Love's Great Transformation: The Clash of Love and Capitalism (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Philosophy - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,0, Leuven Catholic University, course: Economic Anthrogology, language: English, abstract: Love - there are few things which are as omnipresent as this phenomenon. Love is on the one hand the central heating in our universe, the feeling that gives sense to our life. On the other hand it is the source for jealousy and hate. In the search-engine google are more than eight trillion entries for the word love. In music, literature and movies again and again we are confronted with the success or failure of love - throughout the whole history. There are no real borders for the usage. You can love your fatherland, work, car, god, animals, music, chocolate and even capitalism. Some people fall in love on Friday like The Cure, other people's business is loving wisdom (philosophers). In western societies it is used in dimensions, as it was never before the case in history. Asking people about the relationship of love and capitalism many requests claim that they have nothing to do with each other or even that they are contradictory. This leads us to an interesting point, because our economic system - capitalism - tries permanently to make use of other spheres and even, according to Polanyi, subordinates them.

This paper aims to analyze the relationship of love and capitalism and to show something similar Marx did with the commodity: that love is influenced by the conditions of society (especially economy) and that its magic is one that is socially constructed. The thesis is, according to Polanyi's great transformation, that love experienced a great transformation: at least at part was love freed up by capitalism from moral and normative chains, love has become a market and capitalism subordinated love to the economy. The analysis concentrates due to the limited frame on the western culture and on heterosexual love. Furthermore the paper is more descriptive then normative; the aim is not the critic of a specific concept of love but to find out how capitalism and love interact with each other and whether one system is subordinated to the other.