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Emotions in History – Lost and Found

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Ute Frevert

The historical economy of emotions: Introduction

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Brussels, 2010: Emotional politics and the politics of emotion

1On September 16, 2010, Nicolas Sarkozy let off steam. Hitting back at the European Commissioner for Justice and Fundamental Rights who had sharply reprimanded the French government for the campaigns against illegal Roma camps, he did not care to hold back his anger. “I am the president of France and I cannot allow my country to be insulted,” he declared at the Brussels summit. Viviane Reding’s comments had been “deeply, deeply hurtful” not only to the French government, but also to his “fellow citizens.” He considered them an outright “humiliation” and called them “outrageous,” “disgusting” and “shameful.”1

2What had happened, and why did Monsieur le Président launch such a ferocious attack? Ms. Reding had obviously touched a raw nerve. It was already quite something that a commissioner had voiced severe criticism against a member state by accusing France of violating EU regulations and conducting a disgraceful policy. Furthermore, she had referred to the spectre of Vichy France and the wartime round-ups of Jews to draw a parallel with the present-day treatment of gypsies. This upset the French president. Over lunch with the Commission president José Manuel Barroso, he engaged in a fierce verbal argument. After lunch, Sarkozy addressed a news conference to continue the war of words. Interestingly, the vocabulary he used to rebuke the allegations drew from the lexicon of honour and shame: He spoke about humiliation and insult. He spoke about himself, his country and his fellow citizens having been humiliated and insulted, thus invoking highly charged notions of state and national honour. And he left no doubt as to the fact that the insult had been taken seriously. It was a “wound” that hurt deeply.

3Emotions gained centre stage here. They were present in Sarkozy’s words and voice, in his face and gestures. The French president was angry, and he made sure to show it. He lashed out passionately against his critics, although he himself maintained that he had been “the only person who remained calm and did not use excessive language” (which was contested by other witnesses). Both versions were perfectly in harmony with each other. Claiming that he had kept his temper and acted in a restrained rather than “excessive” manner was in accordance with the emotional style to which modern European and international politics adhere. At the same time, though, passions could not and should not be ruled out altogether. In exceptional, truly dramatic circumstances, they had to come to the fore. For Sarkozy, the situation was such that it demanded a straight and clear emotional statement. National honour was not an issue on which he was prepared to make compromises. And it was exactly this kind of honour that he felt had been offended by the “disgusting and shameful” comparison with Vichy and its anti-Semitic politics.

  • 2 Klein, Donald C., “The Humiliation Dynamic: an Overview,” Journal of Primary Prevention 12, no. 2 ( (...)

4But there is more to this incident of passionate international politics. Emotions—anger and disgust— were not only part and parcel of the French president’s reaction. Emotions were also involved in the cause that triggered the violent response: humiliation and insult. Insulting an individual or a group is synonymous with shaming them. It means taking away their honour and dignity, injuring or damaging their integrity. Humiliation deals a blow to someone’s self-esteem; personal or collective pride is wounded by the feeling of being “put down,” of being threatened in one’s “personal integrity and wholeness.”2 Humiliation, as psychologists and social scientists argue, holds strong emotional power.

5It goes directly against what individuals and groups consider their self-perception and how they want to be seen and treated by others. And it is highly subjective, as it depends on one’s own views of what constitutes an insult even if these views are not shared by others.

The economy of emotions: How it works and why it matters

6What does this story tell us about humiliation, anger and disgust and how does it relate to the topic of this book: emotions in history, lost and found? First, it points to the power of emotions in contemporary political life, both domestic and international. This tends to contradict the idea of politics that has been marketed throughout the modern era: politics is supposed to be a down-to-earth business, governed by dry procedures and conducted by unemotional, target-oriented personnel. Driven by interests and norms, it follows a rational logic, exemplified by the grey, colourless appearances of politicians and bureaucrats. Emotions, so it seems here, add colour to those appearances and performances, and, we may assume, to the underlying interests and norms as well.

