Quotes from Eva Illouz

Neoliberalism must be grasped as an individualist social philosophy whose main locus of attention is the self, and whose main anthropological assumption, as Aschoff argues, is that 'we are all independent, autonomous actors meeting in the marketplace, making our destinies and in the process making society. The consequence of neoliberalism was a widespread collapse of the social in favour of the psychological.

Romantic love is a collective arena within which the social divisions and the cultural contradictions of capitalism are played out.

Capitalism is characterized by an entire cultural mindset, in that 'exchange relationships, that of buying and selling, have permeated most of the society.

We argue that if happiness has come to be so prominent in neoliberal societies, it is because it has proven a very useful concept for rekindling, legitimizing and re-institutionalizing individualism in seemingly non-ideological terms through science's 'neutral' and authoritative discourse.

Emotions are the complex conjunction of physiological arousal, perceptual mechanisms, and interpretive processes; they are thus situated at the threshold where the noncultural is encoded in culture, where body cognition, and culture converge and merge.

Mindfulness thrives on the belief that the root of problem is to be found in individuals themselves, rather than in a socio-economic reality. Allegedly, it is not society that needs reform, but individuals who need to adapt, change, and improve.

As Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm indicate in their book, The Buddah Pill, mindfulness often deepens feelings of depression and anxiety, as well as creates some sense of dissociation and detachment from reality as a consequence of excessive self-centredness.

Positive psychologists' claims contrast with the results of sociological studies that relate increasing individualism to higher rates of depression and even suicide in developed as well as in developing countries.

The liminal is an exploration of the limits of the permissible, controlled and ritually sanctioned by the group. It therefore contains elements of transgression as well as a mechanism designed to reestablish the 'normal' order of things.

It could be said that, had it not already existed, corporations might have invented positive psychology themselves.

Autonomy in the workplace is highly valuable in neoliberal organizations because responsibility is no longer vertically distributed but horizontally spread and diffused.

Culture cannot be understood in terms of probabilities. To understand culture is to understand, in Michael Schudson's words, the social significance of the statistically insignificant, as well as the seamless web of meanings people draw on to make sense of social situations.

I am less interested in tearing down the veil than in pointing to its presence.

Love was central to Victorians' sense of self because through it they learned to know not only their partners but themselves. Love was a template for authentic, albeit restrained, expression of their inner self, but it was also a means to attain spiritual perfection, as was made clear by the consistent association of the romantic discourse with the values and metaphors of religion.

The transformations undergone by the meaning of love are characterized by: 1) the extrication of love from religion, that is, the secularization of the discourse of love 2) the increasing prominence of the theme of love in mass culture, especially in film and advertising 3) the glorification of the theme of love as a supreme value and the equation of love with happiness 4) the inclusion of 'intensity' and 'fun' in the new definitions of romance, marriage, and domesticity

The systematic association between love, marriage, and bliss was different from nineteenth-century representations, in which love was more often tragic rather than a happy feeling.

Romance novels constitute 46 percent of all mass market paperbacks sold in the United States, and according to Harlequin, over half its customers buy an average of 30 novels a month

A cultural change is less a matter of content than a restructuring of relationships between subordinate and dominant elements.

Heterosexual romantic love contains the two most important cultural revolutions of the twentieth century: the individualization of lifestyles and the intensification of emotional life projects; and the economization of social relationships, the pervasiveness of economic models to shape the self and its very emotions.

Romantic love is irrational rather than rational, gratuitous rather than profit-oriented, organic rather than utilitarian, private rather than public. In short, romantic love seems to evade the conventional categories within which capitalism has been conceived.

In a way, part of the widespread success of happiness actually lies in that it delivers a legitimate, universalizing and apolitical discourse for individualism - a discourse that conceives one's life as separate from community and which sees the inner life as the cause and root of all behaviors.

Culture thus is a matter of shared meanings, but it is not only that: it is also one of the ways in which exclusion, inequality, and power structures are maintained and reproduced.

This excessive blame of individuals for their failure to lead happier lives would actually explain in part why individuals of individualist societies tend to rank themselves as above 7 out of 10 points in happiness questionnaires. According to some studies, a cognitive positive bias would account for the strong and systematic tendency amongst individuals of these societies to protect their self-esteem by inhibiting negative evaluations of their lives.

The political utopia envisioned by Marx and Engels clearly implied a total separation between commodity and sentiment, interest and love, as a precondition for authentic, fully human relationships.