Bourdieu on love: A latent capital,a primary field and a new research agenda

Abstract

This article offers an elaboration and reconstruction of Pierre Bourdieu’s brief account of interpersonal love in Masculine Domination. Although Bourdieu presented love as a possibility of escape from relations of domination, he also understood that love was a product of labour, inserted within an economy of exchanges, and liable to become infused with domination. I build on these remarks to make the case that it is possible to conceive of love becoming a form of ‘capital’ operative within fields of intimate relations. Two substantial consequences flow from this move. First, it gives specificity to a species of field that has a threefold primacy over all others. Second, it throws into sharp relief the fact that what a person does in one field is contextualised by their location in many fields. Both moves widen the scope of Bourdieusian research considerably by pushing it into new intellectual territory and deepening its explanatory capacity.

Introduction

Pierre Bourdieu is famous as a theorist of domination, inequality and struggle. His vocabulary of capital, fields, habitus and symbolic violence was seemingly designed to convey the saturation of culture and education with class prejudices and strategies for advancement, and latterly with androcentrism too. Remarkably fruitful for empirical research of all methodologies on varied topics, these concepts have since been extended beyond their original applications to make sense of themes and process barely broached by Bourdieu himself, including sexuality and ethno-racial domination. Yet Bourdieu’s perspective has long been criticised for being reductive, cold, pessimistic and even utilitarian. People are apparently cast as self-interested, gains-maximising calculators – in practice if not in consciousness – and even our most intimate relations are seemingly boiled down to class interests and affinities (Alexander, 1995; Caillé & Vandenberghe, 2021; Honneth, 1986; Silva, 2005; Skeggs, 1997; Smith, 2005). Those sympathetic toward the general package of Bourdieu’s sociology have thus endeavoured to inject some feeling into it by thinking through how struggles for capital might be laced with affect (e.g. Aarseth, 2016; Reay, 2015; Sayer, 2005; Threadgold, 2020), harmonising with Bourdieu’s own efforts in his later work to emphasise the affective dimension of life via an elaboration of philosophical underpinnings (see Atkinson, 2020; Peters, 2012).

Through all these critiques and developments, however, one aspect of Bourdieu’s intellectual project has been largely overlooked: his remarks on interpersonal love. These are brief, presented as an afterthought to his little book on Masculine Domination (Bourdieu, 2001), and they never otherwise informed his sociology. Yet these remarks, I hold, bear the seeds for a fundamental development and advancement of Bourdieu’s sociology that radically extends its explanatory reach and research agenda. To be precise, I will build on Bourdieu’s suggestive sketch to make the case that interpersonal love is not only bound up with but can itself operate as a form of capital (that latter concept being suitably understood), that it is the foundation of a specific field – the field of intimate relations – with what seems to be a threefold primacy over all other fields, and that it throws into sharp relief the fact overlooked by Bourdieu, but suggested by others (e.g. McNay, 1999), that people are situated in more than one field at a time with profound effects for activity in each. First, however, I will begin with a reminder of Bourdieu’s sociology and its apparent instrumentalism.

Capital, field, habitus

Bourdieu envisioned the social world as being comprised of so many ‘fields’. These are conceived as relational spaces of domination and struggle between discrete sets of agents and are structured by possession of ‘capital’, the latter constituting specific properties or possessions recognised within the field – or misrecognised given their arbitrary foundation – as defining worth, value and authority. Most fields have more than one capital operative within them, meaning that there is not only an axis of overall capital volume, arraying dominant and dominated agents in the field (and those in between), but a dimension of capital composition, with one form of capital and its associated definitions of value being pitted against a different one. An agent’s position within the field, through associated experiences, generates a sense of the possible and desirable, or schemata of perception and evaluation disposing or inclining them to respond to phenomena related to the field in specific ways. This is the foundation of Bourdieu’s famous term habitus, understood as a situated ‘feel for the game’, and his related notion of strategy, designating a set of activities and practices oriented toward conserving or accumulating capital in the field. Sometimes one’s position and possibilities within a field may incline one to subvert the whole game and impose an alternative scale of values, occasionally leading to veritable revolutions within the field.

