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European Journal of Social Theory 7(2): 123–132

Copyright © 2004 Sage Publications: London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi

Introduction
The Importance of Being Angry: Anger
in Political Life
Mary Holmes
U N I V E R S I T Y O F A B E R D E E N , S C OT L A N D

The sociology of emotion is rapidly becoming a popular field in sociology and this
special issue of EJST turns that interest to the sphere of politics. The main objec-
tive of this issue is to provide an understanding of the sociological importance of
emotions, and specifically anger, in political life. Rather than addressing the
extremely complicated interrelationship between different emotions, the contri-
butions are focused on anger. As will become evident, this is no random choice
but based on the assumption that ‘one can define anger as the essential political
emotion’ (Lyman, 1981: 61). Via this assumption the articles engage with the soci-
ology of emotion and with questions of how and why people do politics. Anger
matters politically because it both motivates and continues to fuel activity and
conflict. Analysis of anger can also assist in the exploration of the supposed person-
alization of politics. Does anger inevitably contribute to nationalism, racism, self-
centred individualism and division, or does it challenge injustice, resist the
bureaucratization of politics and allow greater celebration of diversity?
‘Politics’ here refers both to state and international dealings between poli-
ticians and to more participatory political activity and to the politics of everyday
life. The definitions of anger are also open. Broadly, the editor and many of the
contributors tend towards the idea that anger is something recognized as a
response to perceived injustice. This assumes anger is relational – something we
do (or do not do) as part of our interaction with others. Contributors distinguish
anger from aggression and hostility and attend to the different social meanings
of anger as they are expressed or contained in different social and political circum-
stances. While each contributor has various interpretations of what anger means,
in general, a sociological definition is one which avoids seeing emotions as
‘inbuilt’ mental or bodily reactions or instincts. Crossley (1995: 143) suggests
that ‘[a]nger, for example, is not situated in an inner mental (emotional) realm.
It is an aspect or feature of the way we behave towards that with which we are
angry.’ He draws on Merleau-Ponty’s anti-Cartesian argument that we should not
see mental affirmations of subjectivity as taking place within an individual body
but as ‘publicly verifiable aspects of embodied conduct or behaviour’ (Crossley,
1995: 143). Crossley explains how this is played out in Goffman’s work and
clearly this tradition contributes to Hochschild’s highly influential work on
emotion management, which I refer to briefly below (and see my article later).

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124 European Journal of Social Theory 7(2)

Yet, so far, little social theory has attended to the relationship between anger and
politics. However, my intention is not to provide a detailed review of existing
literature on emotions in politics, as that would be to replicate discussions within
the individual articles. Instead I provide a brief impression of the gaps in the
literature which this issue fills, beginning with an assessment of political soci-
ology’s sparse attention to emotions.
Political sociology, while displaying an early interest in emotions, has only
recently returned to that interest. The emotions involved in social movement
politics have perhaps received the most attention. Many collections, like Silence
and Voice in Contentious Politics (Aminzade et al., 2001), barely touch on
emotions, this particular volume having one chapter on the topic, but others are
more forthcoming. Passionate Politics (Goodwin et al., 2001) re-establishes the
importance of understanding emotions when studying social movements,
discussing the interplay between rationality and irrationality. Within the collec-
tion, a range of emotions are discussed, both in their theoretical and their
concrete manifestations within particular social movements. While useful in
exploring the shifting place of emotions in movement activity, it wavers between
being overly general about emotions and not general enough about politics.
Anger becomes one emotion among others within rather specific oppositional
political forms. Even if looking at emotions in relation to more mainstream
political forms such as welfare politics (Hoggett, 2000), existing accounts say
little or nothing about to what extent anger might be especially crucial. Books
on specific aspects of politics, such as ethnic conflict management (e.g. Ross and
Rothman, 1999), often provide no analysis of emotions at all. However, Mabel
Berezin (2002) has recently attempted to set out a ‘political sociology of emotion’
which requires a brief elaboration.
In trying to think through how emotions matter to politics Berezin suggests
that it is necessary to deal with the analytical difficulties of connecting individu-
ally experienced emotions to collectively enacted politics. She maintains that these
problems can be overcome by using the concepts of secure state and community of
feeling. The secure state (the modern nation-state being the model) is, she argues,
based on emotional attachment to the entity that protects people from threats and
provides stability and security. Communities of feeling are, in contrast, a-struc-
tural and transient. They are about a collective expression of emotional energy
(Berezin, 2002: 39). These unpredictable events can be staged but those that arise
spontaneously are often easier and more effectively used by politicians. She cites
Tony Blair’s appropriation of the emotional response to Princess Diana’s death.
Thus, although communities of feeling are responses to events outside political
institutions, they can be used by those serving the institutions (or indeed chal-
lenging them, as social movements do) to produce solidarity. Solidarity, she
suggests, is politically crucial because it enables people to feel secure. She seems to
imply that solidarity is about sameness in that ‘constructing similarity produces
security, stability and loyalty’ (Berezin, 2002: 47). But solidarity is maintained
partly through exclusion and, despite attempts to acknowledge this, Berezin does
not adequately deal with the issue of what security may mean for those who are
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Holmes Introduction 125

