tions onlyinthe form of texts.Inwriting,emotions are endowed with political
relevance throughasystem of differences: by distinguishingone emotion from
another (e.g., sufferingversusresignation), by differentiatingprivatefrom public
emotion (e.g., sufferingversus indignation), and by comparingemotion to cog-
nition (e.g., class hatredversus class consciousness). Similarly, emotional styles
are modeledonexisting literarygenres–with the sentimental and the melodra-
matic offering the greatestpoliticalrewardsfor the workers’movement.Under-
standing emotions asathus defined medium of transformation (i.e., from feel-
ingto thinkingtofeeling,from aesthetics to politics to aesthetics)isespecially
importantfor understanding the formative contribution of emotionsinthe mak-
ing of the proletarian dream.
The culturalpractices that imagined the proletariat as an emotional com-
munity and distinguished Social Democracy through its emotional regimes
point to the powerful influenceofthe Enlightenment and itsreverberations in
the making of the bourgeois public sphere. Nineteenth-century understandings
of collective emotion (e.g., LeBon’smass soul) developedbetween eight-
eenth-century Enlightenment discourses of emotion, which emphasize the
fluid relations between bodilysensation and aesthetic emotion, and twentieth-
century psychoanalytic theories of the drives, which insist on the necessityofre-
pression and sublimation.Both paradigms confirmed the individual as the start-
ing point of all critical inquiry,with the perspective of classrecognized through
the preoccupation with mass contagion and subsequentlymanaged by mass psy-
chologyand related disciplines.Between thesetemporal markers,the nineteenth
centurymade emotionsavailable through the scientific disciplinesofpsychology
and sociologyand the critique of mass society and modernity thatemerged
under the influenceofNietzscheanism, including the will to power,and that con-
tinued in the context ofLebensphilosophie(vitalism) and,much later,the Frank-
furt School’sCritical Theory.New perspectivesonthe significance of emotions
for aesthetics and hermeneutics openedupthroughWilhelmWundt’ssystem
of internal perception with its fluid distinctions between feelings and ideas
andWilhelm Dilthey’shermeneuticmethod with its emphasis onEinfühlung
(empathy) asacritical faculty.This growinginterest in emotion asaheuristic de-
vice continued with Georg Simmel’sreflections on the mentality of modern life
and SiegfriedKracauer’sessays on the cult of distraction. The attendant refine-
ment of critical methods, often at the intersection of art and science or in the
contact zone between highand low culture, must be seen as recognition of
theremarkable ability of emotion across the culturaland social divides at
Emotional Socialism and Sentimental Masculinity 65