The Political Sociology of Emotions

Essays on Trauma and Ressentiment

Nicolas Demertzis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351212458
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

The Political Sociology of Emotions articulates the political sociology of emotions as a sub-field of emotions sociology in relation to cognate disciplines and sub-disciplines.

Far from reducing politics to affectivity, the political sociology of emotions is coterminous with political sociology itself plus the emotive angle added in the investigation of its traditional and more recent areas of research. The worldwide predominance of affective anti-politics (e.g., the securitization of immigration policies, reactionism, terrorism, competitive authoritarianism, nationalism and populism, etc.) makes the political sociology of emotions increasingly necessary in making the prospects of democracy and republicanism in the twenty-first century more intelligible.

Through a weak constructionist theoretical perspective, the book shows the utility of this new sub-field by addressing two central themes: trauma and ressentiment. Trauma is considered as a key cultural-political phenomenon of our times, evoking both negative and positive emotions; ressentiment is a pertaining individual and collective political emotion allied to insecurities and moral injuries. In tandem, they constitute fundamental experiences of late modern times. The value of the political sociology of emotions is revealed in the analysis of civil wars, cultural traumas, the politics of pity, the suffering of distant others in the media, populism, and national identities on both sides of the Atlantic.

Chapter 1

The political sociology of emotions

An outline

Political sociology in search of emotionality

The term ‘political sociology of emotions’ or ‘political sociology of emotion’ is only rarely mentioned in academic literature (Berezin 2002; Demertzis 2006, 2013; Heaney 2019). If not used as a figure of speech, it alludes to the fact that it is possible to carve out a sub-field within the sociology of emotions. The question, however, is whether such a sub-field is really needed for doing better sociological work and more adequately analyzing the emotions-politics nexus or is destined to end up as another epistemic fractal which does no more than contribute to the disciplinary chaos (Abbott 2001) and the crisis of international sociology. This book argues for a genuine need for the creation of a political sociology of emotions and it is my conviction that there are two converging vectors pointing in this direction. The first refers to the evolution of political sociology itself; the other vector is the status of the sociology of emotions.

In one way or another, the relationship between social institutions and politics, policy, and polities has been an issue of concern for the nineteenth century social theorists premised on the relative separation of state, society, and economy, signaled by the advent of modernity. In brief, Karl Marx’s political writings, which stand at odds with the once prominent historical materialist credos, as well as Max Weber’s types of power and the theory of politics as vocation, shaped the space for political sociology to appear. The same holds of course for Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis of American democracy, Lorenz von Stein’s study of the French Revolution, Robert Michels and Mosei Ostrogorski’s pioneering studies on political parties, movements and bureaucracy, Vilfredo Pareto’s sociology of political elites, and Georg Simmel’s theoretical propositions on conflict, group affiliation and mobilization premised on emotional arousal (Turner 1975). Just before World War I, André Siegfried’s electoral geography in France, and soon after World War II the electoral behavior studies at Columbia University (Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet), made headway in producing a fully-fledged political sociology. The 1950s and early 1960s were actually the era of the emergence of political sociology as a separate and institutionalized field of theory and research.

Next to the Columbia School of electoral studies, the influential group of the Michigan School (Angus Campbell, Gerald Gurin and Warren Miller) pushed the politico-psychological and socio-psychological study of voting preferences in the USA further. Due to the Cold-War political climate at the turn of the 1950s on the one hand and, on the other hand, the western concern for the cultural prerequisites of democracy in the Third World (as it was then called) and its legitimate consolidation in affluent countries in the 1960s, William Kornhauser’s The Politics of Mass Society, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba’s The Civic Culture, and Gabriel Almond and Bingham Powell’s Comparative Politics edited in 1959, 1963, and 1966 respectively, were some strong forerunners for the establishment of political sociology.

Disciplinary-wise, however, the decisive milestones were Seymour Lipset’s The Social Bases of Politics (1960) and Seymour Lipset and Stein Rokkan’s Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-national Perspectives (1967). As a product of the efforts made by the Committee of Political Sociology, founded at the 4th World Congress of the International Sociological Association in 1959, each book has been a landmark in the relevant literature. Since then, political sociology has ceased to be an underrated area of sociological investigation (Allardt 2001: 11704).

Inspired by Aristotle, Lipset’s central concern was the conflict vs consensus dilemma permeating modern democratic politics. In this respect, acknowledging the intellectual debt to Marx, Tocqueville, Weber and Michels, and focusing mainly on the USA realities he established political sociology along four main tenets: the preconditions of democracy; voting as democratic class struggle; the sources of political behavior and the social bases of party support; the input of trade unions in political life. Even after the pathbreaking Party Systems and Voter Alignments, political sociology strove to defend itself as an autonomous and genuine field of its own, not to be seen as an intellectual transit station through which new(ish) issues and perspectives travel before being absorbed by the two ‘parent’ disciplines, i.e., sociology and political science (Nash and Scott 2001: 1).