The class structure of a social order can be conceived of as a field – which Bourdieu (1984) called the ‘social space’ – and is, in capitalist societies, structured by possession of economic capital (money and wealth) and cultural capital (embodied and credentialised mastery of legitimated symbol systems), and secondarily the social capital of connections and networks. Class habitus is the seat of various strategies to accumulate – or challenge the worth of – money and wealth but also credentials and masteries, the font of specific cultural tastes adapted to the possibilities given by social location and the perceptual grid through which we categorise and judge the activities and tastes of others. It is forged first in the domestic sphere, through parent–child relations, and indeed strategies can be intergenerational, involving activities toward improving or maintaining not only one’s own position but the capital holdings of one’s offspring (Bourdieu, 1996a; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990).

Smaller-scale fields with relative autonomy from the social space include the political field, the bureaucratic field (the state), the intellectual field, the fields of cultural production (art, literature, media, etc.) and the economic field (i.e. the field of competing businesses), each having their own forms of capital nourishing habitus, practices and strategies (see e.g. Bourdieu, 1993, 1996a, 1996b, 2005, 2014). These forms of capital are, in fact, key to the autonomy of fields, which are often structured by an antagonism between their specific form of capital – artistic capital or intellectual capital, for example – and ‘outside’ or heteronomous forms of capital, especially economic capital in capitalist social orders. Bourdieu (2005) also suggested later in his career that individual firms or organisations may operate as fields (see further Emirbayer & Johnson, 2008), and others have since broached the possibility that ethno-racial/nationalist domination may be productively understood in terms of capital and fields (Emirbayer & Desmond, 2018) and that there might even be a specifically sexual form of capital (e.g. Green, 2014; Kaplan & Illouz, 2021; Martin & George, 2006; Sarpila et al., 2021; see also Atkinson, 2016, 2020).

Although Bourdieu’s arguments appealed to many on the basis of solving age-old problems in social theory – like the opposition between structure and agency, or objectivism and subjectivism – and being very useful for empirical research, especially on culture and educational inequality, many early reactions nonetheless read into it an unsatisfactory form of reductionism or utilitarianism. There are, in fact, two strands to this critical response. One of these, plied by those nonetheless sympathetic to Bourdieu, emphasised the strange absence of affect in his account of practice. Skeggs (1997, p. 10), for example, found his concepts valuable for articulating the struggles of young working-class women but chided Bourdieu for ‘cod[ing] behaviour in a cold and mechanical’ manner that ‘does not bring out the pleasures and pain associated with gender, class and sexuality’ (cf. Skeggs, 2004). Others have since made varied efforts to breathe greater emotional life into Bourdieu’s concepts (Aarseth, 2016; Reay, 2004, 2015; Sayer, 2005; Silva, 2005; Stefansen and Aarseth, 2011; Threadgold, 2020).

The other strand of critique posited that there may be forms of activity or interaction – friendly, cooperative or intimate relations, that is – that Bourdieu’s supposed depiction of self-interested capital accumulators simply cannot grasp or does so in grossly distortive ways. Caillé and Vandenberghe’s (2021) call for a new post-Bourdieusian classic sociology is its most recent iteration, but Honneth (1986) made this case early on, as a way of contrasting Bourdieu’s sociology against his own effort to revive Hegel’s philosophy of recognition struggles, followed perhaps most famously by Jeffrey Alexander’s (1995) attack on Bourdieu for seeing everything via the optic of class domination and strategisation. This included a lament on Bourdieu’s sociologisation of love, which, indeed, is mostly treated throughout his corpus in terms of matrimonial strategies, social reproduction and elective affinities within the social space. Bourdieu himself, when challenged on similar themes by Terry Eagleton, admitted there to be a problem here, though he claimed he was ‘obliged . . . by reality’ to emphasise domination and struggle and to see friendship, cooperation and intimate relations freed from domination as unusual or exceptional (Bourdieu & Eagleton, 1992, p. 116).

Some elements of these (auto-)critiques may well be answerable from within Bourdieu’s own oeuvre, however – especially as he developed it later in his career. He eventually made clear, for example, that struggles for capital – for oneself and for one’s children – are struggles for recognition (Bourdieu, 1990a, 2000; see also Atkinson, 2020; Peters, 2012). Starting from the existentialist premise that human beings are defined by unbearable finitude and contingency, he posited that we seek escape from these anthropological constants via diversion and finding a sense of purpose, and that both of these, given humanity’s capacity for intersubjectivity, can be found in the games we play with others, i.e. fields, not only because they give us something to do but because they bring recognition – esteem, value, worth – in the eyes of others. Without acknowledging Honneth, and instead appealing explicitly to Blaise Pascal, he thus seems to allude to Hegelian themes. This move coincided with a shift in his vocabulary: whereas once he wrote about people’s ‘interest’ in a field, which struck some readers as utilitarian, he later wrote of ‘illusio’, a concept designed to articulate not only emotional investment in a field – desire for its stakes, its capitals – but its arbitrary nature, captured by the disbelief among those not invested in a specific field that those within it could be so motivated by its stakes (see esp. Bourdieu, 2020, 2021; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992).