cast as the threat. When Berezin argues that people want security and will invest
emotionally in politics when it is threatened, she is leaving us to conclude that
those who live in ‘insecure’ states are both more political and more emotional.
This is close to conforming to dangerous imagined oppositions between calm
rational subjects in ‘advanced’ nations and irrational ‘extremists’ in the developing
world. Such a position is reached, I suspect, because she characterizes emotions as
individually experienced. Her conception of communities of feeling suggests that
individuals occasionally happen to feel together but this remains vague and she
fails to adequately make use of sociological theories about the relational construc-
tion of emotions. Thus, Berezin is right to suggest that ‘much theoretical, analytic
and empirical work remains to be done in the study of politics and emotions’
(2002: 33). This will require work not only within political sociology but more
attention to political life within the sociology of emotions.
Most work on the sociology of emotions (for example, Bendelow and
Williams, 1998; Hochschild, 1983; 1997; Lupton, 1998) tends either to not deal
with politics at all, or to deal only with a certain aspect of politics. Jack Barbalet
(2001) comes closest in that his detailed consideration of emotions in social life
deals with issues such as class resentment. However, Barbalet is dealing with
specific emotions and anger is not one of them. Historian Theodore Zeldin
(1979) is one of the few authors who have tried to recognize the role of anger in
public politics. He looks at politics in France from 1848 to 1945, but the detailed
historical focus fails to produce much in the way of useful generalizations about
emotions and politics. More useful in that sense is Deborah Lupton’s (1998)
monograph on The Emotional Self. This could be seen as an investigation of the
politics of the personal, although she is examining subjectivity, rather than
politics specifically. The Bendelow and Williams (1998) collection on Emotions
in Social Life does not mention politics, except where briefly discussed in relation
to masculinity politics by Victor Seidler (see also Seidler, 1991). This dearth of
attention may be because exploring emotions in politics has analytical problems,
as Philippe Braud (1996) has argued. Braud’s work is not presently available in
English translation, but some of the problems he raises are addressed in this
special issue. Whether or not analytical problems are the cause, discussions of
politics often give no, or limited, attention to emotions. Meanwhile discussions
of emotions give little thought to politics. This volume therefore offers an import-
ant contribution to both political sociology and the sociology of emotion. To
further explain why anger should be the focus of this contribution a brief history
of social meanings of anger within Western societies is required.
The first major understanding of anger I want to examine critically is the
strand of Western thought that assumes expressing anger is a good thing in itself.
Yet the relational and social contexts in which it is ‘good’ to express anger are
highly limited. Hochschild (1983) suggests in her sociology of emotions that
anger is subject to management, but this is a historically and culturally specific
view. The expression of anger does appear to be discouraged within contemporary
America, unless highly managed (Stearns and Stearns, 1986) and the therapeutic
discourses there enlisted to manage angriness have spread within, and now
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126 European Journal of Social Theory 7(2)

