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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2014

JOACHIM C. HÄBERLEN  and
RUSSELL A. SPINNEY
JOACHIM C. HÄBERLEN
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Warwick, Humanities Building, University Road, Coventry, CV4 7AL; J.Haeberlen@warwick.ac.uk
RUSSELL A. SPINNEY
Affiliation:
Santa Fe Preparatory School, 1101 Camino de la Cruz Blanca, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA; rspinney@sfprep.org
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Extract

It might seem trivial and mere common sense to note that revolts and revolutions are deeply emotional moments. In history books and newspapers, we read about the tense and emotionally charged atmosphere that leads to violence when protestors confront police forces, or about furious and passionate crowds acting in defiance of the ideal of rational and coldblooded politics. But rage and anger are not the only emotions involved in the politics of protest. Consider the iconic photographs of the summer strikes during the French Popular Front in 1936, depicting smiling workers occupying their factories and construction sites, or the cheering crowds storming the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Or consider the genre of protest songs, telling stories of solidarity and hope as well as deep sorrow. At times, social and political movements even made feelings their central concern, such as the hippy movement with its calls for free love. On the other side of the political spectrum, conservative as well as social democratic observers often denounced protests and riots as politically irrelevant outbreaks of hatred, or mocked the ‘hysterical’ fear of the peace movement during the 1980s. Somehow, these examples suggest, feelings mattered, yet how precisely they mattered is rarely investigated. The essays in this special issue will address this question in order to enrich our understanding of protest movements, revolts and revolutions. Collectively, they intend to open a theoretical and methodological debate on the role of emotions in the politics of protest and resistance.

Type
Introduction
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 23 , Issue 4: Emotions in Protest Movements in Europe since 1917 , November 2014 , pp. 489 - 503
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 The latest example of this is perhaps the discourse about ‘furious citizens’ (Wutbürger), in the German context, see Kurbjuweit, Dirk, ‘Der Wutbürger: Stuttgart 21 und Sarrazin-Debatte: Warum die Deutschen so viel protestieren’, Der Spiegel, 41 (11 Oct. 2010), 26–5Google Scholar.

2 See, e.g., Hans Ulrich Wehler's critical assessment of the peace movement, Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, v: 1949–1990 (Munich: Beck, 2008), 250Google Scholar. For critical comments, see e.g., Nehring, Holger and Ziemann, Benjamin, ‘Führen alle Wege nach Moskau? Der NATO-Doppelbeschluss und die Friedensbewegung – eine Kritik’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 59 (2011), 83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 An excellent overview over these debates is offered by Goodwin, Jeff, Jasper, James M., and Polletta, Francesca, ‘The Return of the Repressed: The Fall and Rise of Emotions in Social Movement Theory’, Mobilization: An International Journal, 5 (2000), 65–83Google Scholar. Examples of the ‘irrational crowd’ position include LeBon, Gustave, The Crowd (New York: Viking Press, 1960 (1895))Google Scholar; Hoffer, Eric, The True Believer (New York: Harper and Row, 1951)Google Scholar. For the ‘rational actors’ position, see, e.g., Gamson, William A., The Strategy of Social Protest (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Tilly, Charles, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1978)Google Scholar.

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6 In the push to take ideologies more seriously in the study of fascism and communism, emotions generally remain crucial, albeit ahistorical, narrative devices or are ignored altogether, and if anything, still reinforce the impression of the interwar period as a time in which outbursts of feelings prevailed over reason. See most recently Confino, Alon, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 127–8Google Scholar. Confino highlights the importance of emotions, but does not engage with them as historical categories. See similarly Mazower, Mark, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage, 1999)Google Scholar; Koonz, Claudia, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2003)Google Scholar. It is perhaps telling that one of the few scholars who has explicitly addressed emotions in National Socialism, Jill Stephenson, simply asserts that the Nazis appealed to people's emotions and not their rationality, without ever questioning these dichotomist categories, see Stephenson, Jill, ‘Generations, Emotions, and Critical Enquiry: A British View on Changing Approaches to the Study of Nazi Germany’, German History, 26 (2008), 272–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Emotions in the Third Reich have been addressed under the rubric of morality, see Gross, Raphael, Anständig geblieben: Nationalsozialistische Moral (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2010)Google Scholar. However, scholars of neither the fascist movements nor of fascist states have, as far as we see, made use of the conceptual tools discussed by historians of emotions, as was recently noted by Przyrembel, Alexandra, ‘Ambivalente Gefühle: Sexualität und Antisemitismus während des Nationalsozialismus’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 39 (2013), 528–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Przyrembel herself speaks about ‘doing emotions’ in her analysis of practices of shaming in the context of ‘race defilement’, but without referring to any of the theoretical literature on the history of emotions. Beyond the German case, see Falasca, Simonetta, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar, and, on emotions in communism, Halfin, Igal, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

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8 Eustace et al., ‘AHR Conversation’, 1506.

