Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements

Front Cover
Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, Francesca Polletta
University of Chicago Press, Mar 9, 2009 - Psychology - 320 pages
Emotions are back. Once at the center of the study of politics, emotions have receded into the shadows during the past three decades, with no place in the rationalistic, structural, and organizational models that dominate academic political analysis.

With this new collection of essays, Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta reverse this trend, reincorporating emotions such as anger, indignation, fear, disgust, joy, and love into research on politics and social protest. The tools of cultural analysis are especially useful for probing the role of emotions in politics, the editors and contributors to Passionate Politics argue. Moral outrage, the shame of spoiled collective identities, or the joy of imagining a new and better society, are not automatic responses to events. Rather, they are related to moral institutions, felt obligations and rights, and information about expected effects, all of which are culturally and historically variable.

With its look at the history of emotions in social thought, examination of the internal dynamics of protest groups, and exploration of the emotional dynamics that arise from interactions and conflicts among political factions and individuals, Passionate Politics will lead the way toward an overdue reconsideration of the role of emotions in social movements and politics generally.

Contributors:
Rebecca Anne Allahyari
Edwin Amenta
Collin Barker
Mabel Berezin
Craig Calhoun
Randall Collins
Frank Dobbin
Jeff Goodwin
Deborah B. Gould
Julian McAllister Groves
James M. Jasper
Anne Kane
Theodore D. Kemper
Sharon Erickson Nepstad
Steven Pfaff
Francesca Polletta
Christian Smith
Arlene Stein
Nancy Whittier
Elisabeth Jean Wood
Michael P. Young
 

Contents

Part Two Cultural Contexts
81
Part Three Recruitment and Internal Dynamics
133
Part Four The Emotions of Conflict
231
Second That Emotion? Lessons from OnceNovel Concepts in Social Movement Research
303
List of Contributors
317
References
321
Index
353
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About the author (2009)

Jeff Goodwin is an associate professor of sociology at New York University and author of No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945-1991.

James M. Jasper is an independent scholar and the author of Restless Nation and The Art of Moral Protest.

Francesca Polletta is an associate professor of sociology at Columbia University and author of Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements.

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