categories (e.g., virtuesand vices) and the belief inamoral order (e.g., justicevs.
injustice) indicate that the phenomenon of emotional socialism was firmlysitu-
atedwithin nineteenth-centuryforms of religiosity–or,tobemore precise, the
social conventions thatmade Christian tropes and figures an integral part of the
socialist public sphere. The manyreligious references especiallyinthe writings
of Bebel and Liebknecht attestto the enduringinfluenceoffaith, though lessin
the form of church doctrine than in the morals and values that translate ethical
principles into everydaylife. This includes the close connectionto Protestantism
and its emphasis on personal behavior,the influenceofeighteenth-century dis-
courses of the sentiments, and thereligious roots of the cultureofsentimentality
moregenerally. To give one example, the literature ofEmpfindsamkeit(sentimen-
talism) celebratedauthentic feeling asaconduitto the truth of human nature
and an essentialtool in the cultivation of“agood heart.”In this context,suffer-
ing and self-sacrifice appearedless asasign of weakness than as an expression
of authenticity and, ultimately, of empowerment–with obvious implications for
the mutualarticulation of aesthetic and emotionalregisters in socialist utopias
and modernmass societies.
Further complicatingthe issue, the emotional confessions about personal
sacrificesbywell-known Social Democrats as well as their public debates
about the pitfalls of emotional socialism are inseparablefrom the problem of
working-class masculinity.The gendered divisions in the proletarian imaginary
not onlyopened upaspace for expressionsofmale sentimentalitybut also
used the identification of masculinity with cognition and of femininity with emo-
tion to eventuallyreplacethe vestiges of utopian socialism with the certainties of
scientificsocialism. By translating privateemotion into political emotion, Social
Democracy ended up creatingaspace wherein masculinity and emotionality be-
came not onlycompatibleterms but also mutuallyreinforcing ones, as long as
emotionscould be defined in political terms.³Forthese reasons,the contested
status of political emotions cannot be explainedsolelywith regards to the his-
torical transition from utopian socialism to scientific socialism. Asacultural
phenomenon, emotional socialism remained inseparable from the aestheticreg-
isters of the sentimental and the melodramatic, which in the so-called socialist
It would be interesting to consider the emotionalapproach to socialism in theautobiogra-
phies by women socialists such as LilyBraun’stwo-volumeMemoiren einer Sozialistin
(1909–11) and Ottilie Baader’sEin steinigerWeg. Lebenserinnerungen einer Sozialistin(1921).
Foracomparative perspective,see Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler,eds.,SentimentalMen:
Masculinity and the Politics ofAffect in American Culture(Berkeley:University of California
Press, 1999) and Glenn Hendler,Public Sentiments: Structures ofFeeling in Nineteenth-Century
American Literature(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,2001).
Emotional Socialism and Sentimental Masculinity 67