Suchergebnisse

The structuralist and social-psychological perspectives on alienation are described, with attention to Seeman’s contention that the experience of alienation is based more on sentiment than on reason. The passions in early modernity are described, and the eighteenth-century moral sentimentalists Hume, Smith, and Kant are discussed. Romanticism is described as the first self-critique of modernity, as it opposed Enlightenment science, rationalism, and uniformitarianism; it is linked to interiorized emotionality and to diversitarianism. Romantic concepts of alienation include inhibition of natural sexuality, oppressive condition of work, and the loss of an imagined Golden Age before human alienation. Hegel’s Phenomenology outlines a four-stage mode of the undoing of social domination which has a narrative structure consistent with romantic story-telling, but was grounded not in romanticism but in Gnosticism and Lutheran dialectics. Hegel’s critique of sentimentalism and romantism is explored, with Hegel emerging as a dedicated anti-romantic who condemned the sophistry of Schlegel and Novalis’s ‘beautiful soul’, arguing that the self, to be viable, cannot remain encapsulated in inner subjectivity but must rather engage in emotion-laden confrontation with self-willed others in the social world; this requires a positive kind of alienation of the self from itself. Romantic effort to keep the self in itself as protection from the corrupted and corrupting social world was misguided. Hegel was right in asserting that the self is necessarily both subjective and objective, both inner and outer, but wrong in his contention that the self can progress by resolving inner contradictions, for the self, as the core of our personality, rather progresses through incorporating and elaborating contradictions, ambiguities, and polysemantic meanings.

Resentment is a noxious emotion that can exist in sublimated form as a result of being subjected to inferiorization, stigmazation, or violence. In its active form, resentment can be a forceful response to acts that have created unjustified and meaningless suffering. We consider sociomoral conceptualizations of resentment by Adam Smith, Hume, and Lévinas. Nietzsche and Scheler developed the broader notion of ressentiment, a generalized form of resentment arising out of powerlessness and the experience of brutalization neither forgotten nor forgiven. Resentment is seen historically as a sentiment that is saturated with frustration, contempt, outrage, and malevolence. Marshall described oppositional class-consciousness as permeated with resentment and anger, but resentment also contains the basic emotions of surprise and disgust. Resentment is linked to the concept of relative deprivation. A partial classification of emotions is used to further analyze resentment as containing three secondary-level emotions: contempt (anger & disgust), shock (surprise & disgust), and outrage (surprise & anger). Thus, resentment is conceptualized as a tertiary-level emotion, containing three primary and three secondary emotions.

The articles in this Special Issue of the IJSSP, entitled 'Sociology of Emotions', were, with two exceptions, presented at the 90th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association held in Washington, D.C., U.S.A., from August 19–23, 1995. These outstanding papers do much to develop the theoretical grounding of two closely related fields of inquiry ‐ the social psychology of emotions and the sociology of emotions. No social relations are carried out in the absence of either thought or emotion. It immediately follows that the sociology of emotions is not so much a nascent, exotic sub‐discipline of sociology as it is a level of analysis that must be carried out if meaning is to be found in any social system, in any social process, or in any social relationship of the everyday world.

Following Darwin, Plutchik's psychoevolutionary theory defines emotions as adaptive reactions to stimuli. While his 'stimulus' stands as an unanalyzed psychological construct, he does explicate four existential problems of life ‐ territoriality, hierarchy, temporality, and identity ‐ each of which can present itself as positive or negative, as an opportunity or a problem. Plutchik's four existential problems can be generalized into Fiske's (1991) four elementary relations of the social life ‐ market pricing, authority ranking, communal sharing, and equality matching, respectively. A set of propositions is presented, according to which the predicted values of particular emotions are proportional to power functions of the products of pairs of social relations variables. With the measurement of just eight social relations variables, the general, formal, socioevolutionary theory makes it possible to predict the level of each of the eight primary emotions and of the 28 secondary emotions that are mixed pairs of primary emotions. The possibility that jealousy is a mix of three primary emotions ‐ fear, sadness, and surprise ‐ is discussed.