It might seem trivial and mere common sense to note that revolts and revolutions are deeply emotional moments. In history books and newspapers, we read about the tense and emotionally charged atmosphere that leads to violence when protestors confront police forces, or about furious and passionate crowds acting in defiance of the ideal of rational and coldblooded politics.Footnote 1 But rage and anger are not the only emotions involved in the politics of protest. Consider the iconic photographs of the summer strikes during the French Popular Front in 1936, depicting smiling workers occupying their factories and construction sites, or the cheering crowds storming the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Or consider the genre of protest songs, telling stories of solidarity and hope as well as deep sorrow. At times, social and political movements even made feelings their central concern, such as the hippy movement with its calls for free love. On the other side of the political spectrum, conservative as well as social democratic observers often denounced protests and riots as politically irrelevant outbreaks of hatred, or mocked the ‘hysterical’ fear of the peace movement during the 1980s.Footnote 2 Somehow, these examples suggest, feelings mattered, yet how precisely they mattered is rarely investigated. The essays in this special issue will address this question in order to enrich our understanding of protest movements, revolts and revolutions. Collectively, they intend to open a theoretical and methodological debate on the role of emotions in the politics of protest and resistance.
Yet this goal comes with considerable methodological challenges. It is, first of all, anything but clear what emotions actually are. Scholars from a variety of disciplines are far from agreeing upon how to theorise and study emotions empirically, especially from a historical perspective. As editors of the present issue, we do not privilege any specific approach, but seek to highlight how different conceptions and approaches to emotions yield different questions, make use of various sources, and thus lead to a multitude of new insights and interpretations about social movements, political protests and revolutions across twentieth-century Europe. This issue seeks both to contribute to our understanding of a variety of protest movements and revolts and to provide a methodological intervention into the debate on how to study emotions historically. For this reason, we will begin our introduction with a brief discussion of different approaches to the history of emotions and specifically the role of emotions in contentious politics, and then explain how the essays in this issue build upon these approaches and develop them further. We conclude our introduction with some preliminary observations about how the role of emotions in protest movements changed throughout the twentieth century and questions for further research raised by these observations.
Beyond rational actors: emotions in history and contentious politics
For a long time, emotions were of little interest to scholars of protest movements and contentious politics. Reacting against an earlier scholarship that denigrated protesting and revolting crowds by depicting them as deeply emotional and irrational, and hence outside the realm of real, serious politics, scholars – most notably sociologists – since the 1970s were eager to show that protestors were, in fact, rational actors in their own right, trying to make use of political opportunities that were open to them. It is against this backdrop that sociologists of contentious politics have, since the late 1990s, tried to reintroduce emotions into the analysis of protest movements without falling back on old stereotypes of the irrational masses.Footnote 3 For example, as Deborah Gould has suggested, the model of ‘rational actors’ and ‘political opportunities’ fails to explain why people engage in collective activism against all odds (or not), and at times even succeed.Footnote 4
Since then, scholars of contentious politics and social movements from a variety of different intellectual and disciplinary backgrounds have studied the role of emotions in multiple ways. They have asked how emotions help in shaping a political identity, how political movements appeal to feelings to mobilise support, how they make use of emotional practices to form bonds of solidarity, and how social movements deal with fear.Footnote 5 While there is growing attention to emotions in scholarly work on social movements, more work remains to be done on the nature and roles of emotions in the great ideologically driven movements of the twentieth century like communism and fascism.Footnote 6 No doubt, these are important contributions. They help us understand the formation of movements and the dynamics of conflict in ‘hot’ situations, as well as the decline and dissolution of movements. Yet the link between emotions and politics often remains rather instrumental. In this reading, emotions such as rage or hope can simply be incited by leaders of the movement to support the mobilisation of protestors, whereas disappointment and fear tend to lead to dissolution. Emotions themselves, however, often remain an under-theorised ‘black box’, as does the political relevance of emotions beyond the question about their ‘function’ in social movements.
