Reasons of the Heart: Repositioning Love in Sociology

The aim of this article is to discuss and bring together attempts in classical and more recent sociology that from various angles have engaged the question of love. While we do not aim to provide any final or categorical definition of love, we attempt to elaborate love as something much deeper than what is involved in intimate relationships. Love, and loving relations, rather, involve a certain disposition, a certain way of facing and engaging with the world; in the Russian sociologist Pitirim Sorokin’s understanding, to be discussed here, love constitutes a vital energy that sets the world in motion. We conclude that sociology still has much to offer concerning the importance of love, but that it requires a rethinking of disciplinary orientations, revalorizing the work of “maverick thinkers” like Gabriel Tarde and Georg Simmel, and incorporating insights from phenomenological traditions, as in the work of Max Scheler.