700645

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JCS0010.1177/1468795X17700645Journal of Classical SociologyRusu

Article
Journal of Classical Sociology

Theorising love in sociological

2018, Vol. 18(1) 3­–20
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1468795X17700645
https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795X17700645
to a sociology of love journals.sagepub.com/home/jcs

Mihai Stelian Rusu

Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania

Abstract
This article sets out to explore the contributions of classical social thinkers to a sociological
understanding of love. It builds on the premise that despite its major relevance and consequential
importance in shaping both individual lives and the social world, until recently love was a heavily
undertheorised topic in the sociological tradition. Moreover, the body of disparate sociological
reflections that have been made on the social nature of love has been largely forgotten in the
discipline’s intellectual legacy. The article then proceeds in unearthing the classics’ contributions
to a sociology of love. It starts with Max Weber’s view that love promises to be a means of sensual
salvation in an increasingly rationalised social world based on impersonal formal relationships.
Next, it critically examines Pitirim A. Sorokin’s integral theory of love. It then moves to address
Talcott Parsons’ view on love as a binding force whose social function is to integrate the conjugal
couple of the modern nuclear family in the absence of the external pressures exerted by the
kinship network. The article concludes by showing how these conceptualisations of love were all
embedded in wider theoretical constructions set up to account for the modernisation process.

Keywords
Classical sociology, love, marriage, modernisation process, sociology of the family

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

Corresponding author:
Mihai Stelian Rusu, Department of Sociology and Social Work, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Str. Lucian
Blaga, Nr. 2A, SA–3.3, 550169, Sibiu, Romania.
Email: mihai.rusu@ulbsibiu.ro
4 Journal of Classical Sociology 18(1)

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 fac-
ets of love. Later on, in The Four Loves, CS Lewis (1960) enriched Nygren’s dual typol-
ogy 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 seri-
ous 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 trans-
formed 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 relation-
ship (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 mar-
kets and the structure of matrimonial exchanges have not benefitted from a similar intel-
lectual 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 pri-
vate 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, pub-
lished 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
Rusu 5

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 contra-
distinction 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 conclu-
sion that Durkheim’s pronouncements on love are incomparably less sociologically
revealing than his insightful reflections on solidarity, the division of social labour, sui-
cide 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 reper-
toire 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 methodologi-
cal 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 sociologis-
ing 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 tradi-
tion of sociological thought. Starting from this premise, this study sets out to unearth from
6 Journal of Classical Sociology 18(1)

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 under-
pinning 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 histori-
cal 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 salva-
tion 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 religi-
osity 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
Rusu 7

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 reli-
gions 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 univer-
sality (Symonds and Pudsey, 2006: 147).
One of these forms of brotherly love – the puritan brotherliness – intimately associ-
ated with a specific ethos of work – the protestant ethic – led to the articulation of capi-
talism 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, rationalisa-
tion, 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 dif-
ferentiation, 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 log-
gerheads 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 politi-
cal 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)
8 Journal of Classical Sociology 18(1)

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 relation-
ships. The structuring of the political order on the basis of these imperatives of bureau-
cratic 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 univer-
sality and all inclusivism of brotherly love. For this very reason, the theologians of salva-
tion 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 routi-
nised 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 redemp-
tion – 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 salva-
tion’ (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 con-
ceived as a redemptive means of re-enchanting the world and as promising modern indi-
vidual a sensual religion of inner-worldly salvation.
Rusu 9

The theme of ‘love as salvation’ resurfaced in recent sociological scholarship within

Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim’s (1995) framework of the individualisa-
tion thesis. They argue that the societal upheavals brought about by the modernisation
process released individuals from their normative obligations, forced them to recon-
sider 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, ontologi-
cal 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 existen-
tial 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 classi-
cal 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
10 Journal of Classical Sociology 18(1)

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 redemp-

tive 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 ere-
mitic 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 ‘supracon-
scious’. The latter, argues Sorokin (2002), ‘manifests itself in the greatest creative victo-
ries 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 ulti-
mate 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
Rusu 11

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 amitol-
ogy 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 per-
sons 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 posi-
tive 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 socio-
logical 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 classi-
cal 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
12 Journal of Classical Sociology 18(1)