Ultimately, then, being positioned within a field and striving for capital is not about maximising material gains but a question of pursuing that which we care about, or doing what we love, which gives us meaning and defines our being, and so it is no surprise that people feel joy or sorrow, delight or anxiety, contentment or wretchedness as a result of their position, practices and trajectory within a field. Of course, not everyone’s illusio is necessarily of the same strength, nor is it invariable over time, as some people might be more cynical or ‘idealistic’ than others or become more or less invested in a field as time goes on. Nor does a field’s existential balms divest it of domination: worth and value are still defined relationally – some properties and people are considered more worthy or authoritative than others – and prevalent definitions of worth within the field are imposed by others misrecognised as authorities to do so. Still, we perhaps have a better means of understanding cooperation and friendship within and across fields: people have the same or similar interests, loves and passions, and not only in relation to a specific vision of the most desirable state of one or several fields – drawing some people to engage in friendly exchanges and form alliances, groups, factions and so on – but in relation to a field per se – wanting the best ‘for science/art/the company’ and joining with disparate others in the field to defend it from outsiders.

The postscript on domination and love

If these revisions and elaborations bear on our love for the stakes of a specific game, such as art, politics or a specific firm, what about our love for specific people? What about the care and affection we develop for significant others, whether partners, parents, children or close friends? What does Bourdieu have to say about intimacy, a subject of considerable sociological research with little connection to his project? For sure, it may be bound up with social reproduction, and we may be drawn to others or feel an affinity with family and friends on the basis of shared interests and tastes nourished by proximity in the social space and other fields, as Bourdieu argued and so much research on homogamy and homophily continues to show; but love for a specific other is not reducible to that since it involves overlooking, accepting or even cherishing whatever differences from us – big or small – a significant other bears.

Bourdieu did, in fact, address the specificity of love in a short postscript to Masculine Domination (2001, pp. 109–112), seemingly as a counterbalance to the relentless androcentrism in familial and public life documented in the first 100 pages of that book but also as an implicit answer to the problems acknowledged in conversation with Eagleton (see also Bourdieu, 1998, p. 106; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 145). He begins by asking whether love is a form of or escape from domination, particularly masculine domination. As examples of the first possibility he cites women who resign themselves to loving men ‘whom social destiny has assigned to them’ and men of mythology who ‘forget the obligations linked to their social dignity’ in submission to ‘the magic of the attachments of passion’ offered by a temptress, but he quickly moves on to state that ‘constitutive of the experience of love and friendship’ is ‘the suspension of power relations’ (Bourdieu, 2001, pp. 109–110). With relations between men and women in mind, he claims this involves ‘an end to strategies of domination, which aim to bind, chain, subject, subordinate or enslave by inducing anxieties, uncertainties, expectations, frustrations, wounds and humiliations, thereby reintroducing the dissymmetry of unequal exchange’ (p. 110). This possibility, however, is only possible via an ‘endless labour’ toward establishing relations of ‘full reciprocity’ of ‘mutual recognition’ (p. 110). More specifically, this is a recognition or justification of being ‘even in one’s most contingent or most negative particularities’ – including physical or sexual particularities – which, being disinterested, manifests in happiness in the other’s happiness, and the necessary reciprocity is embedded in ‘an economy of symbolic exchanges’ – gift giving, in other words, including the gift of one’s self and one’s body (pp. 110–111). Although Bourdieu does not elaborate any further on this, we might imagine these gifts mostly taking the form, in everyday life, of doing things for/with the other (activities, or simply listening and soothing), of moments of touch (caresses, strokes, hugs, kisses), of certain looks (smiles, eye contact, etc.) or of linguistic utterances (compliments and assertions of love), as well as gifts in the narrow sense of bought or made items.