This is all the more striking since there has been a vivid theoretical debate within the humanities and the natural sciences on the nature of emotions. Much of the debate has been shaped by a binary distinction between nature and nurture, that is the question whether emotions are universal and part of the human condition, as some psychologists argue, or whether the way we feel is culturally and historically specific, as primarily anthropologists have argued.Footnote 7 Recently, however, scholars have begun moving beyond this binary. The historian Nicole Eustache, for example, argued in a 2012 American Historical Review Conversation about emotions, that ‘cutting-edge neuroscientists’ actually confirm what ‘linguistic theorists have been arguing all along: that language fundamentally shapes both the expression and the experience of emotion’.Footnote 8 This is not the place to offer yet another review of the diverging and competing conceptualisations of emotions;Footnote 9 suffice it to note that there is no consensus among the authors of the articles in this issue. What interests us here is how conceptualising and understanding emotions might further inform inquiries into the dynamics of power relations and thus the politics of protest. It is, indeed, politics that has motivated some conceptualisations of emotions as at least in some way grounded in human nature. Remarkably, though, many of the scholars reflecting on the political significance of emotions have concentrated on forms of domination, with the notable exception of Deborah Gould.Footnote 10 In this introduction, we therefore want to think through some of these conceptions to see how they might also help to understand forms of resistance.
Perhaps the most famous example for this is William Reddy. Frustrated by the lack of a firm grounding to make political value judgments within post-modern theory and practice, he turned to emotions.Footnote 11 According to Reddy, there is an amorphous, unbound and unspecified ‘thought material’ within us, as human beings, that we have to name and thereby transform into specific, goal-oriented ‘emotions’.Footnote 12 This very act of naming has both transformative and performative functions, as Reddy's term ‘emotive’ suggests. Saying, or even imagining saying, for example, to a spouse ‘I don't love you anymore’ transforms an unclear, undecided mix of feelings into a clear emotional statement. In that sense, statements like ‘I (don’t) love you’, ‘I’m (not) afraid’, or ‘I’m (not) sad’, do not simply describe ‘objective’ emotional states, but also create them by giving shape and meaning to what was before unclear and unspecified.
How such ‘thought material’ can be articulated and thus specified is, Reddy argues, subject to a society's emotional normative order. According to this line of thinking, how, where and when unspecified ‘thought material’ can be expressed as emotions is shaped and limited by social norms, which Reddy describes as ‘emotional regimes’. Such an ‘emotional regime’ can be, in Reddy's view, more or less liberal; it can allow for more or less emotional liberty and induce more or less emotional suffering by restricting how the unspecified ‘thought material’ can be transformed into specific expressions of feelings. This conception allows Reddy to make political value judgments about any given society based on, in his view, an ‘objective’ foundation. Reddy's attempt to firmly ground politics in an understanding of emotions that some might describe as ultimately biological is certainly open to criticism. Yet, even if one does not buy into his understanding of emotions, we believe that the notion of ‘emotional regimes’ and ‘emotives’ might provide novel ways to think about emotions and the politics of protest. Above all, we would propose that emotional regimes, to employ Reddy's term, are created and, crucially, contested by historical actors. They are part of what William Sewell has described as the ‘built environment’ in which human beings act and feel; our job as historians is, then, to explore not only how emotional regimes shape the possibility of expressing feelings, but also to examine how emotional regimes are created.Footnote 13 As historians of protest movements, we should inquire if protest movements did not aim, at times explicitly, at times implicitly, at altering suppressive emotional regimes, and ask if they succeeded, or simply created a different, but not necessarily less suppressive emotional regime in the process. Conceiving emotional regimes in this way would imply, as Nicole Eustache has argued in the AHR conversation cited above, that emotions are a ‘key index of power relations in any society’, and, we would add, a key field for political struggle.Footnote 14 Importantly, however, we would also caution against too much of a dualistic understanding of more or less ‘liberal’ emotional regimes. Instead, it might be more helpful to consider the ambivalences of emotional regimes and how they change: what might look like more permissiveness, for instance, might just be a different rule of feeling.Footnote 15
