Amore, lusso e capitalismo. Werner Sombart e la secolarizzazione dell’amore. Come la trasformazione dell’erotismo e del rapporto tra i sessi ha influenzato la nascita del nuovo spirito capitalistico-borghese

Sombart takes the view that changes in the “superstructure” (ideas, religions, and the “metaphysical”) anticipate changes in the “structure”. These, in turn, reinforce and accelerate change in social roles. This paper aims to investigate certain aspects of this complex issue, by offering an interpretation of the development of capitalism and the bourgeois spirit in relation to changes in the relationship between the sexes, beginning with the expansion of hedonic and luxury consumption. Love and relations between the sexes thus become a privileged field of observation for the examination, through micro-interpersonal relationships, of changes relating to macro-social relations, in particular in societies where the social structure is founded on the institution of the “traditional” family. Sombart effectively highlights the differences between two visions of the world – in simple terms, one might say “pre-bourgeois” and “bourgeois” – and underlines how the birth of “free” and “illegitimate” love implies, at the social level, the emergence of a “new human type.”