Social Love and the Critical Potential of People : When the Social Reality Challenges the Sociological Imagination

This book unveils the concept of social love as a kind of "Karst River" that flows through the history of sociology, reassessing it as a form criticism by people in everyday life.

Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, this book offers both theoretical and empirical reflections on social love. It shows that love is not only central to the human experience, but that it can also help to interpret and intervene in social problems such as climate change, poverty, xenophobia, and the (post-)Covid crisis, recognizing people as actors in social change. It explores the idea of love as a key element in the promotion of solidarity and recognition in today’s plural and unequal societies.

Based on empirical research on social love conducted through both qualitative and quantitative methods, especially in Europe and Latin America, this book explores the social dimension of love. Providing overviews on key questions and studies on current issues, the book is essential reference and resource for researchers, students, social workers, and professionals in social sciences, social philosophy, anthropology, social psychology, sociology of emotions and postmodern literature.

Silvia Cataldi, PhD, is Associate Professor of sociology at the Department of Psychology of Development and Socialization Processes of Sapienza University of Rome (Italy). She teaches sociology and research methods on bachelor’s and master’s degree courses and in the doctoral school. Her research focuses on methodological aspects of social research and emerging cultural and social identity models and she is involved in many European projects. She is a board member of the European Sociological Association 20RN Qualitative Methods, and the coordinator of the international research network Social-One. Among her publications she has co-edited with Iorio two books on social love: Love at the Time of Accounting (2015) and Culture of Peace (2016).

Gennaro Iorio, PhD, is Full Professor of sociology. He is Director of the Department of Political and Social Studies of the University of Salerno (Italy). Expert in the history of sociological thought, he teaches sociology of innovation, common goods, and sustainable development goals on bachelor’s and master’s degree courses and in the doctoral school. His research projects include urban resilience and prosociality, empathy between sociology and neuroscience, north–south inequalities and social innovation. For almost 20 years he has been studying social love and has published the first avant-garde books on the subject, such as Sociology of Love (2015) now published in three languages, Italian, English and Portuguese.