Ricerc@Sapienza

The starting point of this paper is represented by the research carried out by the study group of Social-One (Iorio, 2014; 2015; Araújo et al., 2015; Araújo et al., 2016; Martins, Cataldi, 2016), which recognised a public dimension and not only the intimate and personal dimension of love in today’s society. Taking

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.

The authors aim to introduce two sensitive concepts in sociology: gift and agapic love. Starting from a clarification of the semantic areas of the two terms, their history, their connections and their opacity, the paper aim to release gift and love only from the private sphere and to give them a public dimension, recognising a strong critical and reflective charge.

The starting point of the paper is that social interaction is anchored in the world of practical logic (Bourdieu 2003). On this base, authors aim to demonstrate that love, before being an interpretative category, is a “practical knowledge” that can be observed in daily life of social actors. Two case studies support the analysis.