Bourdieu then asserts two caveats limiting the prevalence of this ‘pure love’. First, he claims, it is, like the love of art for art’s sake, a historically recent invention. Second, even today it is ‘probably found only rarely in its most fully realized form’ as a ‘limit that is hardly ever attained’ because it is so ‘fragile’ (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 111). This is because it can easily lapse back into ‘excessive demands’, ‘follies’, the ‘return of egoistic calculation’, ‘routinization’ (p. 111) or ‘domineering rivalry’ (p. 112). Nonetheless, he writes, it exists sufficiently – especially among women – to act as a goal toward which we can and should work because of the ‘exceptional experiences’ it provides. In this much it occupies a privileged place in his vision of the human condition. Pure reciprocity of full recognition and affirmation is the most obvious means of suspending ‘the struggle for symbolic power that springs from the quest for recognition and the associated temptation to dominate’ (p. 111) as well as the only force capable of rivalling successfully ‘all the consecrations that are ordinarily asked of the institutions and rites of “Society”’ (p. 112).

Reconstruction: Love as capital, intimate relations as a field

Love, then, is presented as a specific mode of recognition centred on acceptance of and care for another in all their singularity, intimately bound up with affect and desire, generating manifold practices and exchanges in search of reciprocity and liable to tip into domination and manipulation. So far as I am aware, however, Bourdieu’s comments to this effect have drawn little interest from readers and researchers. There has been some rumination, in a theoretical register, on how successful they are in offering a break from the omnipresence of domination and struggle (Fowler, 2003; Friedland, 2009; Lovell, 2000). Otherwise, however, the postscript seems to have passed by with little impact, and the sociology of family and intimate life carries on with little reference to Bourdieu beyond some acknowledgement of his worthwhile emphasis on class domination and/or practical activity (see e.g. Dermott & Seymour, 2011; Morgan, 2011; Ribbens McCarthy et al., 2023; Smart, 2007; for a deeper engagement, see Perger, 2022). The same is largely true of the emergent body of work, sometimes described as ‘(critical) love studies’, seeking to rescue love from the margins of social theory and work out if and how it stands opposed to or embodies power relations (Garcia-Andrade et al., 2018; Gunnarsson, 2011; Jonasdottir & Ferguson, 2014). My contention, however, is that with a little extension of Bourdieu’s logic, his reflections pave the way for significant development of Bourdieusian theory and research beyond their usual domains of application.

The first step is to generalise Bourdieu’s comments on love as a specific form of mutual recognition beyond the amorous male/female couplet he seemed to have in mind, and not just to encompass non-heterosexual partnerships, which he already implicitly did in his remarks on the LGBTQ+ movement (Bourdieu, 2001, pp. 118–124; Fowler, 2003). If the ‘loving dyad’ is, as he put it, an ‘elementary social unit’ (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 112), it need not be confined to what the Greeks called eros – passionate attachment between (new) lovers – but can and should be extended to cover storge – the love like that between a parent and child, or siblings, or partners beyond the stage of ‘falling in love’ – and, as Bourdieu sometimes implied, philia – close friendships and confidantes. All such relations involve mutual care, affection and concern, and all can surely approximate the pure form of reciprocal recognition of one’s singularity and totality via specific exchanges (Honneth, 1996). Expanding the conception of love at stake certainly harmonises with the wider intellectual move from the sociology of the family to the sociology of intimate life (cf. Jamieson, 1998; Smart, 2007). It also separates love from sex – the one need not implicate the other, though there are obviously times when they do – the latter of which can be considered a vector of (mis)recognition, and capital, unto itself, structuring perceptions of the physically attractive/ugly as well as legitimate/illegitimate, ‘normal/abnormal’ or conservative/subversive forms of desire, such as heterosexuality and homosexuality (Atkinson, 2016, 2020; Green, 2014; Kaplan & Illouz, 2021; Martin & George, 2006; Sarpila et al., 2021).