beyond, the West (see Pupavac in this issue). Nevertheless, the condoning of
anger management is not universal or hegemonic. Stearns and Stearns (1986)
document its recent historical emergence and locate it as American. Yet they still
assume (following Hochschild) that there have always been clear social rules
guiding angry and other emotional conduct (which they refer to as emotionol-
ogy). They maintain this stance even when all the documentary evidence they
can gather for the period 1860 to 1930 has little to say on the topic and then
illustrates only a confusion of often contradictory injunctions. To summarize
these as ‘rules’ then seems a rather arbitrary exercise and it becomes purely a
matter of speculation (1986: 97) as to how people’s actual behaviour in that
period might have related to those chaotic notions. Though ‘rules’ may have
become clear to the Americans of the following decades, the very notion of trying
to constantly adjust our behaviour in line with social norms is perhaps itself a
historical development which Foucault characterizes in terms of the emergence
of disciplinary regimes. However, any efforts to manage anger are partial and
fragile if you dispense with the idea of a unitary self, aware of, and in control of,
its thoughts and actions. In seeing emotions, including anger, as managed,
Hochschild (1983) seems to assume some level of rational choice about what kind
of emotions we will display, and when. This view privileges cognitive control.
Though I would not wish to return to a (socio)biological account of emotion as
a ‘hard-wired’ or instinctual response, I would wish to consider emotions as
having elements that are beyond thought-out linguistic capture. Anger can feel
messily sensational, it can be partly somatic, partly ‘unconscious’. Does this sensa-
tionalism lead to affinities with other theories about emotion that underlie the
managed approach, which was defined above as problematic for thinking about
politics and anger?
Also underlying a managed approach to emotions is the second strand of
thought I want to examine about anger: that most familiarly expressed in
Freudian and Neo-Freudian warnings about the dangers of repressing anger (see
Lupton, 1998: 94–5). These are related to the former approach in that they
promote the expression of anger. However, it is not politicized anger at injustice
that is encouraged, but a ‘harmless’ (re)direction of angry feelings so that indi-
vidual resolution can quickly ensue (see Craib, 1994). This arguably depoliticized
understanding of anger is closely related to political anger because both rely partly
on the Aristotelian assertion that only ‘dolts’ do not express anger when they
should (Spelman, 1989; Swaine, 1996). Audre Lorde (1984), Peter Lyman (1981:
62), and Elizabeth Spelman (1989: 268) have used Aristotle’s notion of the right-
eousness of anger in trying to understand it as fundamental in political responses
to injustice. Lupton (1998: 81–4) suggests that this might have a history when
she argues that emotionality itself became a form of resistance against the
perceived enslavement of rational control that emerged in the late eighteenth
century. Romanticism was a discourse within which the ‘passions were considered
the wellsprings of human action’ (Lupton, 1998: 82). Yet anger is not inevitably
an element of resistance. The utility of properly channelled anger in creating
suitably competitive entrepreneurial personalities for early capitalism was
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Holmes Introduction 127

supposedly part of post-Victorian emotionology (Stearns and Stearns, 1986).

Anger may be seen as useful but also as dangerous.
Co-existent with exhortations to (appropriately) express anger is encourage-
ment to repress anger. Stoic philosophers’ belief in a civilized life as one that
avoids anger (Swaine, 1996: 259–63) is still recognizable in descriptions of people
as ‘stoic’ in the face of provoking circumstances. As Spelman (1989) notes, it is
oppressed groups in particular who have been encouraged to repress their anger.
It is, in fact, one of the purposes of this volume to explore anger as a political
response and tool. However, it seems clear that anger bears no ‘natural’ allegiance
to the downtrodden and only through an analysis of anger as embedded within
situated power relations can the anger of politics and the politics of anger be fruit-
fully explored.
In pursuit of this goal, collected here are new articles on the complex relation-
ships between anger and politics. The relationships between culture and political
and institutional structures are discussed in order to better understand a variety
of types of political activity, from the globalized politics of international security
to more locally-based collective struggles for the redress of material and symbolic
inequalities. The articles are grouped under three broad themes: (1) the general
importance of anger in politics; (2) anger as it relates to political conflicts within
global and local contexts; and (3) the collective organization of political activity
and identities around anger at injustice. Obviously these themes overlap and
many of the contributors touch on all of them; however, the articles are grouped
according to their central emphasis.
The first theme is elaborated within Peter Lyman’s discussion of how theor-
etical understandings of emotion can assist in the analysis of political activity.
How might anger be defined and to what extent should it be understood as help
or hindrance in doing politics? Lyman outlines the importance of Western
conceptions of reason as opposite to emotion in establishing dominant and
bureaucratic modes of politics, and perceptions of appropriate political behav-
iour. Anger is the essential political emotion because it is a response to a perceived
injustice. Listening to anger may lead to a constructive public dialogue about the
fairness of political order; but order may be threatened when anger is repressed
because its repression may lead to emotions and actions such as resentment, rage
and violence. The threat that anger poses for political order means there are
strong cultural and political norms that seek to suppress the expression of anger;
the danger of repression is that essential dialogues about injustice may be
suppressed as well. These dialogues are important, according to Lyman, and show
that anger may also be a resource for politics. However, dominant groups seek to
domesticate anger because of the threat it poses. This is done through force, moral
righteousness, care, silence and technique. What is of particular interest is
Lyman’s discussion of technique, that rational rule-following so central to
modern, bureaucratized life. Superficially technique may be represented as the
antithesis of anger, yet he reminds us that Weber’s portrayal of the iron cage is a
story of the domesticating of anger and other emotions in the service of order.
The pursuit of instrumental rationality arose from anger at the whims of
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128 European Journal of Social Theory 7(2)

