The End of Love. Eva Illouz

Praise for The End of Love

      “Eva Illouz presents a bleak but fascinating analysis of what the modern world has done to love … The great French novelist Honoré de Balzac said he wanted to be the historian of the human heart. The Franco-Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz might be called the historian of human heartbreak.”

       The Irish Times

      “Eva Illouz’s work combines theoretical sophistication with a sharp eye for what’s essential in contemporary culture. This singular blend has made her an intellectual star of the European world. The End of Love, the fruit of twenty years of reflection about the ways in which 21st-century emotions are inevitably bound up with consumer capitalism, will show American readers too why Illouz is one of the most important thinkers of her generation.”

      Susan Neiman, Director of the Einstein Forum

      “The End of Love is a provocative new installment in Eva Illouz’s two­ decades-long interrogation of the relations between the modern idea of love and the cultures of capitalism. As contemporary capitalism thrives on dislocation, disruption, casualness, uncertainty, and precarity, Illouz draws attention to a corresponding morphing of sexual relations and inner life. Our contemporary culture, she shows, is suffused with practices of ‘unloving’, of quickly forming and dissolving intimate ties in a quest for self­empowerment understood as radical autonomy and the exercise of free choice. Written with passion, insight, and breathtaking scope, it is the best sociological examination of the disorganization of emotional life wrought by the capitalist market, consumer culture, and the paradoxes of freedom.”

      Gil Eyal, Columbia University