political emotion as dangerous irrationality,anargument first presented by con-
servative scholars in the context of nineteenth-centurymasspsychologyand
confirmed by the fascistmass movementsofthe twentieth century.Inthe Ger-
man context,the argument for deliberative democracy has beenmade most
forcefullyinthe 1960s by JürgenHabermas in his influential theory of the bour-
geois public sphere. The first doubts about the limits of communicative action
andrational choice found expression in the concept ofaproletarian public
sphere developed by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge in evocative writingson
public sphere, experience, history,and obstinacy since the 1970s.³The degree
to which modern democracies,too, depend on cultures of emotion in both ach-
ieving social cohesion and organizingpublicdissenthas become the subject of
urgent concern acrossarangeofscholarlyfields. Until recently,the deep-seated
suspicion towardemotions in politics has focused on the wayshared convictions
are articulated in the form of propaganda, demagoguery,ormass contagion.
Giventhe continuingpreference for measuring the politics of emotionagainst
the allegedlysuperior qualities of critical reasoningand deliberative argument,
there is an urgent need for historicalstudies that treat political emotions as dis-
tinct culturalpractices with theirown formal registers and symbolic functions.
The reclamation of emotionasalegitimate part of political debate is insep-
arable from the discourses of recognition associated in the United States with
contemporaryidentity politics, new social movements, and the so-called culture
wars. There is increasingawareness–at the intersection of cultural studies with
gender and sexuality studies and criticalrace and ethnic studies–of the power-
ful role of emotions in the struggles of marginalized social and ethnic groups and
the self-fashioningofcountercultures and subcultures. Meanwhile, the social sci-
ences have drawnattention tovery different emotional economies established by
the neoliberal world order and thematizedinbook titles such asTheEntrepre-
neurial SelfandTheEmotional Logic ofCapitalism.⁴Here more historically
grounded perspectivesonclass, culture, and the politics of emotion can offer
amuch-needed corrective to the identity discourses thatoffer compellingin-
The twokey texts areJürgenHabermas,TheStructural Transformation of thePublic Sphere: An
InquiryintoaCategoryofBourgeois Society,trans. Thomas Bürger(Cambridge,MA: MIT Press,
1989) and Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge,Public Sphereand Experience:Towards an Analysis
of theBourgeois and ProletarianPublic Sphere,forewordMiriam Hansen, trans. Peter Labanyi,
Jamie OwenDaniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (London:Verso,2016).Forafurther discussion of
the significanceofNegt and Kluge,see the Afterword.
See Ulrich Bröckling, Das unternehmerische Selbst. Soziologieeiner Subjektivierungsform
(Frankfurt am Main:Suhrkamp,2007)and MartijnKonings,TheEmotional Logic of Capitalism:
What Progressives HaveMissed(Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press,2015).
4 Introduction