Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy (Niklas Luhmann)
Хишигтөгс Khishigtugs num.academia.edu
In this important book Niklas Luhmann - one of the leading social thinkers of the late 20th century - analyses the emergence of ‘love&#39; as the basis of personal relationships in modern societies. He argues that, while family systems remained
Love is a theme at the centre of all our lives, including those of sociologists and social scientists. It has been widely addressed and described in literature and poetry, extensively depicted in the pictorial arts, sung about in music. Even philosophy, from its very beginnings, has devoted beautiful and intense pages to this theme. For reasons difficult to understand, the founding fathers of our discipline have been reluctant to enter the analytical realm of love. They touched this theme, but only marginally. It is only relatively recently that more insightful and focused discussions have come from some key figures of contemporary sociology in works by Niklas Luhmann, Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Zygmunt Bauman and, more recently, Eva Illouz that demonstrate the profoundly social nature of our most intimate feelings and convey how the transformation of love and intimacy is related to wider social changes. In this sense, this collection edited by Silvia Cataldi and Gennaro Iorio aims to fill a major gap, while fuelling the debate on social love and its implications as a transformative force in an era characterised by multiple crises. By bringing together scholars from across several countries, not only it collates the fruit of years of research, but it also launches new developments in the debate on social love and set a new research agenda.

Denis de Rougement, in his classic opus Love in the Western World argues that the West was unique in its paradoxical modeling of the relationship between passionate love and marriage; “Since its origins in the twelfth century passionate love was constituted in hostility to marriage.” This articles explores this hypothesis by comparing the French legend of Tristan of Yseult and the Russian legend of Peter and Fevronia of Murom. The contrast between the two stories can be analyzed in terms of the tension between Eros and Agape, between a fatal/passionate love in which the individual defies society - narrowing it down to the point of one irreducible and a companionate love, which embeds the individual in an ever-widening network of community made up of friends, relations, descendants. The article concludes on Anna Karenina. There Tolstoy presents a new variation on the theme of passion love and marriage - a synthesis demonstrating the effects of Westernization on traditional Russian culture, and one much closer to our modern sensibility.

We propose that romantic love is a biosocial phenomenon that may well be a universal and that its cultural aspects are a product of social conditions. This position is unique because romantic love is promoted as a cultural rather than social universal. We argue that culture, social, and psychological phenomena are too frequently conflated and their core definitional features underdefined by researchers. Culture refers to learned practices that have collectively shared meanings to the members of a society. Under social conditions in which romantic love does not confer reproductive and health advantages to a mother and child, it will often be suppressed, undeveloped, and rejected as a cultural component. Through a cross-cultural study, we show that female status and family organization are important features that help in regulating the sociocultural importance of romantic love as a basis for marriage. The authors propose that romantic love is more likely to be a biosocial universal than a biocultural universal. We understand that there is a great deal of overlap between social and cultural, but we intend to make clear the distinctions, as we see them, between these two concepts. Boyd and Richerson (1985, 2005) and Boehm (1999, 2012) have been proponents of a biocultural approach to the study of ''the origin and evolution of cultures.'' These researchers have developed a biocultural approach that remains true to the ethnographic cross-cultural approach of anthropology first advocated by Tylor (1889). Our work fits into this model for cross-cultural research, with the notable addition that the focus is on social conditions and practices from which cultural configurations emerge. In this study, we hope to accomplish the following tasks: First, we intend to demonstrate that the social aspect of romantic love has been neglected in cross-cultural research on love and is just as important as culture, if not more so, for the study of romantic love; second, we intend to show that female status and family organization are important features in regulating the sociocul-tural importance of romantic love, particularly (but not exclusively) as a basis for marriage; third, in our discussion, we present an argument for attending more carefully to definitions of core concepts (e.g., culture, romantic love) and the explanatory limits and strengths (or parameters) of those definitions ; and fourth, we seek to stimulate interest in developing better (i.e., more reliable and valid) codings of the concept of romantic love (and other expressive/subjective concepts) in the cross-cultural databases. We began such studies over 15 years ago (de Munck & Korotayev, Creative Commons CC-BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

How culturally and historically specific is the experience of romantic love. Western expectations and beliefs about romantic love clearly develop out of our unique historical trajectory and cultural background. But this obvious truth should not blind us to deeper correspondences between our emotional lives and the emotional lives of people in cultures different from our own, who, like lovers in our society, report an intense idealization of a loved person, feelings of exaltation in their presence, and suicidal despair when they are absent. The cross-cultural and historical instances presented in this article shows that romantic love is not necessarily the prerogative of a leisured class or a complex society; it is not solely heterosexual, nor does it always lead to marriage; it is not intrinsically linked to capitalism, small families, sexual oppression, a cult of motherhood, or a quest for identity, and is not simply a disguise for lust or evidence of the unseen hand of evolution at work. The extraordinary phenomenon of romantic attraction ought to be understood as a peculiarly human response to characteristic social contradictions and tensions that people seek to escape through the love of another individual.