agoraphilia

English

Etymology

From Ancient Greek ἀγορά (agorá, “agora (gathering of people or place of gathering)”) + φιλία (philía, “(fraternal) love”).

Noun

agoraphilia (uncountable)

1. The love of public life, crowds, and activity.
   • 1962, Harold D. Evjen, An institutional study of the Athenian law of homicide during the fourth century B.C.:

     First, the Athenians suffered from an acute case of agoraphilia. They seemed to center a large portion of their daily lives around the activities of the public gathering places; hence, the temples and the agora would be the most likely places at which the relatives might see the slayer.

   • 1982, I. Peter Glauber, Helen M. Glauber, Stuttering: a psychoanalytic understanding, page 136:

     Rebirth through agoraphilia is then a special instance of flight into reality.

   • 2004, Walter Redfern, Writing on the move: Albert Londres and investigative journalism, →ISBN:

     Though not noticeably a sufferer from claustrophobia, he certainly experienced agoraphilia. He had itchy feet and ants in his pants.

   • 2005, Thomas Kranidas, Milton and the Rhetoric of Zeal, page 129:

     Secondly, there is an enthusiasm for crowded confrontational scenes — what amounts to an intellectual agoraphilia, one which will climax in Areopagitica.

   • 2006, Lee Gutkind, Joanna Clapps Herman, Our Roots are Deep with Passion, →ISBN:

     My father is a lover of the agora: agoraphilia is his addiction. My father's passion for the agora is such that he never wishes to leave it. He does not like to leave the town.

   • 2013, Dick Pels, The Intellectual as Stranger: Studies in Spokespersonship, →ISBN:

     In order to clarify the practical conditions of felicity of the scientific life, we might also reverse the view of Callicles, who only values the agoraphilia of the politician or rhetoretician, and take positively his list of negatives: that philosophy is something for children, not for mature grown-ups, that philosophers lack practical experience, play games, do not know how to address public meetings: in sum, that they are impractical, strange, other-worldly.

2. The love of wide open empty spaces.
   • 1949, Town and Country Planning - Volumes 17-18, page 179:

     Its spacious market places, with their architectural colonnades, and its suburban gymnasia, ringed by trees, evidence not agoraphobia but agoraphilia — love of openness — wherever it was possible.

   • 1996, James E. Gunn, Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction, →ISBN, page 107:

     And where the endemic psychological problem of Earthmen is agoraphobia, the problem of Solarians is agoraphilia. Solarians so love the feeling of virgin space around them that they seldom come into personal contact with each other.

   • 1999, David Hockney, Marco Livingstone, Richard Gray Gallery, Space and line:

     I am concerned about the amount of space, and this is where the photograph is such a tunnel to me. This is where my agoraphilia or my claustrophobia comes in.

   • 2008, Lawrence Weschler, David Hockney, True to life: twenty-five years of conversations with David Hockney:

     That's it: the agoraphilia was stronger, the longing for big spaces.

3. The love of the exotic and new.
   • 2003, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art:

     If it is also a disguised form of agoraphilia, a desire of other other places, it follows that the arena of its poetics is public space and its re-imagining".

   • 2004, Margaret Topping, Eastern voyages, Western visions: French writing and painting of the Orient:

     ...this need to recover earlier modes of journeying emerges differently from the works of the dominant French-language travel writers - and this can be seen in particular in contributions to their 1992 manifesto, Pour une littérature voyageuse, which are marked by a sense of self- investiture as well as by attempts to elaborate aristocratic modes of travel in which the individual sensibility of a sovereign self eclipses the effects of tourism and mass travel; there is a search for micro- deserts of untainted otherness open to the solitary traveller alone, a sense of what Jean-Didier Urbain calls the 'agoraphilia' that privileges distant journeys to the detriment of travels closer to hand.

4. A global perspective; a viewpoint that seeks to encompass the world.
   • 1947, Rayner Heppenstall, The Double Image:

     This agoraphilia, this altitudinous, map-maker's vision is with him from start to finish of his life's work.

   • 2005, Nigel De Juan Hatton, American Anxieties, Foreign Landscapes, page 65:

     Old Man and the Sea as an example of open literature, which closely relates to the parable, and is the literature of agoraphilia. It recognizes the necessity of fenestration. Out through its windows we continually catch glimpses of a larger world than that immediately encompassed by the story we are reading.

5. A political stance that seeks to promote individual rights and public participation.
   • 1984, Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report:

     The administration's philosophy might be described as "agoraphilia": love of the marketplace. It was summed up in the 1985 budget: "This strategy recognizes that most of the decisions about using and producing energy in this country are made by millions of individuals ..."

   • 2012, Piotr Piotrowski, Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe, →ISBN, page 7:

     The demand for recognition of the civil rights of those who, to different degrees, have been deprived of those rights, the claim for the right to those rights, as Hannah Arendt has observed, constitues one of the territories of post-communist agoraphilia.

   • 2013, Martin Breaugh, The Plebeian Experience: A Discontinuous History of Political Freedom, →ISBN, page XXII:

     In addition to communalism and agoraphilia, there is a final characteristic of the plebeian experience relating to the temporal specificity of plebeian action.

   • 2018, Francis Dupuis-Déri, “Who’s afraid of the people? The debate between political agoraphobia and political agoraphilia”, in Global Discourse: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Affairs and Applied Contemporary Thought, volume 8, number 2:

     In order to clarify this question, I introduce two concepts: political agoraphobia and political agoraphilia.