ABSTRACT
Niklas Luhmann, a social theorist, identifies the code of romantic love with the rearrangement of intimacy that took place across the new landscape of interpersonal relations marking the transition from traditional to modern societies. He links the institutionalisation of romantic love with both the French Revolution and Romanticism. Mary Wollstonecraft's reference to 'a new language' suggests how romantic love functions as a code of communication. Gilbert Imlay's perverse turning back to an aristocratic model of masculinity involves the very same libertinism that Wollstonecraft had identified with the old language of love. A key component of the Romantic reworking of traditional models of sexuality and the family was 'pantisocracy'. A new utopian language associated with Romanticism, pantisocracy mixed romantic love and radical politics with ideals of rural retirement and new-world purity, all predicated on a vision of domesticity.