Second, with the definition of love and intimacy broadened thus, we can nuance Bourdieu’s historicisation of ‘pure love’. For love and intimacy, mutual care and affection approximating their purest forms are surely ancient if the Greeks recognised them, if not, indeed, an inalienable element of the human condition – and Bourdieu (2001, p. 111) implies as much in his own comment on love’s enduring appeal ‘from a strictly anthropological point of view’ given humanity’s inherent struggle for purpose and recognition. Perhaps what Bourdieu had in mind when historicising pure love was the move away from match-making based on considerations of social honour or economic standing (or necessity) toward partnering explicitly for love and elective affinity, enabled by socioeconomic transformation, as documented in The Bachelors’ Ball (Bourdieu, 2008) but also myriad sociological studies of love (e.g. Beck & Beck-Gernshiem, 1995, 2001; Hochschild, 2003; Illouz, 2008; Luhmann, 1986). Some might also think of Giddens’ (1992) account of the rise in late modernity of the ‘pure relationship’ based on reflexivity, democratic decision-making and ‘disclosing intimacy’ (cf. Bauman, 2003; Jamieson, 1998). Yet these are only changes in the specific expressions or forms of love, affection and mutual recognition, and their degree of correspondence with marriage and partnership choices, rather than their very existence; the balance of eros and storge perhaps (one may love another but not be able or allowed to marry them, and one may marry someone one does not love at first but then develop sincere affection for them through experience together). Likewise, the idea that love and affection between parents and offspring was absent or rare in the past – as famously argued by Ariès (1996) – seems hard to sustain, even if intergenerational relations and forms of love are certainly always contextualised by specific discourses of parenthood/childhood adapted to different social conditions, possibilities and struggles (see Orme, 2001). Indeed, both the ‘pure relationship’, given its highly selective evidential base, and contemporary notions of ‘good/involved parenting’ might best be considered dominant conceptions of love and intimacy, presupposing and endorsing symbolic mastery and liberalism, against which people – who may nonetheless love one another in the sense of mutual recognition via interpersonal exchanges – are unfavourably judged (cf. Gillies, 2009; Jamieson, 1998, 1999; Layder, 2009; Reay, 2004).

Third, a closer look at Bourdieu’s language on love, specifically the emergence of equal exchange amidst all else, discloses that its common form is, in fact, bound up with domination. Love is something that can be intentionally or unintentionally used for position, authority or symbolic power over the other, and the economy of exchanges can become imbalanced in exactly the same way as any other economy of exchanges, like that among the Kabyles of North Africa studied by Bourdieu (1990b) himself, with partners in the exchange accruing or losing ‘honour’ – symbolic capital – as a result (cf. Duncombe & Marsden, 1993; England & Farkas, 1986; Hochschild, 2003; Layder, 2009). Love can be won or lost, accumulated or dissipated, in single acts or a series of acts of exchange – gifts, insults, (not) doing things for the other, ‘taking them for granted’ and so on. It is, in short, a form of capital – a form of recognition that has come to operate as a form of symbolic power over others and which is even, in some instances, buyable with and convertible into other forms of capital – though, not being backed by institutionalised guarantees, it is evidently an elementary one (cf. Bourdieu, 1990b). It might even be possible to speak of love in terms of misrecognition in certain instances, as when we think someone loves us more than they do, or when love is strategically (or even falsely) invoked to make someone do something, or love for someone blinds one to their abuses minor or major, and so on. And then there is the horrible symbolic violence of feeling – and especially being made to feel – unloved and unlovable. Still, if love is often bound up with domination in everyday practice, to different degrees in different relationships (and a proportion of familial/friendship relations, even routine ones, will not involve love at all), it nonetheless entails a limit point of equilibrated reciprocal exchange pointing toward the possibility of non-violent relations. Perhaps the promise, expectation or approximation of that limit point should be considered constitutive of the experience of love, for the sake of sociological analysis, rather than reaching that limit point.

For love to be conceivable as a form of capital, however, we need to take the fourth step, which is also facilitated by broadening our scope beyond Bourdieu’s discussion to cover familial and intimate relations generally. This is to recognise that the economy of exchanges between two people is always inserted within a wider economy of exchanges between intimates – parents, children, caregivers, siblings, confidantes, ‘chosen family’, etc. – and that, therefore, the ‘loving dyad’ is embedded within a broader network of intimate relations in which love as a form of capital – how much one is loved by others – is more or less unevenly distributed, giving rise to a sense of place relative to others, and striven for. Love is defined relationally, not just in an ego-alter modality but within a topological web of mutually-oriented agents struggling for the same stakes. Bourdieu (1996c, 1998, pp. 64–74) himself wrote of the family as a field, centred on the struggle for authority over the family’s destiny and structured by physical and economic forms of capital (see also Bourdieu, 1990b, p. 54; Atkinson, 2016; McNay, 1999), though he also noted the degree of capital concentration and contention is variable. Instead we might speak with Loa and Choi (2024) of so many fields of intimate relations which nonetheless continue to be pervaded by schemes of perception formed by dominant – including heteronormative – conceptions of ‘family’. Doing so not only recognises the diversity of forms of intimacy within and beyond the perceptual boundaries of ‘family’ and their continued orientation around common mental categories (including that of the ‘household’, which may become a domestic sub-field, but also the ‘kith/kin’, ‘close/distant’ and generation-based oppositions). It also furnishes the principle of relative autonomy to fields of intimate relations by establishing their specific form of capital – love, care, affection – while conceiving other forms of power (physical, economic, cultural, sexual, etc.) operative within fields of intimate relations as heteronomous capitals. ¹ As in any other field, these capitals interplay in complex ways – harmonisation, conversion, polarisation – only disclosable via empirical research, and the force of autonomous capital relative to heteronomous powers will be variable across individual fields as well as over time, both in the short term and historically.