aristocratic power, but became an emotionally dissatisfying trap, especially for the
middle-class knowledge workers whose status is bound up in the negation of
emotion thought central to technique. The suppressed anxiety and anger of these
middle classes, Lyman argues, have been central in producing a political culture
that struggles to recognize and respect the importance of angry speech in address-
ing injustice.
The problems of expressing anger within current political cultures are explored
more specifically in the next two articles about cases of conflict. The authors here
consider the politics of anger within the context of a hegemonic world order, in
one case, and a particular non-democratic history in the other. Anger is discussed
in relationship to ‘trauma’ and conflict resolution and in relation to political
protest within repressive regimes. People’s perceptions, negotiation and manage-
ment of their emotions in relation to their political environment are examined,
while the geo-political, economic and institutional frameworks of the specific
political situations covered are also considered.
Vanessa Pupavac’s article, ‘War on the Couch: The Emotionology of the New
International Security Paradigm’, introduces these themes with her exploration of
the effects of an increasingly dominant Western therapeutic approach to violent
conflict and its aftermath. She argues that, within the new security paradigm, the
Anglo-American therapeutic approach to conflict has depoliticized anger. Indi-
vidual emotional management has been seen as the key to international non-violent
conflict resolution and is embedded within psychosocial trauma counselling
programmes. As a result of the focus on individual emotions, material deprivation
is marginalized and socio-economic injustice ignored. The imposition of the
Western therapeutic approach is especially evident within the former Yugoslavia
and Bosnia in particular. International administration of the region is increasing
the local population’s sense of frustration and alienation from political processes.
When international psychosocial programmes seem to fail to bring change, it is the
people undergoing therapy who tend to be blamed, rather than the presumptions
of psychosocial programmes and their ethnocentric approach to understanding
emotions. The consequence at the political level has been to question the fitness of
the local populations for self-government because of supposed problems with anger
and a general emotional dysfunctionalism. Reducing politics to an externally
imposed form of emotional management encourages dependence on the inter-
veners and delegitimizes the right of the local populations to determine their own
affairs. Western societies project their own therapeutic needs onto widely differing
socio-cultural situations and, by valorizing personal feelings, can discourage divided
communities from finding locally grounded and culturally appropriate ways of
moving beyond enmity. Here, failing to listen to anger has meant a potentially cata-
strophic lack of constructive dialogue.
Of course, dialogue is something valued as central to democratic principles,
so what happens to anger within political systems where those principles are not
recognized? Helena Flam’s contribution deals with how anger cannot easily form
part of political protest within repressive regimes. She highlights many issues that
might remain hidden in an examination of liberal democratic systems. Flam
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Holmes Introduction 129