What Reddy has described as ‘thought material’, sociologist Deborah Gould calls ‘affects’. These, too, are amorphous, unspecified and untamable.Footnote 16 But whereas Reddy is interested in emotional regimes and the liberty they grant or prohibit, Gould is more concerned with the political implications of affects. As Gould argues, naming an affect, categorising an unbound, bodily feeling, always leaves a ‘residuum’, that is, ‘the unnamed excess of the interpretative process’. This affective residuum carries on an ‘uncontained potential’, which ‘continues to exert force and motivate.’ Untameable affect, in other words, has, for Gould, always the ambivalent potential to challenge existing power relations, either in a liberating or a reactionary way, and can lead to social change or inaction. Her approach would thus quite directly help us understand the role of emotions in motivating politics of protest. As scholars, we could investigate how people ‘feel’, in an almost bodily way, that something with the existing order is wrong, and that changes could be made, even though they are not quite able to name what they ‘feel’ is wrong. This might enable an understanding of why people engage in collective action, despite all odds and contrary to what a ‘political opportunities’ approach would predict.Footnote 17
But we need not necessarily turn to conceptions of emotions, or affects, that are ultimately grounded in some understanding of human nature to conceptualise emotions as deeply political. Monique Scheer's praxeological approach to emotions offers an alternative. Emotional practices are, in Scheer's terms, ‘things people do in order to have emotions, or “doing emotions” in a performative sense, which would implicate thinking of emotions themselves as a kind of practice’.Footnote 18 Such practices can look very different. They can be, in William Reddy's sense, emotional speech acts such as expressing love, but also playing and listening to music at social gatherings, showing and viewing photographs of war atrocities to incite moral outrage, or observing other bodies performing an emotion, for example, crying, itself an emotional practice. Building upon Pierre Bourdieu's work and notably his understanding of the socially ingrained ‘habitus’, Scheer rejects the very distinction between an ‘autonomous’ body and the social world. The human body is, as Michel Foucault argued, itself deeply social, and so are emotions. Social power is thus, as Scheer continues, relying once again on Bourdieu, incorporated into the body, ‘and produce[s] corresponding thinking, feeling and behavior’. Ultimately, this approach denaturalises emotions, including bodily impulses. Instead, it proposes that even the seemingly most intimate and natural spheres, that of emotions and bodily feelings, are shaped by social power relations. It is exactly this (conscious!) insight that allows for a ‘recognition of the politics of emotions’.Footnote 19 In line with Bourdieu, Scheer thus pursues an explicitly emancipatory project. Her emancipatory project, however, differs sharply from the arguably equally emancipatory project Gould pursues. Whereas, for Gould, affect, that is the ‘non-rational’, can be a ‘key force in social change’, it is the insight into the social nature of emotions that, for Scheer, can increase the ‘domain of agency’. Interestingly, the potential for emancipatory politics would thus be located within, and not beyond, the realm of presumably intellectual insights.
We are attracted by Scheer's praxeological approach because it supports, we believe, our reformulation of the notion of emotional regimes. Indeed, Scheer is quite sceptical both vis-à-vis the concept of ‘emotional regimes’ and that of ‘emotional communities’ (Barbara Rosenwein), because they imply, in Scheer's reading, ‘coherent, somewhat mentalized, and rather static systems of shared values, behaviors, and so on’. To avoid such static conceptions, Scheer urges historians to analyse how emotional styles, a term Scheer prefers, are practically enacted in everyday social life. To our minds, the same holds true of emotional regimes and emotional communities. The enactment of such emotional norms, whatever one may call them, however, never works entirely smoothly. Practices can fail to generate the emotions they are supposed to achieve, and dominant emotional styles, regimes or communities can be reinforced, but also challenged and contested.Footnote 20 Whether such challenges go hand in hand with a critical explication of emotional norms, or whether they remain unconscious and implicit, will depend on the specific circumstances. These questions are thus subject to close historical investigation.