There has been therefore a matter of disciplinary boundary which became all the more obvious in the early 1980s when political sociology engulfed post-structuralist, feminist and cultural studies perspectives. This happened because the main focus of political sociology ceased to be the social-class bases of the nation-state political power and its central institutions, namely, parties, elites and trade unions (Bottomore 1979). Sharply differentiated from the rational choice paradigm, the ‘new political sociology’ of the 1980s enlarged its scope far beyond formal politics to include a capillary re-conceptualization of power alongside the Foucauldian post-structuralist tenets. It was also influenced by the ‘cultural turn’ in sociology (Alexander and Smith 1998) placing emphasis thereafter on the meaning-making endeavors of political subjects as they are affected by post-modernization processes such as individualization, life-politics, post-materialism, informationalization, cognitive mobilization, etc. (Nash 2000: x–xiii). The ‘cultural turn’ in political sociology resulted in an increasing trend towards anti-essentialism and the rejection of grand narratives that emphasized the decentered nature of power and political mobilizations and the emotional repertories of political actors (Taylor 2010: 18–21, 85–90, 110, 196). In other words, in a global world of incremental complexity political sociology after the 1980s conceptualizes, and to a certain extent contributes to, the enlargement of the boundaries of the political (Gransow and Offe 1982; Offe 1985). That is why identity politics, contentious politics and social movements action, gentrification processes, the mediatization of politics, and citizenship rights center-staged the political sociology agendas in the USA and Europe.

No doubt, one of the most crucial factors that drove this re-direction comprises the intensified processes of globalization and/or glocalization ever since the 1990s; as a consequence, political sociology has been all the more disjoined from methodological nationalism which was anyway about to lose its grip by the ’60s because of the rapid development of comparative politics. This has not only been inscribed in the widening of its thematic agendas, including thereafter transnational social and political movements, digital politics, and multinational corporate business next to more traditional topics such as political participation, power and authority, political parties and civil society (Orum and Dale 2009).¹ It is also expressed via the emergence of International Political Sociology, a combination of political sociology and international relations to be studied through con-current empirical and theoretical analysis and research of transversal issues and topics. Thus, global governance, international citizenship, political geographies, and big data surveillance are, among others, the prime object of attention studied from a more or less processual and relational perspective (Basaran et al. 2017), much owed to Emmanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory and his conceptualizations of geopolitics and geo-culture, as well as of the anti-systemic social movements (Wallerstein 2000; Mateos and Laiz 2018).

Apparently, the proliferation of themes and perspectives conferred added value to political sociology which in the meantime had become a highly established section within sociology even if it lacks disciplinary rigidity (Hicks et al. 2005). Thematic, theoretical and methodological fluidity, disciplinary contiguity and interconnectivity have been called forth by the extant de-differentiation of the scientific serendipity employed in our post-modern era (Crook et al. 1992: 197–219). Notwithstanding cross-fertilization and multifaceted analyses, it seems that since the 1980s political sociologists have not let themselves open to the insights of, nor did they valorize the conceptualizations drawn from, the fast-growing sociology of emotions. Even if a good number of them have been affected by the cultural turn of the ‘80s in the first place, they have not systematically incorporated the affective dimension in the analysis of political phenomena. Indicatively, in the highly inclusive Handbook of Janoski et al. (2005) only two chapters (out of 32) adequately address emotionality with respect to the interpretation of the politics of culture, protest movements and revolutions. Yet, the authors, James Jasper and Jeff Goodwin, were already established sociologists of emotions and social movements (Jasper 2005; Goodwin 2005) who promulgated the need for political sociologists to embrace cultural and emotional concepts in their theoretical toolkit.

More recently, in The SAGE Handbook of Political Sociology, a two-volume and 67 chapter piece of comprehensive work (Outhwaite and Turner 2018), there is hardly any substantive reference to the sociology of emotions, or to emotion or affect, or to particular emotional terms such as fear, anger, resentment, shame, and hatred, especially in the analysis of hot topics like violence, movements, revolutions, and war where such a reference would reasonably be expected. It seems that when emotions meet politics in scientific investigation there is still suspicion or even negligence of their importance and they continue to be treated as something ‘other’ to mainstream analyses (Heaney 2019).

At any rate, treating emotionality as a side issue runs counter to the number of contributions in which emotions were a part of the analysis both before and after the formal disciplinary setting of political sociology where emotions were already brought into the analysis. Although Marx is considered among the forerunners of political sociology, his assertion while criticizing Hegel’s philosophy of right that, for the identification of the particular interest of a class with the interest of society as a whole there has to be ‘a moment of enthusiasm’ (Marx 1844/1978: 27–28) usually passes unnoticed. In equal measure, although Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony is frequently referred to, scholars seem to overstress its moral-intellectual aspect while overlooking the necessity of “organized political passion” which prompts the overcoming of individual calculations in an “incandescent atmosphere” of emotions and desires (Gramsci 1971: 138–140). Against the rationalist understanding of politics, even more explicit is the inclusion of emotionality in the theory of political culture proposed by Almond and Verba (1963) who say that, alongside cognitive and evaluative orientations, a political culture is also composed of affective orientations towards such political objects as the structures of inputs and outputs, and the self as political agent. The same holds true for the Michigan School’s pivotal notion of party identification as the main driver of voting preference,² as well as for the widespread academic interest in trust as supportive and cynicism as undermining elements of democracy (Cappella and Jamieson 1997; Warren 1999). However, political sociologists were not prepared to push the point further and systematically cope with the politics-emotion nexus. Accordingly, they paid, as it were, more attention to Giddens’s ‘Third Road’ than to the possibility of a ‘democracy of emotions’ which can be cultivated reflexively in intimate relationships in order to reinforce at a later stage the ‘life politics’ of social groups struggling for alternative expression beyond the traditional public-private distinction (Giddens 1992: 184, 1994: 16, 119–121).

