Love and Sexuality in Social Theory

Love and Sexuality in Social Theory considers the role that love and sexuality play in private and public life.

Drawing on both classical and contemporary social theory, this book presents both theoretical and empirical studies of love and sexuality as social factors, from the earliest reconstructions of modern emotional life to the most recent analyses of liquid love. With attention to the consequences that passions and desires have both on morals and behaviour, it departs from the analysis of society in terms of the division of labour and utilitarian mechanisms to consider how a society based on performances values human energy and emotional behaviour in a contradictory way. This book, therefore, presents and discusses classic authors, from Georg Simmel and Pitirim Sorokin to Marianne Weber and Simone De Beauvoir, through the work of Erving Goffman and ending with contemporary authors such as Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, and Eva Illouz.

By presenting love as the social foundation of altruism, an essential element in modern conceptions of subjectivity, and a force shaping intimacy and contemporary social life, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, particularly those interested in social theory and the sociology of emotions.

Emiliano Bevilacqua is Professor of Sociology at the University of Salento. His research interests lie in social theory and the relationship between subjectivity and economics. He is the author of several publications, including ’Emotional Foundations of the Market: Sympathy and Self-Interest’ (Frontiers in Sociology, Vol. 7, 2022) and ’The Government of Sentiments in Adam Smith’s Sociology. A Sociological Reading’ (Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia, n. 3, 2020).

Mariano Longo is Professor of Sociology at the University of Salento. His research interests lie in emotions in social theory and the relationship between fiction and the social sciences. He is the author of several publications, including Emotions through Literature. Fictional Narratives, Society and the Emotional Self (Routledge, 2020) and Fiction and Social Realty: Literature and Narrative as Sociological Resources (Routledge, 2015). He is the author of Charles Horton Cooley, pp. 113-133, in M. Cerulo, A. Scribano (eds.), The Emotions in the Classics of Sociology: A Study in Social Theory (Routledge, 2021).

Michael Hviid Jacobsen is Professor of Sociology at Aalborg University, Denmark. His research interests lie in social theory and the relationship between emotions and everyday life. He is the editor of several recent publications, including The Routledge International Handbook of Goffman Studies (Routledge, 2022, edited with Greg Smith), Intimations of Nostalgia: Multidisciplinary Explorations of an Enduring Emotion (2021), and Death in Contemporary Popular Culture (Routledge, 2019, edited with Adriana Teodorescu).