The Masses Are Revolting; or, The Birth of Social Theory from the Spirit of Disgust

Abstract

This chapter shifts the focus from the natural to the social sciences. Against the economic backdrop of the financial revulsion of 1857, the chapter provides a genealogical account of the role of attraction–repulsion in early twentieth-century works of urban sociology and social theory through readings of mid-nineteenth-century texts by Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, and Herbert Spencer. It contends that the fin-de-siècle notion that attraction–repulsion sits at the core of all social relations cannot be understood in isolation from the fact that attraction–repulsion in various guises and iterations was a de facto affective posture for many of the major protosociological urban investigators of the preceding hundred years. The chapter seeks to use the genealogy of attraction–repulsion to complicate the role that has customarily been attributed to emotion and affect in historical accounts of the rise of the social sciences. Ultimately, it illustrates how a confusion between pleasure and disgust, which had been the de facto affective state for Victorian bourgeois social observers, was, for fin-de-siècle social theorists like Georg Simmel, Émile Durkheim, and Sigmund Freud, excluded from sociological method while simultaneously diagnosed as a fundamental precondition for all sociality.

Ways of Seeing Advertising: Law and the Making of Visual Commercial Culture

“…An affective response of disgust often came with these judgments, as Morris exemplified. Disgust was bound up with an entire public language that recommended aesthetic revulsion, as Zachary Samalin (2021) shows. 24 And, indeed, aesthetic criticism became a civil organization.…”