Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements

Front Cover
Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, Francesca Polletta
University of Chicago Press, 2001 - History - 370 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

IV
27
V
45
VI
58
VII
74
VIII
81
IX
83
XI
99
XII
113
XIX
193
XXI
210
XXIII
229
XXIV
231
XXV
249
XXVII
265
XXVIII
280
XXX
301

XIV
131
XVI
133
XVII
156
XVIII
173
XXXII
315
XXXIII
319
XXXIV
351
Copyright

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Page 1 - I'entre deux guerres — Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it.
Page 1 - Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion.
Page 2 - For the purposes of a typological scientific analysis it is convenient to treat all irrational, affectually determined elements of behavior as factors of deviation from a conceptually pure type of rational action.
Page 2 - Even when such emotions are found in a degree of intensity of which the observer himself is completely incapable, he can still have...
Page 6 - an interpretive schemata that simplifies and condenses the 'world out there' by selectively punctuating and encoding objects, situations, events, experiences, and sequences of actions within one's present or past environments" (Snow and Benford 1992, 137).

About the author (2001)

James M. Jasper teaches sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Francesca Polletta is professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling and Protest Politics and Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements, and coeditor of Passionate Politics: Emotions in Social Movements, all published by the University of Chicago Press.