Love and development

Submitted by cuz on Thu, 09/26/2013 - 19:46

So my graduate school class today took a surprising and welcome turn. There were two things that I'll separate out. The first is this: love and development. For class we read the 30-year update to Limits to Growth. At the end, the authors identify five tools for reshaping the feedback loops in the existing global system. One of these is love, which unsurprisingly gave everyone pause. And we spent most of the class discussing what love is, how it applies to development, how politicians have used love (current mayor of Bogota Gustavo Petro Urrego and former Paraguayan President Federico Franco), and love's connection to philanthropy and charity. It has me thinking that it would be interesting to look at the relationship between love and development. So here is a list, which I will amend over time as new ideas emerge, of books and articles that might be useful for such an endeavor:

  • Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, which addresses love in its final chapter.
  • Cornell West, The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought, which I assume addresses love since it has been one of his themes.
  • Nel Noddings, Caring, which offers an ethic based on caring that has obvious connections to love and loving.
  • Adam Kahane, Power and Love, which apparently former Paraguayan President Federico Franco asked some of his staff to read (if I understood correctly).
  • Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude, a discussion (at Columbia's GSAPP) of which led him to shyly suggest that one possible solution to capitalist exploitation might be love.
  • Julius Nyerere, Ujamaa: Essays on Socialism, "Socialism and Rural Development", speaks of 'love' as an assumption of traditional ujamaa living, which is to be the basis for Tanzanian socialism.
  • Martha Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice, 2013

I am open to any other suggestions you have...