Why does love matter?

Love and Society discusses the meaning and importance of love for contemporary society. Love is not only an emotion that occurs in our intimate relationships; it is a special emotion that allows us to relate to each other in a lasting fashion, to create out of our individual pasts a shared past, which enables us to project a shared future.

Bringing together the idea of Simmel s second order forms with theories of love, this insightful volume shows that the answer to why love is so central to society can be found in the social transformation of...