These approaches thus provide different ways to study the ‘politics of emotions’. While William Reddy's concept of ‘emotional regimes’ highlights the limitations and prohibitions of expressing feelings, Deborah Gould's work draws attention to the unnamed and unspecific affective residua that might motivate collective action. Finally, Monique Scheer's notion of ‘emotional practices’ urges historians to study closely what people did, thereby confirming existing emotional styles or challenging them. Scholars will certainly continue to debate the merits and problems of these concepts and terminologies, and it is not our intention here to privilege one or the other. Indeed, the contributors to this special issue draw on a wide variety of conceptual, and arguably mutually exclusive, approaches to the study of emotions in history. Adam Zientek's study of the mutinies in the French army in 1917, for example, makes use of neuroscientific understandings of basic emotions that are hard-wired in the body and hence subject to stimuli like alcohol consumption,Footnote 21 whereas Jake Smith and Joachim C. Häberlen combine Reddy's notion of ‘emotional regimes’ and Monique Scheer's praxeological approach to analyse the alternative left and youth revolts in Germany from the 1970s to the early 1980s. Approaching their subjects from different theoretical understandings of what emotions are, the articles presented here demonstrate the potential yield – and, importantly, limits – of different conceptualisations of emotions for empirical studies. Independently of the terminology one chooses, however, the articles demonstrate that it is essential to combine studies of both emotional rules and norms, how they are created, formulated and enacted, with studies of challenges to these rules and norms, both practical and theoretical.
Beyond emotional discourses: feelings and bodies in protest movements
Beyond the theoretical differences, all the approaches presented in this issue show that a mere study of the emotional lexica and languages of social activists and protestors does not suffice.Footnote 22 They highlight, in one way or another, the role of the body – be it as locus of some unnamed affective potential, or be it by focusing on what might be called, in a rather loose sense, ‘emotional practices’, even though the articles do not always employ this language. The articles address what people did to influence, shape and perform their own and others’ emotions and feelings; or, to phrase this in a way that implies perhaps less intentionality and agency, how people's ‘doings’ (Scheer) shaped their emotions. Moving beyond emotional languages, the articles pay particular attention to the necessarily gendered body, to the brain and to the senses as well as to bodily practices and how they relate to feelings. They analyse how the space in which bodies moved shaped, for example, deeply gendered emotional communities; they discuss material objects activists used to express, perform, or incite emotions. These practices are perhaps of particular relevance to the study of protest movements, in which bodies played and play such a crucial role – in the form of protesting and marching bodies, of bodies engaging in violence or suffering from violence, or of bodies dressed up to defy cultural norms.Footnote 23 Even today in a seemingly increasingly virtual world, it is hard to imagine protest movements, revolts and revolutions without the involvement of bodies.
Taken together, the different methodological approaches pursued in these articles offer a rich repertoire for how a study of feelings and bodies will enhance our understanding of contentious politics. Adam Zientek's approach to emotions is perhaps the most radical and provocative for historians. In line with current neuroscientific research, Zientek locates basic emotions in the human brain. There is, then, no difference between emotions and the neurological and physiological processes of the body. According to this logic, emotions can be stimulated or suppressed by consuming drugs, such as alcohol, that affect specific neural pathways, as Zientek explains. In this sense, Zientek's work looks at how bodies and material objects – alcohol – not only interact, but fuse. Whether or not the neuroscientific theories Zientek draws on – notably Jaak Panksepp's model of ‘core emotional affects’ – are correct will be open to debate. Not everyone will agree with his reliance on neurobiologists to understand the hard-wired nature of emotions across human cultures and time. It may, as any reliance on biology, face charges of reductionism. As editors, we do not want to hide our preference for other approaches. Yet, given that ‘neuro-history’ has often been discussed, and criticised, in rather abstract terms, we believe it is crucial to see what such an approach can yield in practice. Indeed, Zientek's careful micro-study of one decisive day during the French army mutinies in spring 1917 demonstrates, first, that historians, and especially historians of emotions, would do well to consider alcohol as well as other drugs as a historical agent that can shape people's feelings and thus actions.Footnote 24 Second, by focusing on ‘micro-situational’ factors, namely that soldiers were sober at 2:30 pm, but drunk by 6:00 pm, rather than depending on ‘distal macro-structural factors’, Zientek shows how neuroscientific insights can inform historical studies and, in Zientek's reading, provide the situational reasons in the brain for why something happened at a specific point of time in a specific way, something that arguments operating on a ‘grand’ cultural level fail to do.
