Quotes from Eva Illouz

The culture of capitalism is self-contradictory, demanding that people be hard workers by day and hedonists by night.

Happiness, indeed, becomes not only a prerequisite for work - more and more managers claim to select workers according to their levels of happiness and positivity - but also the very content of the work itself, with positive emotions, attitude and motivations rising as essential psychological features, even more important or essential than skills or technical qualifications.

Commodities have now penetrated the romantic bond so deeply that they have become the invisible and unacknowledged spirit reigning over romantic encounters.

Culture is sometimes only a context in which people relate to each other, but sometimes culture has a power of its own to shape and transform social relationships.

Far from being a 'haven' from the marketplace, modern romantic love is a practice intimately complicit with the political economy of late capitalism.

The beauty-romance link was extended to cover the desire for self-expression, and the new nexus of beauty, self-expression, and romance was in turn fostered by the culture of consumption. Love was thus made to reinforce a definition of selfhood centered around the commodities that provided youth, beauty, charm, glamour, and seductive power.

The intertwining of love and romance with hedonist and antimodernist themes marked the shift from Victorian morality to a consumption-oriented or 'hedonistic' one in which pleasure was encouraged actively rather than dealt with ambivalently.

Freiheit ist kein abstrakter Wert, sondern eine institutionalisierte Praxis, die Kategorien wie den Willen, die Wahl, das Begehren und die Gefühle prägt.

Never really either private or public, the modern self establishes its value through processes that are at once psychological and sociological, private and public, emotional and ritualistic. Clearly, then, in modern erotic/romantic relationships what is at stake are the self, its emotions, interiority, and, mostly, the way these are recognized (or fail to be recognized) by others.

Lo que hace del amor una forma de locura es que no guarda ninguna conexión con lo real.

El amor apasionado implica dolor y ese dolor no nos debe atormentar. En palabras de Franzen, "el dolor duele pero no mata. Si uno considera la alternativa —un sueño anestesiado de autosuficiencia que la tecnología ampara—, el dolor surge como producto e indicador natural del estar vivo en un mundo que resiste. Vivir una vida entera sin dolor es no haber vivido".

Love is more than a cultural ideal; it is a social foundation for the self. Yet, the cultural resources that make it constitutive of the self have been depleted.

Seligman proposed not so much a new psychological approach as a new positive attitude that moved basic and applied psychology away from stagnation and focused scholars on the unexploited market target of healthy, normal people.

Positive psychologists insisted that people need to increase their happiness not only when things go wrong, but also when things go well, thus introducing a fundamentally new role to academic psychology: not only correcting suffering, but maximizing selfhood.

It could be argued that positive psychology is little more than ideology recycled in the form of charts, tables, and number-filled diagrams; an easily marketable pop psychology touted by scientists in white coats.

Different fields notwithstanding, since their early alliance positive psychologists and happiness economists have shared the conviction that happiness was not an ill-defined or speculative construct with more than fifty shades of historical and philosophical grey, but an objective, universal concept that can be unbiasedly and accurately measured.