The Curious History of Love%E2%80%A8

Diagnosing modern society as emotionally empty, Kaufmann, a professor of sociology at the University of Paris, provides a brief but exhaustive survey of love in Western Europe and America. Hoping to reconcile love's two warring aspects%E2%80%94agape, or universal love; and passion, its singularizing antithesis%E2%80%94Kaufmann seeks to create an alternative to the emotionless culture that our market economy has formed. As the influence of these two forms of love wax and wane throughout history, from Plato to Romanticism to feminism, Kaufman explains how Reason began to supplant love during the Enlightenment and, corrupted by capitalism, transformed from rational individualism into the calculating individualism that has poisoned love. Rejecting the possibility of any effective political revolution based upon love, Kaufmann lays out the golden rule for personal relationships%E2%80%94you must put the happiness of your partner before the happiness of others%E2%80%94and muses on the joys and trials of fulfilling everyday love. Given this book's epic historical scope and relative brevity, many historical movements are glossed over too quickly, at times to the detriment of the argument, but Kaufmann shines when he breaks from highly abstracted history to analyze the importance of cultural ephemera like Tristan and Isolde, classic Hollywood cinema, and personal ads %C3%A0 la Craigslist's "Missed Connections," giving the reader the peculiar feeling that, ultimately, Kaufmann's survey is both too long and too short for its own purposes. (Jan.)