Ricerc@Sapienza

What does drive a person to risk his life to help others? What does prompt a social worker to spend time with a needy person beyond his standard duty? Why does person give a suspended good for a complete stranger?
In the every-day life there many social phenomena based on un-conditionality, disinterestedness, surplus. Often such phenomena remain outside the field of sociological explanation.
Drawing from critical theories, authors propose to (re)introduce the sociological concept of agape-love as a theoretical frame for those social mechanisms that elude reification, quantifiability, instrumental thinking.
Agape-love, as formerly introduced by Luc Boltanski (1990), is focused on the present, avoiding any consequence calculation, refuses comparison and equivalence, doesn’t involve reciprocity. Authors propose to reconceptualise agape, integrating it with theoretical insights by different social scientists (classical scholars such as Weber, Simmel and contemporary ones such as Honneth), with new reflexive and institutional accounts, and provide it with empirical foundation.
After a theoretical discussion on the concept of love as a social driver, authors present some case studies and the results of a meta-analysis. At the end conclusions on possible learnings for contemporary society are drawn.