1. A brief history of love  
  Note on Eastern origins
  Love as Ideal: Medieval courtly love
  Love as Passion: 17th century to modernity
2. Love and capitalism
  Love and alienation
  Love as art (Erich Fromm)




‘More and more [Westerners] have an Arab and Persian heart, for it was from the Middle East that romantic love emerged. Europeans have chosen to forget not only that their language originates in India, but that it was there that the most modern view of sexual pleasures was conceived … One may feel isolated in one’s own town, but one has forebears all over the world.’ (Zeldin 1994: 47)

The Crusades (1025-1291)
Music communicates feelings / emotions
‘rab love was transmitted to the French troubadours not by philosophers, but through music. The musicians on either side of the Pyrenees understood each other, because a mood is more infectious than an idea’ (Zeldin 1994: 78).
Troubadours: ‘singer-songwriters’, France 12th -13th centuries

Spiritual/emotional love

Sexual love begins very slowly to be viewed positively

Resistance to the Church/’outlet’ for passions

Woman’s role passive (‘beloved’)

But: recognition that eroticism is based on mutuality

Emerging emphasis on individual uniqueness and authenticity

Living life authentically (‘true to myself’) in relationships with others in conditions of mutual support.

The problem: compatibility

Compatibility no longer about external criteria (family, education, wealth, prestige), but about personal, emotional aspects

 
Undergoes a process of autonomisation: becomes its own world

Becomes self-referential (e.g. ‘love for love’s sake’)

Institutional expression of this development: the ‘love marriage’

For a time this was special, today a banal fact

Love becomes ‘ordinary’, part of everyday life (e.g. love novels, Hollywood movies, love songs, etc)

Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Interested in investigating the dehumanizing aspects of capitalism.

His entire philosophy can be read as a protest against alienation.

“Assume man as man, and his relation to the world as a human one, and you can exchange love only for love … If you love without calling forth love, that is, if your love as such does not produce love, if by means of an expression of life as a loving person you do not make yourself a loved person, then your 
1929, joins Institute for Social Research
1933, migrates to US in 1933; New School of
Social Research, NY, Columbia, Yale
Key contributor to Critical Theory’s synthesis
of Marx and Freud (socio-economic structural
influences on instincts)
The Fear of Freedom (1942) The Sane Society (1955) The Art of Loving (1957)
‘If love is a capacity of the mature, productive character, it follows that the capacity to love in an individual living in any given culture depends on the influence this culture has on the character of the average person. If we speak about love in contemporary Western culture, we mean to ask whether the social structure of Western civilisation and the spirit resulting from it are conducive to the development of love. To raise the question is to answer in the negative. No objective observer of our Western life can doubt that love … is a relatively rare phenomenon ….’  (1996: 65)  
Our relation to the world under conditions of capitalism falls short of being ‘a human one.’

Capitalism has distorted our personalities; exchange value as the supreme value leads to the formation of a marketing character

Marx: love an impossibility under capitalism
Fromm: not impossible, but difficult:
Love’s purpose: overcome our humanly specific aloneness

But: not fusion with another, but unity that preserves individual integrity:

‘Mature love is a union under the conditions of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality. Love is an active power … which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow men which unites him with others; love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity. In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.’

“Our character is geared to exchange and to receive, to barter and to consume; everything spiritual, as well as material objects, becomes an object of exchange and consumption.” (Fromm)

How is that reflected in intimate relationships?
Aries, P. 1997, ‘Love in married life,’ Western Sexuality: Practice and Precept in Past and Present Times, eds P. Aries and A. Bejin, New York: Barnes and Noble,.
Illouz, E. 2007, ‘Romantic Webs’, Cold Intimacies, Cambridge: Polity, pp. 74-114.
Luhmann, N. 1984, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, Cambridge: Polity.
Morris, C. 1995, The Discovery of the Individual: 1050 – 1200, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Singer, I. 1984, The Nature of Love: Courtly and Romantic, vol. 2, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Zeldin, T. 1994, An Intimate History of Humanity, New York: Harper Collins.
代写SOC315Love in History:From Chivalry to Capitalism