European Journal of Social Theory

Anger is often described as a wild emotion that endangers both social order and the possibility of constructive political dialogue. And yet, anger is an indispensable political emotion – for without angry speech the body politic would lack the voice of the powerless questioning the justice of the dominant order. Anger is not the opposite of order, for anger is domesticated by the dominant to serve order – in the form of force, authority, moral indignation and care. Moreover, order itself, in the form of technical rationality, is rooted in the anger of the middle-class professional whose claim to social status and power depends upon their moralistic enforcement of the rule of technique. A dialogical politics can only emerge when anger is heard with empathy, rather than domesticated or silenced.

The emotional state of war-affected populations has become a central concern for international policy-makers in the last decade. Growing interest in war trauma is influenced by contemporary Anglo-American emotionology, or emotional norms, which tends to pathologize ordinary responses to distress, including anger related to survival strategies. The article critically analyses the ascendancy of a therapeutic security paradigm in international politics, which seeks to explain the prevailing political, economic and social conditions in terms of cycles of emotional dysfunctionalism. The article contends that international therapeutic governance pathologizes waraffected populations as emotionally dysfunctional and problematizes their right to self-government, leading to extensive external intervention. However, international therapeutic governance may be detrimental to postwar recovery as well legitimizing a denial of self-government.

A well-established idea is that the powerless, even when they are angered by the relations of domination or their consequences, do not display this anger for fear of negative sanctions. Although in the first part of his Domination and the Arts of ResistanceJames Scott elaborates this idea in a creative manner, he challenges it in the second part of his book. He proposes that when autonomous spaces emerge in the systems of absolute domination, the powerless use them to develop their own cultures of solidarity and dissent. These make it highly probable that the long-suppressed anger, rather than just simmering, will one day explode in the face of the oppressor with a satisfying full blast. In this article I use mostly Central European material to argue against Scott’s unorthodox view. I line up evidence in support of the thesis that, even where there are autonomous spaces and cultures of dissent, citizens display apathy and protesters start out with much anxiety and caution, afraid to provoke the anger of the powerful. Fear of repression and the wish to dilute one’s own and the onlookers’ anxiety, I argue, account for why, in this region after 1980, protest assumed ever more ambivalent, satirical and carnivalesque forms. Not anger, but rather a mixture of fear and hope – the latter propagated by the leading ÈmigrÈ and domestic dissidents – dictated the display of such emotions as anxiety, but also sorrow or joy.

Cultural norms and values, as well as historical, social, and legal contexts shape the public uses and expressions of particular emotions, including anger. In the settler states of Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, indigenous peoples and those who came later negotiate the unfinished business of empire. Their exchanges are framed in terms of ethnic identity and difference. It is argued here that anger plays a significant part in the legal and political processes of claim, denial, and response through which these differences are articulated and transacted. This article examines situations where people whose very naming is a product of European thought engage in the struggles of decolonization. The very different occasions and forms of anger over justice claims described illustrate the extent to which meanings are not shared in these societies.

The part anger plays in motivating political action is frequently noted, but less is said about ways in which anger continues to be a part of how people do politics. This article critically assesses approaches to emotions that emphasize managing anger in accordance with ‘feeling rules’. It reflects on the utility of Marxist notions of conflict as the engine of change for the understanding of how anger operates in political life. This involves understanding the ambivalence of anger and its operation within particular power relations. Shifting sets of conventions have had some continuity in discouraging women in Western nations (particularly white and middle-class women) from showing anger. But clearly, women do get angry and feminists have drawn on anger in acting politically. New Zealand feminist writings from the ‘second wave’ are taken as illustrative of the common difficulties Western feminists faced in dealing with anger. These difficulties were due to trying to juggle social conventions about femininity, the political ideal of sisterhood, and the realities of dealing with other women in often new and experimental political processes. Anger could be personalized and hurtful, but in certain cases its expression was constructive in producing more respectful relations. Exploring these cases makes it clear how anger produces, and is produced by, relations with others.

In most academic research on politics, emotions are deemed important only to the realm of subjects or citizens, not to power. Emotions are presented as a problem power has to deal with, not something with which power is itself intimately involved. This article discusses recent attempts to reintroduce emotions into political analysis and argue that they are incomplete insofar as they look only at opposition social movements, not at mainstream parties. With a nod to Carl Schmitt, I argue that anger is not something that only occasionally bursts onto the political scene, but is central to ‘normal’ politics as well. Anger is central to politics both as a diffuse, untargeted sentiment citizens experience, usually economically, and as the emotion political organizers need to capture and channel, which they do by offering up an ‘enemy’ they identify as the source of the problem. Opposition movements and parties of power alike succeed when they persuade people to accept the enemy they propose.