Expelling the Other or Re-Making the Social? Bauman, Fromm and the Civic Potential of Love in Liquid Modernity

This article discusses Zygmunt Bauman’s and Erich Fromm’s diagnoses of love in contemporary consumer societies and reads them as a critical contribution to current debates on the civic potential of love. Focusing on two major transformations that affect everyday life and primary face-to-face relationships—the growing pervasiveness of digital media and the consolidation of a consumerist ethos—the paper shows how commodification, ontological insecurity and the “expulsion of the Other” undermine human relationships and contribute to the fragmentation of social love. Drawing on Bauman’s notion of liquid love and Fromm’s conception of love as an art oriented to the good of the other, it reconstructs how both authors interpret love’s erosion as a structural feature of modern capitalism and liquid modernity. At the same time, the article suggests that their analyses also illuminate the conditions under which love can still operate as a civic and solidaristic force, capable of resisting consumerist logics, sustaining caring practices and re-opening spaces of recognition, responsibility and social bonding. In this sense, Bauman’s and Fromm’s reflections help us understand not only the contemporary breakdown of real human relationships but also the ambivalent role of love in the making and unmaking of the social. In Bauman’s and Fromm’s work, the critique of contemporary forms of love does not simply describe an inevitable moral decay, but rather highlights the conditions under which love is deprived of its social and civic potential and contributes to the “expulsion of the Other”.