7Second, the story prompts us to ask how emotions work. What do words, facial expressions, voices and gestures disclose about emotions? Do they convey real emotions or faked ones? Are there any real emotions that might remain hidden in one’s body or soul, and if so, how can we approach them? Or do we have to think of emotions as expressions of those inner feelings that bring them to the fore and communicate them to others? Could there be a difference between (inner) impression and (outer) expression? Is it conceivable that Nicolas Sarkozy did not feel angry or disgusted at all but rather wanted to make his audience believe that he felt this way? Did he display those emotions for other purposes? What can people achieve by “doing emotions”? And by which rules do they play? Can they invent their own rules and act accordingly, or do they more or less follow scripts that bear a more general meaning? Under which circumstances can they afford to disappoint expectations (in this case, for a politician to behave in a rational and restrained manner), and how can they make sure that affective language reaches its audience?

  • 3 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 13, 2009 (quoting chief rabbi Meir Lau and public intellectual (...)

8Third, the story raises questions as to how new this emotion talk and work is. To many observers, it seems as if we lived in a highly emotionalised age. Politicians have to show emotions, yet they are well advised to think twice about which emotions are appropriate for which occasion. When the Pope visited Jerusalem in May 2009, his speech at Yad Vashem was criticised for lacking strong commitment and personal emotions. What he said about the Holocaust was seen as overly calculated, diplomatic and professional. The fact that he recommended empathy fell short of what the Israeli public deemed proper and desirable.3 In a similar vein, election campaigns and inaugural speeches regularly play the emotions card by asking the citizens for their trust or evoking hope, by casting doubt on the opponent’s trustworthiness and benevolent intentions.

  • 4 As to the link between consumer marketing and emotions, see Illouz, Eva, Consuming the Romantic Uto (...)
  • 5 Trentmann, Frank, ed., The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern Worl (...)
  • 6 Barker-Benfield, Graham J., The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Brita (...)

9Yet emotions are by no means restricted to the political realm. In order to sell products and services, the consumer economy coats them in emotionally charged images, sounds and words that promise happiness and well-being to buyers and users.4 Sometimes, cars and cosmetics are bluntly called “Emotion” without any attempt to conceal their consumer lust-enhancing strategies. These are but the most recent examples of a much longer process that reaches back at least to the late nineteenth century, when economies in the US and Europe embarked on what has aptly been named the making of the consumer.5 Even before that, commercial development and the culture of feelings reinforced each other. As early as the eighteenth century, sentimental fiction evoked goods as objects of emotional attachment that then became proliferated in economic life.6 Emotions were thus rendered consumable and rose to public awareness and agency.

10Just as “emotional capitalism” (Eva Illouz) was not invented in the twenty-first century but has a longer history, emotional politics is not a new arrival, either. Honour and shame are concepts that rest upon far more ancient notions of political power and legitimacy. Politicians driven (away) by passions are discussed time and again, and the era of mass politics presumably increased rather than diminished the appeal of emotions. It also served to foster emotional communication between citizens and their political representatives. Loyalty to the king was gradually replaced by trust in the government, which needed constant recalibration and fine-tuning. Distrust became a scourge for those political regimes that sought to invoke their citizens’ cooperation by means of deliberation rather than coercion.

  • 7 Hutcheson, Francis, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustr (...)

11Those observations invite us to embark on an intellectual journey tracing the historical economy of emotions. The term originally stems from the Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson who, in 1728, wrote about the “oeconomy” of passions “which would constitute the most happy State of each Person, and promote the greatest Good in the whole.”7 Caring about such an economy was part and parcel of the project of modernity as it has developed in Europe since the eighteenth century. “Finding emotions” and exploring their relevance, importance and impact lends colour and taste to the project’s texture that has preoccupied contemporaries and historians from its very beginning. But it also helps to retrieve aspects and dimensions of people’s actions and mindsets that have been lost in translating the past to the present.

  • 8 Berger, Peter, “On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor,” in The Homeless Mind, eds. Peter Berg (...)
  • 9 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 13, 1974, p. 19.

12A case in point is, again, honour. Sociologists writing in the 1970s could rightfully claim that modernity denied the reality of honour and slander.8 The cultural significance of honour that Max Weber was still acknowledging in the early twentieth century was on the wane. When German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder adapted his award-winning movie Effi Briest from Theodor Fontane’s celebrated novel in 1974, the actress Hanna Schygulla confessed that she could not at all relate to the kind of honour Fontane wrote about in 1895. Eight decades later, she found it utterly strange and outmoded.9

13Honour, thus, figures as a lost emotion, or, to be more precise, as a disposition whose emotional power has more or less vanished. Late-modern European societies and their intellectual interpreters have turned a deaf ear to honour’s passionate demands that had resonated so compellingly in previous generations. The first chapter of this book explores how this change came about. Why and how did emotions get lost? Were they lost altogether, or did they live on under different names and labels? What happened to those social groups that had harboured and nurtured certain feelings and related practices for long periods of time and then chose to drop them? Can lost emotions resurface, as some present-day honour rituals, alongside Sarkozy’s outburst in 2010, seem to suggest?