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 insti-
tutional 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 fam-
ily. 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 produc-
tion 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 institu-
tional 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 spe-
cialisation, and the emergence of the nuclear family to fit the new productive environ-
ment 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 con-
jugal family and the kinship were now managing autonomous budgets. A final aspect of
Rusu 13

the structural isolation of the conjugal family consists in its socio-emotional estrange-
ment 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 orienta-
tion) 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 mainte-
nance 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 fami-
lies, 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 substi-
tute of the external pressures exerted by the kinship. Love replaces external constraints,
14 Journal of Classical Sociology 18(1)

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 per-
manent 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 mainte-
nance 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 arrange-
ments, 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, strati-
fication 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 mar-
riages 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 roman-
tic 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 happi-
ness. 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 con-
sists 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 institutionalisa-
tion 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
Rusu 15

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 trig-
gered by the industrial revolution, which reshaped the occupational structure and, conse-
quently, 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 accompany-
ing 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 func-
tional 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’ histori-
cally 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 sim-
ply 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 pro-
viding 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)
16 Journal of Classical Sociology 18(1)

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 pos-
sibility 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 emo-
tional 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 strati-
fication 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 socio-
logical 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 phi-
losophy of history detailed in Social and Cultural Dynamics (Sorokin, 1937). The
dominion of ‘sensate culture’ (materialism) at the expense of an ‘ideational culture’ (spir-
ituality) 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
Rusu 17

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 consist-
ency across the writings of classical sociologists. Weber discussed erotic love as an adul-
terous 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 scholar-
ship 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 sig-
nificant consequences for the socio-political and emotional order.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

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Author biography
Mihai Stelian Rusu is an Assistant Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Social Work,
Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania. His scholarly interests range across the politics of
memory, political sociology of nationalism, fascist studies and the sociology of celebration.

Appendix 1.  Weber’s conception on the differentiation of modern social world in

autonomous spheres of activity.

Sphere of activity Immanent values Original conflict with the The context of the
(Lebensordnungen) (Wertsphären) religious sphere autonomisation from
the religious sphere
(Eigengesetzlichkeit)
Religious Ethics of brotherhood – –
love, universality
of human suffering,
universal solidarity
Economic Efficiency, calculability, No: before the The emergence of
instrumental reason emergence of salvation capitalism as economic
religion, religious activity system which led to
(magic) also pursued the clash of self-
economic interests interested mercantilism
with the altruistic love
(caritas) promoted by
the ethics of universal
brotherliness
Political Bureaucratic power, No: the sphere of The articulation of the
legal–rational political power conflicted modern bureaucratic
authority, impersonal with the religious order state which secured
rules only with the emergence for itself the complete
of salvation religions monopoly of exercising
endowed with an ethics legitimate violence
of universal brotherly
love
(Continued)
20 Journal of Classical Sociology 18(1)

Appendix 1. (Continued)
Sphere of activity Immanent values Original conflict with the The context of the
(Lebensordnungen) (Wertsphären) religious sphere autonomisation from
the religious sphere
(Eigengesetzlichkeit)
Aesthetic Artistic ecstasy, No: until the The formalisation of
formalism, autonomisation of art, artistic creation as art
aestheticism religion and art formed became increasingly
an organic symbiosis, as more concerned with
the religious meaning was the aesthetic ‘form’
communicated through at the expense of the
artistic forms religious ‘content’
expressed through the
work of art
Erotic Eroticism, No: in many religious The sublimation of
sensualism, practices (e.g. Greco- sexual activity into
intimacy Roman mysteries) eroticism which led
sexuality was sacralised to the elevation of
and celebrated in eroticism as a profane
orgiastic rituals sacrament promising
an inner-worldly
sensual salvation
from the iron cage
of formal impersonal
relationships
Intellectual Cognitive rationality, No: until the emergence The cognitive
objectivity, of modern science, revolution of science
value neutrality intellectual speculation which set in motion
was compatible with the the programme
religious worldview and of intellectual
it was subordinate to the disenchantment of
latter the world through its
rational explanation

Source: Author’s own systematisation based on Weber (1946: 323–357).