between passion and dutyâ (Durkheim, 1897: 67). In other words, what he was trying to get at is that the family love to which he refers stands under the mark of duty; it is a performance of social morality. The family love operates to keep the family together, reinforcing social norms and values, notably the nuclear family. The family love produces a social bond that is essential to the functioning not only of the family, but also of societies that are built upon social norms and values. Family love, therefore, is necessary and essential, a moral imperative. Without family love, the family institution would break down, resulting in social norms and values being contested. In contrast to family love to which Durkheim refers, there is the passionate love of the couple. This is also referred to as free love, stressing the perpetual antithesis between duty and passion (Durkheim, 1897). In contrast to family love, whereby members in the family are emotionally bound together by the dual imperative of morality and duty, the love of the couple is free from this burden:
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, 1897: 61, own translation)
Durkheim was clearly an advocate of the modern, nuclear family, ignoring any possibility for social change or diversity in the family. The exclusion of other type of families, such as same sex families, strengthens the idea that heterosexual relationships are simply ânormalâ and âdesirableâ, along with heterosexual marriage. Based on the free selection of partners to marry, and based on mutual attraction, marriage then creates duties and responsibilities (Durkheim, 1897). Such duties and responsibilities are strengthened by the arrival of children. He argues that the familyâs moral influence is not really felt until the conjugal couple becomes a family, âproperly speakingâ. However, Durkheim suggests that he was not a fan of having so many children in a family because that would undermine family love, noting that the more intense and passionate the parentsâ love and affection for one another, the fewer the children in the family (Lamanna, 2002). Given that not all societies maintain paternal feeling, parentsâ love and attachment to their family ought to be socially and culturally constructed: âIt is the social organization of the relations of kinship which determines the respective feelings of parents and children. They would have been otherwise if the social structure had been differentâ (Durkheim, [1893], as cited in Lamanna, 2002: 119). I suspect that Durkheim was cautious and suspicious of emotions, feelings, and intimacy. His approach to love and the family was very functional, fearing that love dismantles rationality, ironically provoking violence, abuse and exclusion, and it is asocial. Further critiquing Durkheimâs arrogant disregard of love, Rusu (2017) states that:
it is difficult not to experience a feeling of intellectual disappointment as one realises the platitude of [Durkheimâs] remarks on love. Hardly could someone contest the conclusion that Durkheimâs pronouncements on love are incomparably less sociologically revealing than his insightful reflections on solidarity, the division of social labour, suicide and the sacred.
(p. 3)
I agree with Rusu to some extent. Although Durkheim was concerned with human and social relations, it is surprising that love was not his focal interest given its unquestionable significance in moulding human relationships and societies at large. Nonetheless, Durkheim has made a vast contribution to sociology in other important areas, notably the division of social labour, suicide, solidarity, and the sacred. He should still, along with Marx, be crowned one of the founding fathers of sociology.
Through his writings on the historical sociology of religion, Weber stumbled across the notion of love following an analogous path to Durkheim since Durkheim came across love indirectly within the wider context of his sociological writings of the family. Like Durkheim, although love did not stand out as a core focus in Weberâs writings, it did indirectly become a key part of his writings. For instance, Weber examines the different forms of âbrotherly loveâ (BrĂŒderlichkeit) in salvation religions within âIntermediate Reflectionsâ (Zwischenbetrachtung) from the first volume of The Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion (Gesammelte AusfsĂ€tze zur Religionssoziologie) (Weber, 1946). The historical constructions of religions conveying promises of redemption, such as Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and Judaism, etc., largely shifted the socio-moral foundations of the communities wherein such religions formed (ibid.). According to Weber, kinship-based communities were governed by a social ethic based on two essential principles prior to the advent of these religions of salvation. First, there is the moral law of talion or âsimple reciprocityâ, summed up by the statement âas you shall do unto me I shall do unto youâ (Weber, 1946: 329). Second, providing the second pillar of the prevailing social morality, there is an ethics of neighbourliness morally codified within the principle of the brotherly help for the friendly neighbour. He demonstrates that such religions changed their communityâs ethics of neighbourliness to a universal ethics of brotherhood that endorsed a fraternal âcommunism of loveâ. The ethics of brotherhood widened the concept of neighbourhood until it became coextensive with the entire humankind as the religiosity of salvation produced the notion of the universality of human suffering, suggesting a universalization of human solidarity to the level of the whole of humanity. Consequently, not only the friendly neighbour, but also every single human being was now worthy of being loved as a âbrotherâ on the foundation of the universality of human suffering. Through the idea of brotherhood, then, love developed; it made its way up to the surface of recognition. In Weberâs sociological writings, as the expression of an ethics of religious love, he distinguished an ideal type of brotherly love. This ideal type of brotherly love is defined by a set of five characteristics, as described by Rusu (2017: 5):
(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 latterâs 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.
Weber traces the four empirical types wherein brotherly love constructed itself in several salvation religions through history and the world after constructing this ideal type:
[Weber] 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.
