Love as a social action: the concept in the sociological thought

The starting point of this paper is represented by the studies carried out by the study group of Social-One (Iorio, 2014; 2015; Araújo et al., 2015; Araújo et al., 2016; Martins and Cataldi, 2016), which recognized a public dimension and not only intimate and personal dimension of love in today's society. Taking as a reference point the work of Luc Boltanski, “L’amour et la justice comme competences” (1990), the research of the study group has proposed to widen the circle of sharing to go beyond the input from classic sociologists with a new conceptual category linked to agape. This path has actually already been begun by some well-known scholars - including Simmel, Sorokin, Giddens, Luhman and Honneth - on the shoulders of whom it has already been possible to see the historical path of transformation of the concept. But the “agape” action brings something new to the social sciences: agape, in fact, introduces emerging characteristics, which at the same time link to and transcend the love understood as “eros” and “philia”, defining itself as a key to gaining insight into a primarily empirical social reality based unconditional love of neighbour. On this basis the paper traces the path that the concept of love has had in the history of sociological thought, enlightening its public and social characters and proposing a research project based on love as agape.