Love and Society

In often moving ways, this scholarly text explains how love has come to be at the heart of late modern morality. The book beautifully navigates from explaining the sacred to the mundane ideas, myths, rituals and experiences of love and how they have changed. This is a theoretically rich and empirically exciting journey that seeks to illustrate love as a social bond as well as an emotion that has become predominant in linking individuals to the social sphere in durable ways. It is a compelling account of the ways in which love has become the fundamental organising principle of our social world with implications for how intimates are morally distinguished from non-intimates and how consumption is entangled with our selves and desires.

Dr Mary Holmes, University of Edinburgh, UK

Seebach has produced a grand systematic treatise on the historical transformations of love as code, ritual, and experience. Skillfully integrating Simmel and Luhmann with micro-sociology of emotions, he shows how love survives within the frames of contemporary myths and "rituals of the second order" even in the flux of late modernity.

Randall Collins, author of Interaction Ritual Chains.

Seebach's Love and Society covers a lot of ground: not only does it superbly review the now crowded space of theories of love, but it also analyzes the rituals, stories and forms of exchange at work at love, and asks what makes love a second order social form, that is a social form made to last. The idea of love as a second order social form is original and persuasively argued throughout. This is an important addition to the philosophical and sociological literature on love.

Eva Illouz, EHESS and Hebrew University of Jerusalem

...this book covers vast intellectual ground and contains a lot of thorough and interesting
analysis of empirical instances of love rituals and lay persons’ stories concerning their experiences of
modern love.

Poul Poder, University of Copenhagen, Denmark