9 A recent review has been provided by Bettina Hitzer, ‘Emotionsgeschichte – ein Anfang mit Folgen’, H-Soz-u-Kult, http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/forum/2011–11–001 (23 Nov. 2011).

10 See Gould, Deborah, ‘Passionate Political Processes: Bringing Emotions Back into the Study of Social Movements’, in Goodwin, Jeff and Jasper, James M., eds, Rethinking Social Movements: Structure, Meaning and Emotion (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 155–75Google Scholar; Moving Politics; and ‘On Affect and Protest’, in Cvetkovich, Ann, Reynolds, Ann and Staiger, Janer, eds, Political Emotions: New Agendas in Communication (New York: Routledge, 2010), 18–44Google Scholar.

11 This turn is most obvious in Reddy, William M., ‘Emotional Liberty: History and Politics in the Anthropology of Emotions’, Cultural Anthropology, 14 (1999), 256–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions’, Current Anthropology, 38 (1997), 327–51; and, for a more elaborate version of this argument, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

12 Reddy, Navigation, 88–96.

13 Sewell, William H. Jr, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 362–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Eustace et al., ‘AHR Conversation’.

15 On this point, see Scheer, Monique, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuan Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory, 51 (2012), 193–220CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See similarly, with regard to (only seemingly) more permissive communicative norms, Scharloth, Joachim, 1968: Eine Kommunikationsgeschichte (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2011)Google Scholar.

16 Gould, Moving Politics. Gould relies on the theoretical work of Brian Massumi: ‘Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements’, in Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), xvi–xixGoogle Scholar; Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); and ‘Navigating Movements: An Interview with Brian Massumi’, in Mary Zornazi, ed., Hope: New Philosophies for Change (New York: Routledge, 2003), 210–42.

17 Gould, Moving Politics, 18–29. See also Jan Plamper's comment that a history of emotions might help us understand why mostly middle- and upper-class students around the globe turned to Marxism, ‘a choice that defies Marxist and rational choice explanations’, in Eustace et al., ‘AHR Conversation’, 1512. See, from a feminist perspective, on the political and epistemological potential of emotions, Jagger, Alison, ‘Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology’, Inquiry, 32 (1989), 151–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Scheer, ‘Emotions’, 216.

19 Scheer, ‘Emotions’, 216. On praxeological approaches more generally, see Reckwitz, Andreas, ‘Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing’, European Journal of Social Theory, 5, 2 (2002), 243–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reckwitz, Andreas, ‘Affective Spaces: a Praxeological Outlook’, Rethinking History, 16 (2012), 241–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Scheer, ‘Emotions’, 216–17. On emotional communities, see Rosenwein, Barbara, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006)Google Scholar and ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, American Historical Review, 107 (2002), 821–45. The notion of ‘emotional styles’ has been proposed by Gammerl, Benno, ‘Emotional Styles: Concepts and Challenges’, Rethinking History, 16 (2012), 161–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In a different context, Scheer has developed, together with Pascal Eitler, the notion of ‘trying emotions’, see Eitler, Pascal and Scheer, Monique, ‘Emotionengeschichte als Körpergeschichte: Eine heuristische Perspektive auf religiöse Konversionen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 35 (2009), 293, 311–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 See Smail, Daniel Lord, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2008)Google Scholar. For a critique, see Reddy, William M., ‘Review Essay: Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain’, History and Theory, 49 (2010), 412–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 For a study of emotional lexica, see Frevert, Ute, Baily, Christian, Eitler, Pascal, Gammerl, Benno, Hitzer, Bettina, Pernau, Margrit, Scheer, Monique, Schmidt, Anne and Verheyen, Nina, Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling, 1700–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 On bodies in protest movements, see e.g., with numerous further references, Pabst, Andrea, ‘Protesting Bodies and Bodily Protests: “Thinking through the Body” in Social Movement Studies’, in Brown, Timothy and Anton, Lorena, eds, Between the Avant-Garde and the Everyday: Subversive Politics in Europe from 1957 to the Present (New York: Berghahn, 2011), 191–200Google Scholar.

