Secure States: Towards a Political Sociology of Emotion

Abstract

Emotion and politics is the study of the non‐cognitive core of politics. Emotion and politics presents its own special set of difficulties. First, emotions are experienced individually but politics is by definition a collective phenomena. This means that the social analyst has to attempt to understand how an individual micro‐level instinct, an emotion, contributes to collective macro‐level processes and outcomes. Second, emotions are ontologically in the moment. Emotions and sound have similar properties. Music or noise either soothes or jars the central nervous system. Emotions too affect the central nervous system and even social scientists have begun to acknowledge the relevance of neurobiology to their studies. The physicality of emotion suggests that a robust analysis of emotion demands a multi‐disciplinary approach, and not that emotions are outside of the purview of the social sciences. This chapter begins from the position that much theoretical, analytic and empirical work remains to be done in the study of politics and emotions. It represents a first attempt to explore, from multiple angles, how emotions matter to politics. The chapter proceeds on four levels: first, it develops the concepts secure state and community of feeling as analytic frames that unite politics and emotion; second, it explores how emotions are embedded in political institutions; third, it takes up the issue of emotion and collective action; and lastly, it suggests the conceptual issues that a political sociology of emotions might address.

Exploring emotions and the economy: new contributions from sociological theory

“…1) I identify five components of an analytic heuristic that models a sociological account of the relation between emotion and action. I draw these components from my analysis of the literature on emotion in neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, economics and sociology that I reviewed in previous essays (Berezin 2002(Berezin , 2005(Berezin , 2006. Assembling the components and specifying the possible pathways among them is a first step towards developing an interdisciplinary approach to emotions that identifies the contributions of various disciplines.…”

Defamiliarizing Heavy-Contact Sports: A Critical Examination of Rugby, Discipline, and Pleasure

“…Emotions, for example, are integral in processes associated with social interaction, social control, and with producing and challenging social structures, power relations and cultural traditions (Barthes, 1990;Bourdieu, 1986;Foucault, 1978Foucault, , 1985. In recent years, major works on emotion have also appeared in political science, history, moral philosophy, economics, education studies and neuroscience (Berezin, 2002). Shilling (2002) further observed that, "emotional phenomena occupy an important place in sociology's heritage" ( p. 10)-such as the work of Comte, Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel-yet this rich heritage "has yet to be explicated fully by the sub-discipline" (p. 10).…”

The Democratic Role of Campaign Journalism

“…Whilst the personal can equally be political and ideological, and emotional responses can provoke a "community of feeling" that can overcome self-interested impulses (Berezin, 2002), journalists assume that readers would not identify with the culturally "other" and would instead understand issues in terms of competing interests and blame. As Aldridge (2003) suggests, the tabloids' focus on moral outrage against deviant outsiders was commercially motivated, but specifically because journalists assumed readers to be instrumental, self-interested and distrustful of politics in any form, and therefore more easily united by blame and calls for retribution than sympathy and concern for the interests of disadvantaged communities.…”