14While the first chapter closely links emotions to social groups that feed and cultivate them before discarding them from their emotional economy, the second chapter tackles the question of how gender has structured emotional styles and regimes. Here, normative prescriptions come into play, meticulously seeking to align individual behaviour with highly gendered feeling and display rules. As with honour and shame, those rules became deeply embedded in the self-perception of women and men. A growing body of self-help literature as well as various other “schools of emotions” helped to vocalise rules and expectations and to translate them into personal attitudes and conduct. Gender, so the argument goes, served as the most conspicuous category that “naturalised” emotions while at the same time connecting them to distinct social practices and performances. This did not, however, leave emotions and related practices frozen in time. As much as men and women learned to negotiate and adapt gender relations to changing needs and desires, they also found new ways of coming to terms with what they were supposed to feel and how they should express those feelings.

15The historical economy of emotions thus presents itself as dynamic and mobile, both enacting and reacting to cultural, social, economic and political challenges. It sees emotions and emotional styles fade away and get lost (like honour or acedia), but it also witnesses the emergence of new or newly framed emotions. Empathy and sympathy/compassion serve as great examples of emotions that are “found” and “invented” in the modern period. They are therefore addressed in the book’s third chapter. Since the eighteenth century, empathy and sympathy have been regarded as civil society’s primary emotional resources, connecting citizens and fine-tuning their mutual relations. They have fuelled humanitarian movements, from abolitionism to campaigns against cruelty, from giving shelter to escaping slaves to donating money for grief-stricken citizens in the present world. What stands behind this crucial reliance on empathy as a secular emotion? How did people learn it, and who did not? What prompted its success, and what prevented it from gaining full power? Are there limits to empathy, and how do we account for them in specific historical arrangements changing in the course of modernity?

The modern and the pre-modern

  • 10 Davis, Natalie Zemon, A Life of Learning (New York: American Council of Learned Societies Occasiona (...)

16Considering the time frame of our intellectual journey into the historical economy of emotions, it could be argued that modernity did not actually start as late as the eighteenth century. For Natalie Zemon Davis, modernity began about two hundred years earlier, in the sixteenth century which, in her graduate training, she had come to see as the birthplace of “our modern ills and adventures: ferocious competition and capitalistic greed, but also hopes for change and the seeds of democracy.”10 At the same time, though, she was well aware that the sixteenth century (and the seventeenth to which she expanded her analysis later in her career) generated much more than “modernity” and that elements of the pre-modern coexist and interact with the modern in manifold ways. This holds true for the early modern period as much as for “high” and “late” modernity.

  • 11 Interestingly, both Miri Rubin and Eva Österberg, who delivered the Natalie Zemon Davis Annual Lect (...)
  • 12 See, among others, Meyer-Sickendiek, Burckhard, Affektpoetik: eine Kulturgeschichte literarischer E (...)
  • 13 Baasner, Frank, Der Begriff ‘sensibilité’ im 18. Jahrhundert: Aufstieg und Niedergang eines Ideals (...)

17Focusing on the time period that starts in the mideighteenth century is not to deny, then, a vibrant preor early-modern history of emotions.11 Particularly in the field of art, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced a wealth of emotion texts. In literature, theatre, painting, sculpture and music we encounter a surge in “affect poetics” that built on Aristotelian notions of various passions and connected them to aesthetic practices.12 Affects and passions, in those days, were taken to be the prime movers of human actions, and consequently drew close scrutiny and constant monitoring. Regulating as well as expressing them through appropriate manners, looks, and words became a major concern of early modern polite society. Being sensible and behaving accordingly was a trait of seventeenth and early eighteenth-century aristocratic circles. It induced a vivid intellectual debate concentrating on questions of sincerity versus mask-wearing, of authenticity versus camouflage.13

  • 14 Huizinga, Johan, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chic (...)
  • 15 Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

