ABSTRACT
This essay makes a contribution to thinking about the presence of social love in democracy. What kind of loving relations does democracy need? The first section presents a diagnostic about an “ideologization of recognition” that leads to the unknown of love as a constitutive part of recognition relations. The second section advances an investigation of the present time by dealing with the current crisis of democracies and the rise of populism. Thereafter, resonance theory and its relation to recognition theory are demonstrated. This is done by developing a discussion about the relation between resonance and love, on the one hand, and resonance and democracy, on the other. The text concludes by articulating resonance and loving relations with Pierre Rosanvallon’s complex democratic theory.