examines the contention that civil society was resurrected in Central Europe by
protest politics. However, unlike most previous literature, she focuses on the
newer forms of street protest, which, she argues, were based on fear, courage and
hope. Though anger was important in these protests, its expression was danger-
ous, considering the authorities often used force to dispel demonstrations. Appre-
hension about the repression of mass rallies produced playful new forms of
protest, which felt less fearful for those involved and aimed at diffusing aggres-
sive official responses and making them look ridiculous. If anger at injustice is
responded to with force rather than discussion, this denies that dialogue is
possible and other means of seeking to address injustices need to be found. Such
an example is helpful because repressive regimes are not the only situation in
which anger fails to bring about constructive dialogue.
Anger can be necessary or destructive within the more collective forms of
politics involved in social movement activity and identity politics more broadly.
How people deal with anger may depend on the varying imagined identities of
those acting together and their relationships to dominant social meanings
surrounding anger. The ability of certain ‘groups’ to effectively represent them-
selves and their needs and interests may be either compromised or enhanced by
the ways in which they understand and respond to anger and by the type of
political regime within which they must operate. Tensions are particularly
apparent between those who hold to individualized notions of anger and those
who understand it in more collective terms. Such issues are discussed here within
the context of anger in feminism. They are also discussed in relation to indigen-
ous peoples’ challenges to the Eurocentrism of liberal democracy.
In this issue, Lane West-Newman argues that post-colonial societies have a
social and political life significantly coloured by the experience of anger produced
through perceptions of ethnically located injustice, inequality and difference.
Colonization and settlement as historical processes have produced sites where
ethnic difference triggers frequent and significant negative emotional responses.
There are indigenous grievances arising out of the processes of colonization,
producing indigenous anger about the consequences of non-indigenous (white)
settlement. There is also racism and resentment of any formal efforts made to
address indigenous grievances, especially through legal channels. Together, this
constitutes a social climate where ethnic difference is a salient force in inter-
personal and political relationships. Legal attempts to redress imperial injustices
and work towards conciliation are often formulated within liberal frameworks of
individual rights. Such frameworks may be unhelpful for indigenous peoples
whose own cultural frameworks may privilege a community, rather than
individual responsibility, to ensure justice. The different cultural meanings
informing settler and indigenous anger make accommodation difficult, but
understanding those differences is important in seeing how they continue to
construct post-colonial relationships.
The way in which anger constructs relationships is also explored in connec-
tion with the second-wave feminist movement in my own article. The part anger
plays in motivating political action is frequently noted, but less is said about ways
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130 European Journal of Social Theory 7(2)

in which anger continues to be a part of how people do politics. This article

assesses the usefulness of understanding anger as situated and relational, via a
critique of a feeling rules approach to anger. Drawing loosely on Marxist notions
of conflict as the engine of social change, it endeavours to understand the
gendered aspects of anger as they operate within feminist politics. Shifting sets
of conventions have had some continuity in discouraging women in Western
nations (particularly white and middle-class women) from showing anger. But
clearly, women do get angry and feminists have drawn on anger in acting politi-
cally. New Zealand feminist writings from the ‘second-wave’ are taken as illus-
trative of the common difficulties Western feminists faced with their anger,
because of the political ideal of sisterhood and the realities of dealing with other
women in often new and experimental political processes. Feminist struggles
demonstrated that anger is not inevitably emancipatory, but is more likely to be
subversive of entrenched patterns of dominance under conditions and relations
that are at least oriented towards equality. If anger is taken up as a necessary part
of conflicts, not as a chance for personalized slighting, then it can help emotion-
ally and politically move people towards respectful relations with others that are
key to establishing social justice. This involves seeing anger as productive of
relations with others rather than as a reaction to an enemy ‘other’.
However, in his article, David Ost argues that movement and party politics is
successful when it convinces people to accept the enemy it proposes. Though this
is different from my own argument, I share Ost’s belief that emotions are ‘some-
thing with which power is itself intimately involved’. Contributions to the special
issue do deal largely with oppositional politics, but all the authors do attend to
responses to and uses of anger among the powerful. Ost specifically looks at main-
stream politics and how anger might be central. Citizens’ diverse experiences of
anger are something he suggests politicians direct for their own purposes, usually
by attributing social problems to a particular enemy. In coming to this
conclusion, Ost is working with a different understanding of power than the
Foucauldian-based one I propose in my article. My own analysis perhaps also
relies on a rather optimistic belief in people’s ability to find forms of politics in
which conflict is important but which can transcend the ‘us versus them’ mental-
ity which Ost is no doubt right to perceive as a crucial feature of most current
political activity.
This collection of articles is distinctive and important in its endeavour to
understand the complexities of political activity. Socio-political life is funda-
mentally shaped by, and shapes, anger as a key political emotion. In addressing
such processes, these accounts offer a timely extension to the sociology of
emotions and a new approach to understanding politics. There has been wide-
spread public response to events such as September 11 (see Kemper, 2002) and
nationalized conflicts such as those in the Balkans, the Middle East and some
African states. This, combined with cynicism about politicians and the appear-
ance of new protests (such as those against global capitalism), suggest shifts in
political culture that can be better understood by attending to anger. Fear may
appear to be the dominant emotional force in early twenty-first-century politics,
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Holmes Introduction 131

