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CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article
Front. Sociol.
Sec. Sociology of Emotion
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2025.1523683
This article is part of the Research Topic Love: From Emotion to Social Action, Beyond Opposition View all articles
Reasons of the Heart: Repositioning Love in Sociology
Provisionally accepted
Bjørn Thomassen 1,2*
Andreas Bandak 3- 1 Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark
- 2 Roskilde University, Roskilde, Zealand, Denmark
- 3 University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Capital Region of Denmark, Denmark
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 attemot 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, revalorising the work of "maverick thinkers" like Gabriel Tarde and Georg Simmel, and incorporating insights from phenomenological traditions, as in the work of Max Scheler.
Keywords: love, Tarde (Gabriel), Simmel, Georg, Theory, Scheler, Sorokin
Received: 06 Nov 2024; Accepted: 19 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Thomassen and Bandak. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Bjørn Thomassen, Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark
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