In Defense of Love An Argument

From the acclaimed author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler comes a stirring manifesto on love in the modern age.

There is a battle raging for the soul of love. Since time immemorial, we have embarked on a quest to understand the nature of love, seeking clarity in everything from astrology’s constellations to phrenology’s bumps on the head. Recently, the answers offered by advancing science have been taken up by neuroscience popularizers and have caused tectonic shifts in popular culture’s idea of love.

Ron Rosenbaum, who brings the same rigor to his thinking on love as he did to his analysis of the unique qualities of Shakespeare’s writing in The Shakespeare Wars, interrogates love’s identity in the public imagination over centuries to probe the secrets of its power. He investigates the new science of love through such aspects as “trait constellations” and the effort to turn all human lovers into numbers.

What is love? Is it a diffuse feeling or a quantifiable chemical reaction? What is a chance meeting and what is the result of chemical determinism? And most importantly, why have we become so obsessed with codifying and quantifying love through science? The very capacity that makes us human, Rosenbaum argues, is being taken over by numerical methods of analysis.

In Defense of Love is more than an examination of the intersection of love with literature and science. It is a celebration of the persistence of a mysterious and noble phenomenon: the power of surrendering to love.

RON ROSENBAUM studied literature at Yale, and briefly at Yale Graduate School, before leaving to write. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Observer, and Slate, among other publications. His book Explaining Hitler, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1998, has been translated into ten languages. Random House published a collection of his essays and journalism, The Secret Parts of Fortune, in 2000 and an anthology he edited, Those Who Forget the Past: The Question of Anti-Semitism, in 2004. He has been a member of the advisory board of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s publications project. He lives in New York City.