Activity

The vision of love outlined here emanates directly from what nineteenth-century men and women called “character.” In contradistinction to a long Western tradition that presents love as an emotion that overtakes one’s capacity to judge and that idealizes the object of love to the point of blindness,…

Fourth, are there cultural norms and techniques to hold one’s desires and wants in suspicion? For example, Christian culture contains a built-in suspicion of one’s own (sexual and other) wants and desires, whereas a culture of consumer self-realization, on the contrary, encourages the view of desir…

[...] Psychic suffering contains an experience which threatens the integrity of the self. Suffering in contemporary intimate interpersonal relationships reflects the situation of the self in conditions of modernity. Romantic suffering is not parenthetical to presumably more serious forms of sufferi…

For example, when (heterosexual) love became the constitutive theme of the novel, few noticed that it became tightly intertwined with another theme, no less central to the bourgeois novel and to modernity at large: that of social mobility. As suggested by the two examples of Catherine and Emma disc…

Precisely because we live in a time where the idea of individual responsibility reigns supreme, the vocation of sociology remains vital. In the same way that at the end of the nineteenth century it was radical to claim that poverty was the result not of dubious morality or weak character, but of sy…