Society needs free love

The argument

Love is highly individualist, and each person should be free to interpret what love is for themselves without interference from the state. That is the underpinning of the 'free love' ideology, and the reason it takes the form of a political claim rather than a private one: if love is something each person defines, then any authority that defines it on their behalf is not regulating a relationship but overriding the person whose relationship it is. The history of the idea shows how wide that interference has turned out to be. Free love arose in the mid-19th century, beginning as a rejection of legal ties between lovers and later expanding into a critique of mainstream ideas about sexuality. Over time it has encompassed the rejection of obscenity laws, been constructed as the "soul of modernity", advocated against the persecution of homosexuality and of interracial relationships, fought for access to birth control, and opposed patriarchal control of women. What began as an objection to marriage law became an objection to a much larger apparatus, because each of those causes turned out to involve the same thing: a public authority deciding which attachments are permitted and which bodies may act on them. That common thread is what makes the position coherent rather than a list of separate reforms. The state should not be able to oppress individual emotions or sexuality, and wherever it has tried, it has done so by treating love as a matter for public regulation rather than personal definition. The conclusion follows from what love is taken to be. True love should be unencumbered — love is not love unless it is free, because a feeling that has been prescribed by someone else is no longer the individual's own.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The question asked is definitional — what love is — and the argument answers a normative one about how the state should behave. 'Society needs free love' and 'the state should not be able to oppress individual emotions' are prescriptions, and a prescription about regulation presupposes the thing regulated rather than defining it. That the state has policed marriage, sexuality and reproduction is not disputed by any position in this debate; it establishes that love has been governed, not what love is. 'Love is not love unless it is free' is a stipulation rather than an argument. It redefines the word so as to exclude every attachment formed under social constraint — arranged marriages, relationships conducted under legal prohibition, love within any of the societies that have organised kinship by rule, which is nearly all of them — and so places most of human experience outside the category. A definition that disqualifies the majority of its instances is doing something other than describing. The argument also sits awkwardly against the position it supports. That position holds that love is a societal tool; this case holds that love is 'highly individualist' and that society interferes with it from outside. Those are close to opposite claims, and they cannot both ground the same conclusion: if love were constituted by social control, removing the control would not liberate love but dissolve it. As written, the argument reads more naturally as a case for love as pure emotion, or as culture-specific. And the historical examples cut across it. The campaigns against the persecution of homosexual and interracial relationships were substantially campaigns for *recognition* — for the right to marry, to inherit, to adopt, to be next of kin. Those are demands for the state's involvement in intimate life, not for its withdrawal, which is the opposite of what free-love doctrine asks.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That the state has regulated intimate relationships is not disputed and does not establish what love is, since regulating something presupposes it. The claim that love is highly individual also sits in tension with the position it supports: if love were constituted by social control, removing the control would dissolve it rather than free it. [Rejecting P2] 'Love is not love unless it is free' is a stipulation that excludes every attachment formed under social constraint, placing most of human experience outside the category. The historical examples also cut across the argument, since the campaigns against persecution of homosexual and interracial relationships were substantially campaigns for legal recognition and the right to marry — demands for the state's involvement rather than its absence.