Turning to neuroscience is, however, by no means the only option for incorporating the body into our analyses. The body's senses play a central role in Christophe Traïni's article on animal rights activists from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. He specifically focuses on ‘sensitising devices’, that is the ensemble of material objects activists use to provoke affective reactions and mobilise involvement and support for a political cause. ‘Affective states’, he writes, ‘are inscribed into the materiality of objects’. By virtue of their materiality, objects appeal to our senses – we hear, see, smell and touch them. If exposed to objects that in a particular way speak to our senses, which we find horrifying or disgusting, then we are sensitised over time, forced to respond and no longer able to remain neutral, as activists hope. However, how these objects are inscribed with the intended emotional strategies of activists also reflects the social conventions of both the activists and their intended recipients, as well as the position of the scholar making his or her observations, all of which requires careful reconstruction. Similar to alcohol as discussed by Adam Zientek, albeit in a less directly chemical way, material objects gain agency in Traïni's argument. Objects can incite affective states but, as Traïni cautions, how the intended affective states are received and experienced by others is often ambiguous, ‘sometimes incomprehensible even to the person feeling the emotion’, and only indirectly discernible to the observer through a ‘tangle of clues’.Footnote 25 This approach allows Traïni to trace how mobilisation strategies of animal rights activists changed from the nineteenth to the twentieth century and to relate these changes to the altered social basis of the animal rights movement, not only by noting the different social statuses between activists, but also ‘the norms and representations that brought them into contact with the affective experiences that shaped them’, including a lowering in the tolerance threshold for violence, the increasing popularity of pet animals and an increased propensity to identify with animals in general found in the late twentieth century.
How anyone could stand up to, let alone sustain and reinvigorate resistance against an oppressive regime is the subject of Eduardo Romanos's long-term study of Spanish anarchists’ ongoing struggle against the Franco regime from 1939 to 1975. Whereas bodies have been central in Zientek's and, to a lesser degree, Traïni's articles, Romanos looks at how multiple emotional practices continued to influence the high-risk activism of Spanish anarchists in ambivalent ways, during brief windows of opportunity like 1945 and the early 1960s, thus challenging more narrow sociological approaches that typically would only focus on one emotion. By way of an underground print culture, Romanos not only provides a glimpse into some of the older forms of clandestine political activism and related emotional practices of anarchist reading cultures and émigré correspondence, but he also shows how the strategic dramaturgy of hope and indignation enabled the reactivation of anarchists’ networks and even the possibility of new alliances under changing circumstances, as well as how other feelings like resentment among anarchists actually worked to divide the movement in the years after the Second World War.
Music allows Nikolaos Papadogiannis to further explore the performative dimensions of multiple and overlapping emotional communities of left-wing Greek migrants in West Germany from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Drawing on Barbara Rosenwein's work, Papadogiannis investigates how Greek migrants performed specific emotions by listening to music and singing, a performance which created at once a national community of Greeks in West Germany, centred around feelings of suffering due to migration and longing for the homeland, and a distinctly left-wing emotional community that sought to turn suffering into strength for struggling. Yet this left-wing emotional community also transcended national boundaries on the basis of international solidarity through socialising with left-wing German activists. What emerges through Papadogiannis's analysis is thus an image of dynamic and overlapping emotional communities interlinked through the emotional practices of Greek music.Footnote 26 Collectively singing and listening to music, Greek migrants performed kefi, a Greek term deriving from the Arabic kaif that can be roughly translated as ‘spirit of joy’, in the original Arabic meaning under the influence of marijuana. Space played a key role in this formation of an emotional community, since members of different political factions of the left gathered at the same taverns, sang together and thus jointly performed kefi, which allowed them to overcome political differences. Kefi is a highly cultural specific emotion with its own performative scripts. In this sense, it could be interpreted as a prime example of a habituated emotional practice in Monique Scheer's sense that had to be enacted in new contexts – West Germany rather than Greece – and thereby changed in the process.