This last point underscores that fields of intimate relations, again like other fields, are dynamic, with individuals rising, falling and so on gradually or rapidly over time, but a specificity of these fields is that their dynamism is also bound up with constant processes of merging and splitting, as new relations form or weaken and players enter (including through birth) and exit (including via death). Indeed, any one field of intimate relations should be understood as embedded within a broader constellation of overlapping fields with fuzzy boundaries that can become the subject of struggles of greater or lesser magnitude.

The threefold primacy of the field of intimate relations

The field of intimate relations is not, however, just another type of field to log alongside the other ones identified by Bourdieu. Instead, everything would seem to indicate that it may just possess a threefold primacy – a ‘coming first’ – over all other fields. The first form of primacy is historical: anthropology and ethnoarchaeology have long established that the earliest forms of human organisation – bands, tribes, clans and villages – were necessarily oriented around the kin group and exchanges and relations within and between kin groups. Out of this eventually grew the ‘houses’ and ‘lineages’ that came to rule ancient civilisations and medieval kingdoms and which would one day, through the processes and strategies explored by Bourdieu (2014), pave the way for the bureaucratic state and the differentiation of fields of law, politics and so on that we observe today. Fields oriented around kinship, with all their forms of power and honour, were thus the first human fields and the conditions of possibility for all that came after.

Even within multi-field societies like today’s, however, the field of intimate relations retains a second form of primacy: developmental. Bourdieu (2000, pp. 164–167), treading the territory of psychoanalysis, made clear that the first struggle for recognition – the first field – into which a child (usually) emerges as a social being is the domestic group, as a sub-section of the field of intimate relations (Atkinson, 2016). It is through the struggle for recognition from caregivers, and the latter’s responses (based on their own recognition of, and desire for recognition from, the child), that a child’s first evaluations and dispositions – their sense of the possible and desirable – are formed and their illusio for specific forms of capital crafted (their ‘primary’ or ‘family habitus’). The process is, for sure, given specificity by the class and other field positions and dispositions of principal caregivers, but also by the structure and transformations of relations between intimates (siblings, other caregivers, etc.). Eventually the child emerges as an agent in the social space, and potentially in an employment-related field (their so-called ‘secondary habitus’), but their range of possible futures, again setting the conditions of possibility for all that came after, was first formed through struggles for and exchanges of love, care and attention within the field of intimate relations. They remain within the evolving field as they age, of course, but the sources of worth and value there come to be played off others, which may in some instances dovetail with a rejection or subversion of familial orthodoxies regarding desirable futures, tastes, pastimes or political stances (cf. Bourdieu et al., 1999, pp. 507ff.).

This brings us to the third form of primacy characterising the field of intimate relations. Research tends to show not only that the vast majority of people consider family of crucial importance to their lives but that most people think it more important than their employment, money or other things when asked to rank or rate them (Atkinson, 2024; Koshy et al., 2023). Patterns are differentiated by gender, age and class, for sure, opening up possibilities for the kinds of domination and manipulation flagged by others. If women are typically more strongly oriented toward family than men are, for instance, and thus invested more in care for and love of others, this may be exploited by men, who are typically more strongly oriented toward work and money than women are, whether directly within the intimacy field (‘if you love me. . .’) or indirectly within other fields, including the economic field in the form of a strategic commercialisation of love (Hochschild, 2003; Illouz, 2008; Jonasdottir, 1994). Nonetheless, even those who rate family life lower than others do are still likely to rate it highest among their own concerns. This might be taken as evidence that people’s illusio for the forms of recognition offered by the field of intimate relations not only ‘rivals’ their illusiones for other fields and capitals, as Bourdieu suggested, but typically outweighs them. On top of this, it is widely known that strong and stable social networks – comprising family and close friends, i.e. intimates whose recognition one recognises as valuable – are vital for mental and physical well-being (Marmot, 2004). The structure of and one’s location within a field of intimates may just be the most prominent feature of many people’s practical experience and sense of worth.

