De-Privatizing Love: A Transnational Dialogue on the Public Dimension of Love in the Socio-Political Sphere

Dominant rationalist and neoliberal frameworks have often privatized love by treating it as an intimate emotion detached from institutions, power, and collective life. This article examines when love becomes publicly consequential as a sociological force. Using an interpretive, cross-cultural, and dialogical approach, it brings into conversation three situated sociological traditions developed in Brazil, Italy, and South Korea. Rather than comparing nation-states as fixed units, the article analyses how different sociological traditions interpret shared public problems through distinct moral vocabularies and institutional contexts. Three public grammars of love emerge: struggles over inequality and ecological justice in Brazil; tensions between expertise and democratic mediation in Italy; and questions of social empathy, hyper-competition, and post-growth transformation in South Korea. Love also appears as an ambivalent force that may generate cohesion or conflict, inclusion or exclusion. The article concludes that de-privatizing love broadens sociological understanding of how emotions shape collective life and demonstrates the analytical value of dialogical engagement between sociological traditions for reconstructing the public meanings of love across different socio-political contexts.