as the ‘war on terror’ promotes fearfulness, rather than offering freedom from
it. In such a climate, anger becomes extremely important because while fear
arguably discourages action and divides people, anger can encourage communi-
cation – even if it is initially somewhat hostile. However, anger is not intrinsi-
cally just, and whether it offers salvation or disaster remains dependent on when
and how it occurs and the responses people make. A fuller knowledge of anger
in politics is therefore crucial if politics is to be more than the pursuit of hostil-
ity.

References

Aminzade, Ronald R., Goldstone, Jack A., McAdam, Doug, Perry, Elizabeth J., Sewell,
William H., Jr, Tarrow, Sidney and Tilley, Charles (2001) Silence and Voice in the Study
of Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barbalet, J.M. (2001) Emotion, Social Theory, and Social Structure: A Macrosociological
Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bendelow, Gillian and Williams, Simon, eds (1998) Emotions in Social Life: Critical
Themes and Contemporary Issues. London: Routledge.
Berezin, Mabel (2002) ‘Secure States: Towards a Political Sociology of Emotion’, in Jack
Barbalet (ed.) Emotions and Sociology. Oxford: Blackwell/Sociological Review.
Braud, Philippe (1996) L’Emotion en politique: Problèmes d’analyse. Paris: Presses de
Sciences Politiques.
Craib, Ian (1994) The Importance of Disappointment. London: Routledge.
Crossley, Nick (1995) ‘Body Techniques, Agency and Intercorporeality: On Goffman’s
Relations in Public’, Sociology 29(1): 133–49.
Goodwin, Jeff, Jasper, James M. and Poletta, Francesca (2001) Passionate Politics: Emotions
and Social Movements. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hochschild, Arlie R. (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
—— (1997) The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. New
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Hoggett, Paul (2000) Emotional Life and the Politics of Welfare. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
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Lorde, Audre (1984) ‘The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism’, in Audre Lorde
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Lupton, Deborah (1998) The Emotional Self. London: Sage.
Lyman, Peter (1981) ‘The Politics of Anger’, Socialist Review 11: 55–74.
Ross, Marc Howard and Rothman, Jay, eds (1999) Theory and Practice in Ethnic Conflict
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St Martin’s Press.
Seidler, Victor (1991) Recreating Sexual Politics: Men, Feminism and Politics. London:
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Spelman, Elizabeth V. (1989) ‘Anger and Insubordination’, in Ann Garry and Marilyn
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132 European Journal of Social Theory 7(2)

Stearns, Carol Zisowitz and Stearns, Peter N. (1986) Anger: The Struggle for Emotional
Control in America’s History. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
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Zeldin, Theodore (1979) France 1848–1945: Politics and Anger. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

■ Mary Holmes is a Sociology Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen. Her

research into the political and cultural representation of gender engages with the
sociology of the body, emotions, and intimacy and relationships. Her published
articles include discussions of the reproduction of gender within political cultures,
and of time as a political resource. She has also co-edited Critical Concepts: The
Body (2003), a major work on the sociology of the body. Recently she was awarded
an Economic and Social Research Council grant to investigate distance relation-
ships, and work on this topic is due to appear in a forthcoming issue of Current
Sociology and The Sociological Review. Address: University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen
AB24 3QY, UK. [email: m.holmes@abdn.ac.uk]