Multiplicity

The motivational primacy of intimate relations vis-a-vis other fields in an individual’s life presupposes something else given little attention by Bourdieu: that we are positioned within more than one field at a time, that we value their stakes unequally, and that our desire for the stakes of, and experiences and practices within, one field will impact on our position and practice within another (see Abrahams & Ingram, 2013; Atkinson, 2016, 2020, 2024; Burawoy, 2019; Decoteau, 2016; Lahire, 2011; McNay, 1999; Schmitz et al., 2017). Bourdieu (1996b, p. 271; 2010, pp. 5–7) did, for sure, note the existence of ‘double plays’ when someone is positioned within two employment-based fields, such as the magistrate breaching the political field or the religious figure entering the sociological field, and the manner in which capitals and dispositions honed in the social space are translated and converted into field-specific capitals and dispositions is a background feature of many of his analyses (on Manet, for example, see Bourdieu, 2017). Beyond reducing it to struggles over patrimony, however, he never made the connection to the familial field, or field of intimate relations, which logically renders the multiplicity of field positioning a pervasive and profound social experience. Everyone, with rare exceptions, is positioned within a field of intimate relations, and everyone is positioned within a social space, and then many people are positioned within employment-related fields too – a firm or organisation if not one of the larger-scale fields studied by Bourdieu. Everyone, therefore, will feel the pull of multiple sources of value and multiple field effects on their time, attention and mental energy. Indeed, their lives are organised around the spatiotemporal and psychological management of these forces.

At one stroke, one could argue, we find a means of connecting Bourdieusian sociology to not only the sociology of intimate life but the vast body of research on ‘work–life balance/articulation/overspill’ (e.g. Crompton, 2006; Grzywacz et al., 2002; Hochschild, 2001, 2012) – a body of research otherwise having little to do with Bourdieu (though see Evans & Wyatt, 2023, 2024). In fact, Bourdieu (2001, p. 107) himself recognised the sacrifices and tensions experienced by women trying to juggle family life and ‘success’ in employment, but never couched it in field terms, and McNay (1999) explicitly made the case that women’s moves between the familial field and employment-related fields induce a certain reflexivity, but this has never been followed up on conceptually or empirically. Both allude to the important theoretical point that capitals, positions, desires, dispositions and strategies are forged not only within single fields but across the fields an individual is situated within (cf. Bourdieu, 1990a, p. 73), and that this may differ by gender as well as across the life course (given the difference having younger or older children is likely to make). National context will matter too, as the nexus of policies and discourses emanating from the fields of politics, the state, business and so on, describable in terms of ‘welfare’ or ‘gender regimes’ (Esping-Anderson, 1990; Orloff, 1996), will structure possibilities and expectations.

Work–family struggles experienced disproportionately by women are probably the most obvious – and unjust – manifestation of the play of intimate fields with others in individual lives, but they hardly exhaust it. Bourdieu’s comment that passionate attachment to a lover can make men ‘forget the obligations linked to their social dignity’, for example, implies they can neglect or forego practices associated with the forms of value, or capitals, of one field, such as an employment-based field, for the sake of love. We would add that it could be parental or filial love as much as amorous love that puts a brake on certain strategies or practices. There may also be instances where someone participates in a certain employment-based field, and pursues certain strategies within it, for the sake of someone in the field of intimate relations (e.g. carrying on in a firm one hates, or pursuing heteronomous rather than autonomous capitals, to support the other). Or strategies for capital within one field – whether the intimate field or an employment-based field – are enacted as a kind of compensation for failure in another. Or more simply, frustrations and sorrows – but also joys – from one field bleed into interactions and relations with others in another field. And so on. The point is, many experiences and strategies related to any one field, if not most of them, only make full sense when placed in this context of multiple field membership, and that while (the feel for) the topology and dynamism of a single field may be necessary for explaining what one or more people do within it, it might not always be sufficient. New concepts are required to articulate this, not least a conception of a cross-field ‘meta-habitus’ and a relational model of multiple illusio (see further Atkinson, 2016, 2020, 2023, 2024, forthcoming).