Emotional practices, albeit consciously developed rather than unconsciously habituated practices, are also the subject of the article by Smith and Häberlen about radical left-wingers in West Germany from the late 1960s into the early 1980s. At the same time, Smith and Häberlen draw on Reddy's notion of ‘emotional regimes’ to understand how emotional rules and practices interacted. The radical left-wing authors which Smith and Häberlen examine argued that capitalism would yield only negative feelings, such as frustration, boredom or fear, or produce a general emotional void that left no space for the expression of positive feelings. In a way, these left-wing authors thus analysed what might be called a ‘capitalist emotional regime’. However, Smith and Häberlen argue that they effectively created an emotional regime for their own milieu, in which it became imperative, for example, to admit how emotionally damaged one was. Smith and Häberlen thus show how a particular interpretation of a socio-political system, that is, capitalism, resulted in more or less firm rules concerning the appropriate expression and performance of feelings. At the same time, radical left-wingers developed a set of what Smith and Häberlen call ‘alternative emotional practices’ that would break with these rules and yield the feelings left-wingers were desperately looking for, ranging from openly talking about emotions, showing bodily signs of affection, to resorting to violence as a means to overcome fear. The article by Smith and Häberlen article thus shows how an analysis of emotional norms and discourses can be combined with an examination of emotional practices that were meant to enact or to counteract these norms.
Finally, Juliane Fürst discusses a similarly increased propensity to construct one's identity in emotional terms among hippies in the Soviet Union during the 1960s and 1970s. Weaving together different approaches taken by authors of this issue, Fürst engages with a variety of ‘emotional practices’ (Scheer). While Häberlen and Smith make use of written sources to study emotional practices, Fürst turns to interviews with former activists. These hippies, Fürst shows, engaged in emotional practices that would help them escape the overly rationalist world of state socialism and an official youth culture focused on lectures and study circles. Like the West German left-wingers studied by Häberlen and Smith, Soviet hippies used colourful fashion to oppose the ‘grey’ and rational socialist world. They listened to music and consumed alcohol and other drugs to create new modes of experience and expression, and reach a state of kaif, the deeply bodily feeling of pleasure stimulated by drugs. For these hippies, as for West German radical left-wingers, emotions themselves became a form of protest. Hippies, Fürst argues, created an ‘emotional universe’ that ‘frequently put them at least in a parallel, if not an opposing, universe to the emotional regime propagated by official Soviet culture’. Soviet attempts to reintegrate not only hippies, but also broader segments of Soviet youth never succeeded. Ultimately, this development undermined the official ‘scientific world-view’ of the regime and hence its ideological legitimacy. In this sense, the emotional protests of Soviet hippies had arguably more far-reaching consequences than the protests of their counterparts in the Western world.
Read in combination, the articles in this issue present a wide array of aspects in which the historical study of emotions can be developed still further, in particular in protest movements. While not everyone will agree with all the methodological arguments of our authors, the articles suggest multiple ways to integrate the body and material objects, as well as space, into our analyses of emotions. We need, first, to consider how the body and external stimuli interact – be it alcohol or other drugs, graphic images, or even the weather.Footnote 27 Whether such reactions are hard-wired into the human body and brain, or whether they are themselves the result of cultural norms and traditions, will be subject to further debate. Second, we need to combine analyses of feeling rules and emotional regimes with analyses of emotional practices, which include, but are not limited to bodily practices.Footnote 28 Feeling rules might set standards for how to express and perform feelings, but the enactment of such rules always has the potential to fail. Practices do not always yield the feelings they are supposed to yield, which might make people revolt against these rules. Third, we need to take seriously the social aspect of emotions.Footnote 29 Whether it is collective drinking, singing or violence, emotions are usually performed collectively, or with a collective audience in mind. Thus we need to understand how collective emotional practices can facilitate the formation of communities that can become active in moments of revolt, be they Greek immigrants, mutinying French soldiers or West German squatters.
Beyond the means to an end: political emotions
Is it possible, beyond the richness of the methodological approaches presented in this issue, to see how the role of emotions in protest movements changed within the twentieth century? Of course, much depends on theoretical understandings of emotions: if emotions are transhistorical and transcultural neurochemical processes in the brain, then it might be difficult and debatable to think about how their role changes, for instance, as media and social media practices evolve over time. And, of course, the very diversity of the case studies presented here, both in terms of space, time, and different groups of actors, allows only for some preliminary and hesitant remarks that call for further attention. That said, however, some observations can be made.
