"Surprising, beautifully written, and erudite, Eva Illouz's latest book will deftly lure you into the complex world of emotions. You will come out of it with a renewed appreciation for all that this crucial part of life offers. This is why I give this terrific book my highest recommendation."-- Michèle Lamont, author of Seeing Others: How Recognition Works and How It Can Heal a Divided World "Jealousy, hope, disappointment, love, envy, and more. Eva Illouz takes us on a brilliant and beautifully sad journey through the emotional stations of the cross of modernity, offering a remarkable phenomenology of their institutional constitution. It is a journey to the heart of our darkness and our light, chock full of mystery, contradiction, and flashes of unexpected illumination."-- Roger Friedland, University of California, Santa Barbara "In this sweeping and compelling work, Illouz provides her most ambitious contribution to the sociology of emotions, building new alliances between social sciences and literary studies to illuminate our shared world, in the face of its apparent fragmentation." --William Davies, author of Nervous States and The Happiness Industry "Freud argued that modern civilization is built on repressed emotions.

Illouz counters that late modernity is being collapsed by emotional explosions. A tour de force by the foremost sociologist of emotion at work today."-- Philip Gorski, Yale University "In this compelling and revealing work, Eva Illouz draws on social science and literature to diagnose our present discontents. Compelling because it focuses on contemporary political developments and social movements and ranges from public life to the private and intimate. Revealing because it shows how our feelings are socially shaped and in ways we often fail to see."-- Steven Lukes, New York University "In a sweeping analysis that spans Marx and Freud, Eva Illouz uses her deeply sociological insight to address how notions such as capitalism and the internet have sowed the seeds of desire, fear, and resentment in a way that stands to undermine modern democracy. Very rarely does a book with this scope feel so present and relevant. There is nothing like it in the field.

" --Kathryn Lively, Dartmouth College.