Conclusions and prospects

Although it took some time to become clear, Bourdieu’s sociology can readily illuminate the pains and pleasures, or joys and sorrows, of social life, not only via felt reactions to how others do or would judge us – shame, guilt, pride and so on – but insofar as we are more or less successful in pursuing the things we care about. Less certain was whether Bourdieu’s sociology could sensibly render intimacy, care and love for other people – and the pleasures and pains they bring – beyond matrimonial strategies, social reproduction, homophily and shared interests within and across large-scale fields. To offer some clarity, I have taken Bourdieu’s brief postscript on love from the tail of Masculine Domination and pursued a four-point reconstruction. The result was an autonomous form of capital strictly separable from sex insofar as not all loving relations implicate sexual desire and not all sexual desire implicates love, even if, like any other capitals, they can and do frequently combine in cathartic or noxious ways. This capital, furthermore, is inserted within a species of field that is not simply yet another to add to the list of fields dissected in Bourdieu’s corpus and proliferating, sometimes questionably, in the works of others influenced by him, but one with three forms of primacy over all others: historical, developmental and evaluative. This in turn highlighted the point, given scant attention by Bourdieu, that we are situated in more than one field at a time, necessitating new terms capable of making sense of how the fields we inhabit interrelate in everyday experience and practice.

It is worth re-emphasising, to counter a persistent reductive reading, that while I have given attention and sociological elaboration to the inflection of love with domination, Bourdieu’s original point remains valid: love as a form of singular recognition based on reciprocal exchange of ‘gifts’ freed from imbalance and domination is a realisable and sometimes realised possibility worth striving for in relationships, even if it is always contextualised by a wider system of exchanges (in which some others, for example, might feel left out or sidelined by that balanced exchange). Love can be and often is a profound wellspring of interpersonal and structural power and manipulation, flowing along gendered and generational lines especially, but it is also holds the potential for, and offers flashes of actualisation of, a genuine suspension or renouncement of domination. Perhaps that offers a way out of the quandary of love studies – a means of surmounting the critical/celebratory binary polarising feminists and others (Gunnarsson, 2011). Perhaps, too, the positive face of love as mutual recognition, and counter to dominion, can be broadened out into the generalised type of love for others that the Greeks called agape, as Boltanski (2011) hopes – but that is for the moral philosophers to ponder.

More interesting from a sociological point of view are the possibilities for research opened up by the conceptual elaborations offered here. On the one hand, I would suggest they extend the capacities of Bourdieu’s tools into areas of enquiry where he otherwise remains a marginal or absent figure, especially the sociology of family and intimate life and the mountain of scholarship on the interface between family and employment, by removing any vestiges of untenable class reductionism. Demonstrating advances over alternative perspectives would, for sure, require a separate, full engagement in itself (for some suggestions, see Atkinson, 2024, forthcoming), but establishing the logical viability and possibilities of a Bourdieusian sociology of intimacy has been necessary first. Hopefully we have at least indicated that Bourdieu’s tools may offer more to sociologists of intimacy and work/family tensions than just a laudable emphasis on class and practice. Maybe, for instance, they can give further substance to the growing emphasis on ‘relationality’ in the sociology of intimate life (Roseneil & Ketokivi, 2015), or a lens for seeing how the family ‘practices’ and ‘displays’ foregrounded by many (e.g. Dermott & Seymour, 2011; Morgan, 2011) are not only forces of fusion but suffused with power and struggle.

On the other hand, since foregrounding the field of intimate relations and the struggle for and around love has highlighted the effects of multiple field membership on experience and practice, it also opens the way for research going beyond the usual formula of ‘field analysis’ pursued by Bourdieu; a style of enquiry that takes as its object not a multitude of people within a single field but single individuals or events – whether one-off transformations, like revolutions, or regularities, like educational inequalities – defined by a multitude of fields. Field analysis would of course remain a necessary element of Bourdieusian sociology, but complementing it with multi-field analysis offers the promise of not only stretching the reach of relational sociology from the ‘big structures, large processes and huge comparisons’ famously targeted by Tilly (1989) to the sanctum or terror of the domestic space but articulating the interplay of the two in the most granular of experiences, perceptions and worries. Going beyond the gestural or theoretical statements on multiplicity of Bourdieu and others, or the small steps of some, such a development in research capacity, giving form to what was previously hidden, should thus deliver a better handle on how all fields today work all the time – that is, in conjunction with the myriad concerns and worries flowing from the intimate lives of their constituents. Interpersonal love is thus no afterthought or curiosity for a robust theory of social life – it cannot be, because it runs through everything.