Maybe most interestingly, the contributions by Juliane Fürst, and Jake Smith and Joachim C. Häberlen suggest a trans-European turn towards emotions in protest movements in the post-1968 years.Footnote 30 The Soviet hippies examined by Fürst, the left-wing Greek immigrants interviewed by Papadogiannis, and the radical left-wingers in the article by Smith and Häberlen all made feelings their key political concern. They thus reshaped the very contours of the political. This observation raises a series of questions for further research. First, it would be worthwhile investigating whether a similar turn towards emotions can be found in other countries as well, both in Europe and beyond, most notably the in the United States. It seems at least likely that a similar trend might be observed among French and Italian radical left-wingers (the Indiani Metropolitani, for example), as well as within oppositional youth cultures in Eastern Europe.Footnote 31 Second, the gendered nature of this turn requires greater attention. At the time, many activists combined a critique of capitalist rationality with a critique of male rationality, arguing that men's social roles forced them to deny their feelings, whereas society attributed emotionality to women, a dichotomy at least some feminists bought into, praising women's allegedly inherently greater emotional capabilities. Today, few scholars would agree with such gendered dichotomies. Nevertheless, it would be important to know how such dichotomies, as well as gender more generally, shaped the emotional practices and experiences of men and women involved in these movements, a question partially addressed by the authors of this issue.
Furthermore, the very nature of this turn would require more attention. How novel was the concern with ‘alternative’ or ‘better’ emotions within left-wing movements since the late 1960s? Dominant emotional regimes or styles were continually challenged by countercultures, as Monique Scheer notes, and activists in the post-1968 era could rely on some of these antecedents: left-wing bohemians, and the Lebensreformbewegung from the later German Empire to the Weimar Republic, which, for example, founded the community at Monte Verità in Switzerland, a place to which radical left-wingers and drop outs in the 1970s returned;Footnote 32 Wilhelm Reich and his ‘sexual political organisation’ in Weimar Germany; and finally countercultural movements like the American Beat Generation, French Situationists and Dutch Provos.Footnote 33 In one way or another, they all had made emotions one of their central political, social or cultural concerns, for example, the struggle against loneliness and boredom in modern, urban society. Though scholars have recognised that these movements constituted important sources for radical activists and the broader counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, the question if and how they laid a basis for the emotional politics since the 1970s remains to be examined more closely.
One fascinating aspect of this turn to emotions is its transnational nature that seems to have crossed the Iron Curtain. How precisely did this happen? Did countercultural youth movements from East and West mutually influence each other, or was this a Western import to Eastern Europe? Why did ideas developed in one country or socio-political system, the capitalist West, resonate so well in other places such as Eastern Europe? All these questions deserve closer research. The trans-European scope of the turn towards emotions in protest movements also calls for a broader contextualisation. First, the social, political and cultural impact of this turn needs to be examined. Did, as Smith and Häberlen suggest, a different ‘emotional regime’ emerge within Western societies, beyond the radical left? Were the radical left-wingers they examine just part and parcel of a broader ‘therapeutisation’ of society, or were they one of the driving forces of these changes?Footnote 34 And, taking a comparative perspective, were capitalist regimes better able to integrate these alternative emotional cultures than their Communist counterparts in Eastern Europe? In other words, how far might alternative youth movements like the hippies and their turn towards emotions have paved the way for the revolutions of 1989? Second, the relation between dominant ‘emotional regimes’ and movements challenging these regimes deserves attention. If activists on both sides of the Iron Curtain turned to similar emotional practices to challenge both the capitalist regime in the West and the socialist regime in the East, then one might ask whether these regimes were not so different after all. More importantly, did the (emotional) regimes of capitalism and socialism change in some ways during the post-war period that ‘triggered’ a turn towards emotions among oppositional movements? The dynamic relations between hegemonic emotional regimes and social or political movements calling for different emotional experiences thus remain to be explained and understood.Footnote 35