(Rusu, 2017: 5)
The âpuritan brotherlinessâ form of brotherly love, which links with Weberâs work on the protestant ethic (Weber, 1992 [1930]), led to the articulation of capitalism as a mode of production. The inception of the capitalist modern world that has been supplemented by differing phenomena, such as rationalization, individualism, bureaucratization and secularization, consistently weakened the foundation of the religious ethics of universal brotherly love. As Weeks (2005) declares, âsecularization has undermined the link between faith and morality for vast sections of the population, especially in Europeâ (p. 194). The social world was experiencing incremental differentiation while the process of modernization was gaining increasingly more momentum, leading to the development of several quasi-autonomous areas of activity (Lebensordnungen). These areas in pre-modern societies, including the intellectual, erotic, economic, aesthetic, and political, were subordinated to and ingrained into the religious realms and its ethical principles. Regardless, the modern changes brought about structural strains and tensions across these areas of human activities. For example, these areas free themselves from the regulation of religions and âthe religious realm with its âethics of brotherly loveâ is increasingly colonized with the values and principles of other life spheresâ (Rusu, 2017: 5). Two tensions emerge here: the economic sphere shaped by the basis of efficiency, predictability, calculability and instrumental reason; and the religious area with its specific ethics of brotherly love. Capitalism, therefore, attempted to undermine âbrotherly loveâ due to the egoistic pursuit of material self-interest. People were (and are?) selfish. Weber (1946) articulates that:
the bureaucratic state apparatus, and the rational homo politicus integrated into the state, manage affairs, including the punishment of evil [âŠ] in a matter-of-fact manner âwithout regard to the personâ, sine ira et studio, without hate and therefore without love.
(pp. 333â334)
A man is both political and economical. The political area comes under the value hegemony of pragmatism, impersonalism, and the âreason of stateâ in the world of capitalism. Human personal relationships, love, subjectivism, and humanism appear to be absent in the political and economical realms. However, today, we are still surrounded by politics and economics; they surround us whether we like it or not. Because economic values increasingly colonise the political spheres, men are expected to embody rationality. With that said, they embody non-humanism and non-subjectivism, resulting in an absence of love until it serves a purpose, one that serves a need. What need is that, I question? Thus, can love serve a purpose in economics and politics? In the political and economical landscapes, in which rationality, structure, and order stubbornly persist, love becomes alien and unwanted. Weber (1946) established that âthe brotherly ethic of salvation religion is in profound tension with the greatest irrational force of life: sexual loveâ (p. 343). This is because passionate love for an erotic partner is exclusivist by default, and this feature of it weakens the all inclusivism and universality of brotherly love. Passionate love, uncommitted love, a love that selfish men draw on to fulfil their selfish sexual desires is what upsets the confines of marriage. Eroticism and sexual promiscuity supply economical and political men, who are invested in earning money, enjoyment. This enjoyment of sex operates to undermine marriage, relationships, and close attachment to another soul. Weber (1946: 347) argues that, standardized by bureaucratic procedures and disenchanted by instrumental reason, erotic love offers to those who experience it âthe unsurpassable peak of the fulfilment of the request for love in the direct fusion of the souls of one to the otherâ in a cold and impersonal world. The sensual experience of love is so overwhelming that it is crowned as an âerotic sacramentâ (Weber, 1946: 347). In other words, not only is eroticism sacralized, but also elevated to the status of a sensual religion. Regarding the latter, erotic love functions as a form of escapism and a form of salvation from the prison of routinized formal relationships making up the social world, controlled by instrumental reason and impersonalism. The man who seeks erotic love âknows himself to be freed from the cold skeleton hands of rational orders, just as completely as from the banality of everyday routineâ (Weber, 1946: 347). The freeness of the structured everyday routine, governed by politics and economics, is momentary and episodic. Seeking eroticism manifests usually at night-time, in clubs or bars, and then casual sex is usually performed in a private place, a home, or a hotel. All that is required is the discharge of oneâs sexual energy until the everyday routine remerges.
History tells us that erotic love was conceived as a redemptive means of re-enchanting the world and as promising the modern individual a sensual religion of inner-worldly salvation. The modernization process released men from their normative obligations, from their everyday routines, to achieve redemption through erotic, casual sex since they âearned itâ through economics and politics. Men, then, hold economical and political power, and the redemption of sex serves to prove this, at the cost of love. Love becomes alien, disregarded, and even unwanted. It serves a lack of purpose for these men, in contrast to eroticism and casual sex. The latter two are forms of âreligionâ for men, resulting in the âdeath of Godâ and secularization. Men are, therefore, confronted not only with rationality and bureaucracy, but also life becomes unmeaningful and, instead, a robotic routine that turns men simply into modern ârobotsâ develops. If men were in intimate relationships or married, they could âcheatâ to achieve redemption for Weber (1946) spoke of adulterous love as an erotic ekstasis, a sensual epiphany conceived of as a fleeting escape from the monotonous grinds of conjugal life. Either way, men were constructed as selfish, only needing sex to serve a purpose, a function.
That said, I now contemplate and discuss Talcott Parsonâs contributions to the functionality of love. Some may think that Parsons does not have the right to be positioned alongside such sociological thinkers as Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, especially when Parsons did not necessarily belong to the same generation as these important thinkers. However, his sociological thought has resonated with my upbringing, especially in relation to the nuclear family and gender roles. Being brought up in a household in which clear homophobia, conservatism, sexism, and other inequalities manifested, I was forced to learn that men were expected to enact particular gendered roles, to bring home the money, to be heterosexual, to be manly, a ârealâ man, and women were there to serve the men. I strongly challenged and resisted these gender roles. Parsons shaped my sociological thinking regarding the functions of gender roles and family. The breadwinner model of the family took shape in my own everyday life, although I continued to resist such a myopic model. Still, the men in my family, who were the primary income earners, were the âinstrumental leadersâ, while the women in my family took on the âexpressive roleâ of providing emotional support besides running the internal affairs of the household (Parsons, 1955: 13â14).
In his functional analysis of the nuclear family and the American kinship system, Parsons had implicitly touched on the issue of love. For example, he argued that, within modernity, the development of the nuclear family was a flexible model that fit the system of industrial production via its structural isolatio...
