CONCEPT
Emotional Capitalism
Illouz's signature concept: the cultural formation in which economic and emotional discourses have become so thoroughly interpenetrated that genuine feeling functions simultaneously as lived experience and as productive resource.
Emotional capitalism names the mature cultural formation, developing since the early twentieth century, in which economic relationships have absorbed emotional demands while emotional relationships have absorbed market logic. Corporations require not merely labor but passion; partners evaluate intimacy by its returns. The crucial subtlety is that this is not a falsification of feeling. Real joy, real creative love, real vulnerability continue to be experienced—and precisely that realness is what makes them productive. The system has evolved past the need to demand performance; it can harvest the authentic article. The AI transition represents the apotheosis of this formation: the first technology in which the gap between emotional experience and productive function closes to zero.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Illouz developed the concept across three decades of sociological fieldwork, beginning with Consuming the Romantic Utopia (1997) and reaching its fullest articulation in Cold Intimacies (2007). Her argument is that three historical forces converged in early twentieth-century America to produce this formation: the rise of