24 See in this regard the discussion of rape and the role alcohol played therein by Merridale, Catherine, Ivan's War: Inside the Red Army, 1939–45 (London: Faber & Faber), 263–98Google Scholar.

25 See in this context the work of Bruno Latour, who argued that material objects have agency, Latour, Bruno, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988)Google Scholar and Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

26 On the relation between music and emotions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, see the contributions in Juslin, Patrik N. and Sloboda, John A., eds, Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, and Applications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

27 Despite common knowledge that sunshine and rain can have profound impacts on feelings, such issues have not been studied extensively historically, although it is a common trope in literature (think, for example, of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther). Anecdotal evidence suggesting that it might be worth looking at weather conditions and their (emotional) consequences includes Haffner, Sebastian, Defying Hitler: A Memoir (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 23Google Scholar. Haffner contrasts the publicly displayed enthusiasm over the outbreak of the First World War with the generally depressed mood during the November Revolution in 1918 and links this, among other things, to different weather conditions. Another example is the May Day riot of 1 May 1987 in Berlin. According to one participant, it was the first warm summer night after a long and harsh winter, and people simply wanted to celebrate.

28 On feeling rules, see Hochschild, Arlie R., ‘Emotion Work, Feeling Rules and Social Structure’, American Journal of Sociology, 85 (1979), 551–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 The social dimensions of emotions are particularly stressed by Emirbayer, Mustafa and Goldberg, Chad Alan, ‘Pragmatism, Bourdieu, and Collective Emotions in Contentious Politics’, Theory and Society, 34 (2005), 469–518CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Of course, the slogan that ‘boredom is counter-revolutionary’ was already popular during the May 1968 revolt itself, especially in France; see, e.g., Viénet, René, Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May ’68 (New York: Autonomedia, 1992Google Scholar; London: Rebel Press, 1992); Ross, Kristin, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Seidman, Michael, The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers in 1968 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004)Google Scholar. For the Italian context, see Passerini, Luisa, Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1996), 31–2Google Scholar.

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32 On Monte Verità, see, e.g., Voswinkel, Ulrike, Freie Liebe und Anarchie: Schwabing – Monte Verità: Entwürfe gegen das etablierte Leben (Munich: Allitera-Verlag, 2009)Google Scholar.

33 Scheer, ‘Emotions’, 217. She is referring to the work of Andreas Reckwitz, who analyses dominant and countercultural forms of subjectivity since the 19th c., see Reckwitz, Andreas, Das hybride Subjekt: eine Theorie der Subjektkulturen von der bürgerlichen Moderne zur Postmoderne (Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2006)Google Scholar. See also Jensen, Uffa, ‘The Lure of Authenticity: Emotions and Generations in the German Youth Movement of the Early 20th Century’, in Berghoff, Hartmut, Jensen, Uffa, Lubinski, Christina and Weisbrod, Bernd, eds, History by Generations: Generational Dynamics in Modern History (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), 109–24Google Scholar; Kauders, Anthony D., ‘Drives in Dispute: The West German Student Movement, Psychoanalysis, and the Search for a New Emotional Order, 1967–1971’, Central European History, 44 (2011), 711–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kempton, Richard, Provo: Amsterdam's Anarchist Revolt (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2007)Google Scholar.

34 See Maasen, Sabine, Elberfeld, Jens, Eitler, Pascal and Tändler, Maik, eds, Das beratene Selbst: Zur Genealogie der Therapeutisierung in den “langen” Siebzigern (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jensen, Uffa and Tändler, Maik, eds, Das Selbst zwischen Anpassung und Befreiung: Psychowissen und Politik im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013)Google Scholar.

35 It would be worthwhile to investigate links and relations between (dominant) emotional regimes and emotional countercultures on the one hand, and the dynamic between hegemonic and marginal forms of subjectivity studied by Reckwitz in Das hybride Subject on the other.