Fifteen years ago, commenting on its future, Hicks et al. (2005: 4) maintained that despite its success in focusing on the social bases of politics, political sociology ‘needs to be more inclusive of recent developments’ and undertake possible syntheses of new developments into existing theories. Today we may claim that this need has been partially met; if anything, and even if one sticks to its hard core, i.e., political power, one would expect that the emotional element could be given more chances by political sociologists, to the extent that it is also through emotions that in every society the mode of political domination is reproduced and ideologically justified. Or, as recently argued, to the extent politics is about the creation, maintenance and use of power, political actors understand the relevance of the creation of relatively stable affective dynamics to further political projects, both as a target for destabilization when it comes to their political opponents, and as a goal to achieve for themselves (Slaby and Bens 2019: 345–346). The point therefore is to complement the study of the social bases of politics with an analysis of its emotional bases which, nevertheless, have been initially explored ever since the late 1970s by sociologists of emotions like Theodore Kemper, Randall Collins, Arlie Hochschild, David Heise, Susan Shott, etc. As it is rightly put, ‘a research agenda for a renewed and revitalized political sociology needs to focus on the ways in which people “feel”, “experience” and “live” the complex contradictions of the social and political world’ (Taylor 2010: 198).

The sociology of emotions at a crossroads

In both sides of the Atlantic, the sociology of emotions has now come of age and the fast-growing research on political neuroscience, affective political psychology, and affective science for that matter, have rendered the demarcation between emotion and reason in analysing politics a thing of the past. As a field, the sociology of emotions has been growing in a steadfast way and since the early ‘80s, it has been developing into a ‘normal’ but no less multifaceted, if not amorphous, scientific paradigm.³ As a consequence, a very large number of social scientists worldwide have come to realize that any description, explanation or interpretation of social phenomena is incomplete, or even false, if it does not incorporate the feeling and embodied subject into their study of structures and social processes (Bericat 2016). This is an achievement of the sociology of emotions.

Notwithstanding pertinent definitional matters, i.e., how to conceptualize emotional terms like affect, sentiment, passion, feeling, emotion, mood etc. (Demertzis 2013: 4–6; Slaby and von Scheve 2019b), the sociology of emotions has made us social scientists become fully aware of at least two aspects of the human condition. First, emotions are culturally mediated; namely, any sort of emotions, be it moral, primary, secondary, programmatic, anticipating etc. is: (a) elicited and experienced relationally and situationally, (b) expressed according to social conventions (feeling rules) and structures of feeling which make for its valence, arousal, and potency, (c) discursively narrated within and through language games partaking thus in identity and will formation processes. Second, any socio-political phenomenon is permeated by emotionality which means that, in different degrees, social agents are always both rational actors and sentimental citizens. In this respect, the sociology of emotions contributes to the general sociological theorizations by systematically providing an emotions-centered lens on the world and on social order (Hochschild 2009; von Scheve 2013).

When the pioneers of the field (Hochschild, Scheff, Kemper, Collins) coined the term in the early and mid-1970s, they probably could not foresee the steadfast pace with which the sociology of emotions would move forward over the next few decades. Suffice it to mention that in 1975 Thomas Scheff in San Francisco organized within the American Sociological Association (ASA) the first session ever on emotions.⁴ The very same year Randall Collins published his Conflict Sociology wherein emotions are given a central explanatory role for the emergence and the resolution of conflicts and the micro-dynamics of social stratification and, while reflecting on the relationship between emotion and gender, Arlie Hochschild was the first to use the term ‘sociology of emotions’ (Hochschild 1975). Four years later she published a highly promising article on the sociological analysis of emotions which finally led to her classic The Managed Heart in 1983. Those works resonated with the American and European Zeitgeist of the 1960s where expressivity and the self were center-staged (Kemper 1991: 303).

Given that strong interest, in 1986 the ASA formally established a standing section on the sociology of emotions and the following year in Chicago it organized two thematic sessions which resulted in the Research Agendas in the Sociology of Emotions edited by Kemper (1990). Prompted by the emotional turn in social sciences and humanities, in 1990 the British Sociological Association set up a study group for the sociological investigation of emotions and in the 1992 annual meeting of the Australian Sociological Association, a session on the sociology of emotions was organized for the first time. Also, in 2004 a Research Network for the sociology of emotions was formed in the European Sociological Association, and has expanded significantly ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The political sociology of emotions: an outline
• PART I: The politics of trauma
• PART II: The politics of ressentiment
• Postscript
• References
• Index