18Apart from being topics of contemporary discourse, emotions formed an integral part of pre-modern (as well as modern) religious, economic, social, and political culture. As early as 1919, Johan Huizinga, the eminent Dutch scholar of medieval history, wrote about the late Middle Ages as a period of exuberant passions. After the reformation, positive and negative extremes were balanced out; neither the grim hatred nor the risibility that had characterised the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, lived on into the early modern era.14 Twenty years later, sociologist Norbert Elias envisaged a similar scenario. Starting with absolutism, Europeans, he claimed, had learnt how to control their affects, instead of acting on an immediate impulse. The state monopoly of violence as it developed from the sixteenth century had triggered such learning processes as much as it depended upon them.15

  • 16 Rosenwein, Barbara H., ed., Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: (...)
  • 17 Davis, Life of Learning.
  • 18 As of 2008, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, hosts a research cen (...)

19Meanwhile, historians of medieval and early modern history have started to deal with those concepts of “rationalising” and “civilising” emotions as they have developed since the end of the Middle Ages. While some stress that Huizinga’s image of uncontrolled, spontaneous emotions ruling over men’s lives until the fifteenth century did not capture the strategic way in which emotions were used to convey notions of power and powerlessness, others have warned against applying an overly instrumentalised notion of emotions to the period.16 Natalie Zemon Davis has not yet taken sides in this controversy. Her work, though, has a lot to tell about honour and shame, about feelings of fraternity and community in early modern compagnonnage systems, about mourning rituals and Protestant sensibilities when it came to the relief of the poor. From very early on, she looked at “rational interests” as much as on “façons de faire, façons de penser, façons de dire”—and, one might add, façons de ressentir.17 But she did not turn the latter into a distinct research topic or into an analytical tool to open up new areas of historical investigation. This leaves us, her admirers and students, to venture into this new field and explore its potentials as well as its limits.18

  • 19 As to the various concepts and their convergence, see Frevert, Ute et al., Gefühlswissen: Eine lexi (...)

20By comparison to the pre-modern period, modernity as it is defined here takes a particularly strong and unique interest in emotions and what had formerly been called affect, passion, appetite or sentiment.19 First and foremost, emotions have come to be considered as primary assets of a person’s individuality and how she relates to others, i.e. her sociability. Arising in the body, they are felt and perceived by the person who inhabits that body. Rather than letting herself be overwhelmed by a sudden affect or consuming passion, the person is supposed to manage and control the manner in which she communicates her feelings through words, facial expressions, sounds and gestures.

  • 20 See, among others, Goleman, Daniel, Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ (London: (...)
  • 21 Rieff, Philip, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (San Francisco: Harper & R (...)
  • 22 Barker-Ben eld, Culture of Sensibility; Koschorke, Albrecht, “Alphabetisation und Empfindsamkeit,” (...)

21How this could be done in a way conducive to the well-being of society was subject to a growing literature of moral philosophy and social conduct. The current craze about “emotional intelligence” gives only a recent example of a long tradition of advice books and coaching techniques aimed at enhancing a person’s social capital and economic efficiency.20 At the same time, the culture of “the therapeutic” which emerged in the twentieth century has reinforced introspection and emotional awareness as crucial means to individual psychic health and balance.21 Again, this culture can easily be traced back to the eighteenth century which indulged in a great number of introspective measures. Reading novels, painting portraits and pastorals, and writing diaries and letters were promoted as methods of cultivating sensibility.22

22Due to ongoing processes of literacy, urbanisation, industrialisation, and communication, modernity as an economic reality, as a political challenge, and as a large-scale social laboratory, engaged more and more people. It was not only thought about, but also lived and practised. The triumphal rise of science and its popularisation during the nineteenth century allowed for new theories and concepts to travel fast and reach an eager audience. Psychology, which gradually moved away from philosophy and metaphysical speculation made a powerful entrée into all sorts of domains: from industrial relations to commercial advertising, from individual therapy to political communication. In its wake, emotions gained attention and permeated public discourse as well as private conversations among lovers, friends, and family. Religious texts as well as literature, art, and music that had for a long time dominated the trade of modelling affects and reflecting on passions, were being increasingly complemented by scientific tracts and self-help manuals.

23But what actually happened to emotions while they were analysed, measured, talked about, communicated, and managed? What happened to them during the period starting in the European Age of Sensibility and culminating in an era of high subjectivity at the end of the twentieth century? How did this affect their appraisal and appreciation? How did it shape the way in which emotions were gendered and class-bound? Were there emotions that got lost over the course of time? And how can historians find them?

Notas

1 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7ded6ae6-c1b9-11df-9d90­00144feab49a.html#ixzz163bayNzr; http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/16/nicolas-sarkozy-keeps-dismantlingroma-camps; http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/politics/international_politics/sarkozy%2Broma%2Bcomments%2Baposoutrageousapos/3768007.html (last access: Nov. 23, 2010). All translations from German and French, if not otherwise noted, are mine.

2 Klein, Donald C., “The Humiliation Dynamic: an Overview,” Journal of Primary Prevention 12, no. 2 (Dec. 1991): pp. 93–121, quote p. 97; Miller, William Ian, Humiliation and Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), ch. 4; Lindner, Evelin, Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict (London: Praeger Security International, 2006).

3 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 13, 2009 (quoting chief rabbi Meir Lau and public intellectual Tom Segev).

4 As to the link between consumer marketing and emotions, see Illouz, Eva, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); eadem, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).

5 Trentmann, Frank, ed., The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World (Oxford: Berg, 2006).

6 Barker-Benfield, Graham J., The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), ch. 4, esp. pp. 211–14; Brewer, John and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993); Bermingham, Ann and John Brewer, eds., The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text (London: Routledge, 1995).

7 Hutcheson, Francis, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, ed. Aaron Garrett (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), p. 47.

8 Berger, Peter, “On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor,” in The Homeless Mind, eds. Peter Berger et al. (New York: Random House, 1973), pp. 83–96.

9 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 13, 1974, p. 19.

10 Davis, Natalie Zemon, A Life of Learning (New York: American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper, No. 39, 1997).

11 Interestingly, both Miri Rubin and Eva Österberg, who delivered the Natalie Zemon Davis Annual Lectures in 2007 and 2008 respectively, focused on emotions in pre-modern history: Rubin, Miri, Emotion and Devotion: The Meaning of Mary in Medieval Religious Cultures (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009); Österberg, Eva, Friendship and Love, Ethics and Politics: Studies in Mediaeval and Early Modern History (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2010).

12 See, among others, Meyer-Sickendiek, Burckhard, Affektpoetik: eine Kulturgeschichte literarischer Emotionen (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005); Kolesch, Doris, Theater der Emotionen: Ästhetik und Politik zur Zeit Ludwigs XIV. (Frankfurt: Campus, 2006); Gouk, Penelope and Helen Hills, eds., Representing Emotions: New Connections in the Histories of Art, Music and Medicine (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Bredekamp, Horst, Theorie des Bildakts (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010).

13 Baasner, Frank, Der Begriff ‘sensibilité’ im 18. Jahrhundert: Aufstieg und Niedergang eines Ideals (Heidelberg: Winter, 1988).

14 Huizinga, Johan, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

15 Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

16 Rosenwein, Barbara H., ed., Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), esp. Althoff, Gerd, “Ira Regis: Prolegomena to a History of Royal Anger,” pp. 59–74, and, as criticism, Dinzelbacher, Peter, Warum weint der König? Eine Kritik des mediävistischen Panritualismus (Badenweiler: Bachmann, 2009); Miller, Humiliation, pp. 97–98.

17 Davis, Life of Learning.

18 As of 2008, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, hosts a research centre on the history of emotions in the modern era. For programme and projects see http://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/en/research/history-of-emotions

19 As to the various concepts and their convergence, see Frevert, Ute et al., Gefühlswissen: Eine lexikalische Spurensuche in der Moderne (Frankfurt: Campus, 2011); Dixon, Thomas, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

20 See, among others, Goleman, Daniel, Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ (London: Bloomsbury, 1996); idem, Working with Emotional Intelligence (London: Bloomsbury, 1998).

21 Rieff, Philip, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1966); Lasch, Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism: American life in an age of diminishing expectations (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), and, more recently, Illouz, Eva, Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

22 Barker-Ben eld, Culture of Sensibility; Koschorke, Albrecht, “Alphabetisation und Empfindsamkeit,” in Der ganze Mensch, ed. Hans-Jürgen Schings (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994), pp. 605– 28; Bermingham, Ann, ed., Sensation and Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s Cottage Door (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Knott, Sarah, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

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