The history of emotions

Rob Boddice

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526126009
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The first accessible text book on the theories, methods, achievements and problems in this burgeoning field of historical inquiry.

1

HISTORIANS AND EMOTIONS

Feeling for the past

The purview of historians is change over time. We look for causes and effects in order to explain how and why change happens. Seldom do we look for what is. We are focused on what was, or on how things came to be. Understanding the complexity of past societies, past cultures and past politics allows us to understand why things happened the way they did. This observation does not merely apply to events, however broadly interpreted, but to experience in general. The historian’s role has come to include an appraisal of what it was like to be in the past: we have come to ask, what did it feel like? Questions of identity, the self, interpersonal relations, relations with institutions, the production and reception of culture, and relations with the environment, the ecosystem and the city: all these have fallen into the realm of historical analysis. The implicit assumption is that such relations and formations in the past were different to what we find in the present. It is not so much that the past explains the present: such a calculation becomes increasingly difficult the further away in time one gets from the here and now. It is more that an analysis of the structure of human experience in the past might help us denaturalise the present.

History challenges our assumptions about what we think we know. It takes common knowledge and common sense and shows them to be situated knowledge and situated sense. What counts as ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ is only ever normal or natural under certain circumstances. History disrupts such categories. This is the political edge of historiography. It holds to account those who would proclaim, this is how things are. It enables us to ask ‘why?’ and ‘for how long?’ It permits us to posit other ways for things to be.

Enter the history of emotions and a curious challenge. In general, and with some notable exceptions, historians have steered clear of historicising the human being itself.¹ Humans have been actors in shifting historical scenery, and it has sufficed to analyse that scenery and the drama within it. This has been at odds with the aforementioned tendency to reject what is. If historians have tended to reject transhistorical universals, they nevertheless have also tended until quite recently to assume that the human being, since the beginning of historical time, has been a biological constant. Certainly, histories of the body have shown the ways in which historical understandings of physiology, illness and disease, disability and sex have had profound implications for historical cultures.² Moreover, there have long been historical and philosophical works on times, places and cultures in which the boundaries of being biologically human have been blurred for the sake of political or social exclusion.³ The history of slavery;⁴ the history of the Holocaust;⁵ women’s history:⁶ these broad focus areas have highlighted the ways in which boundary lines were drawn around the human being in order to preserve that category for a select group (more often than not, white men). The point of such narratives, however, is implicitly to point out that such boundary lines were falsely constructed for political ends. Human beings, ultimately, are human beings. These kinds of stories remind us of our own politics, and they cause us to reflect on where lines might be being (falsely) drawn today.

In short, things have always been done on the basis of what humans thought they knew, leaving deep social, cultural and political traces in the historical record. But for all that epistemology – whether high or vernacular – has left its mark, still the assumption remains that, beyond wayward thinking, there was a body and a mind of a being that for all intents and purposes had not changed much in thousands of years. For all that focus on change, the biological human behind all the politics was remarkably fixed as a stable historical category. If we challenge that fixity, it does not mean that we undermine all those aforementioned books and articles that have pointed to the historical injustices wrought by people in power. On the contrary, there is an opportunity to explore further the historical experience of exclusion, from both sides. The history of emotions offers such a new venture for the historian of an interdisciplinary disposition.

At the core of this project is an understanding that human beings – human bodies/minds – are made, and make meaning, in the world. This should not be read as a radical statement aligning the history of emotions solely with the adherents of social constructionism. On the contrary, the once distant disciplines of anthropology and neuroscience are rapidly being bridged: on the one hand by the observation that cultural context undoubtedly prescribes, delimits and influences experience; and on the other hand by the neuroscientific insight that humans are neurologically plastic, writeable pieces of hardware. Instead of a nature/nurture dyad, more of which below, neuroscientists and anthropologists alike are pointing us in a biocultural direction for our research. There is no culture-free or value-neutral context to the study of human ‘nature’, and there is no ‘nurture’ without framed biology; that is, the human. I will say much more about this in chapter 6, but it is essential to hold this premise in mind throughout.

Ancient precursor

Emotions research in other disciplines pre-dates the development of a professional discipline of history, and for most of the life courses of those distinct fields of research there was not only no overlap, but apparently no chance of any. In some ways this is surprising, because at a crucial juncture in the nineteenth century there was a clear moment of rapprochement; an opportunity not taken. This is the first of two aborted beginnings for the history of emotions. But before coming to history as a discipline, it is worth reflecting on some earlier works of history that clearly found a place for emotional analysis, even if later historians either did not notice or pretended it was of no importance.

Where better to begin than with the father of historiography, Thucydides (c.460–c.400 BCE)? Much has been made of the Thucydidean method, as it tends to be called, but the principal focus of historiographical engagement with Thucydides has been on his so-called objectivity, his weighing of evidence in context and his checks for bias and reliability. The passages in The Peloponnesian War in which Thucydides discusses method are indeed fascinating and repay many readings and re-readings.⁷ But I have long harboured doubts that the history unfolded by Thucydides has any real bearing on the debates about truth and/or objectivity that occupied historians from the 1820s onwards. On the contrary, the work is fiendishly cleverly emplotted, and at the centre of the plot is the way in which men (usually men) are driven by passions in strict conformity to prescribed expressions in given contexts, or else on breakdowns of those prescriptions. The first history of emotions, I venture here, was by Thucydides. We could do worse than to re-visit it.

At the core of Thucydides’ account of the war is an explanation of what drives men to do what they do. There are ideas of duty and of courage, and indeed we can generally map the ebbs and flows of success and failure among the Athenians onto the extent to which virtues were kept up or allowed to lapse. Thucydides is by no means distinctive in hitching virtuosity to the passions. The virtue of courage, for example, is to fight despite fear, not in the absence of fear.⁸ Virtuous vengeance is the result of controlled and purposeful anger, not a lack of control. Fear and anger are ever-present features of the war. It is from what happens when these passions overcome the virtuous intentions of Athenians that the story becomes dynamic.

There are any number of clear illustrations of this, but a single example will suffice to make the point that the history of emotions is as old as the concept of writing history itself. In Pericles’ funeral oration to honour the virtuous dead of Athens, he praises the Athenians for their courage and their sense of duty. Central to this praise is an assessment of the state of feeling of the population. Athenians are neighbourly, striving to avoid hurting ‘people’s feelings’. They are law abiding, both in terms of written code and unwritten custom, for to break laws was an ‘acknowledged shame’.⁹ After hard work, Athenians enjoyed the ‘recreation’ of their ‘spirits’, and ‘cares’ were driven away by domestic beauty and ‘good taste’.¹⁰ The ‘love of what is beautiful’ was a contained love, not a softening love. It kept them manly. Moreover, poverty did not arouse shame, but those who did not strive to get out of it were shameful. Overall, Athenians marked themselves out against others for their ‘general good feeling’, which made their ‘friendship more reliable’. Indeed, Athenian altruism was, according to Pericles’ speech, ‘unique’.¹¹ These dispositions added up to an extraordinary courage in the face of a threat to the city. The city’s population did not reflect on the chance of success or failure, which they left in ‘the doubtful hands of Hope’, and reached ‘the climax of their lives’ with ‘a culmination of Glory, not of fear’.¹² Driving them was a sense of shame connected to falling ‘below a certain standard’ and a notion of the value of Athenian freedom. ‘Happiness depends on being free’, Pericles concluded, ‘and freedom depends on being courageous’.¹³ Thus, fear, courage and happiness are the essential markers of the successful city state.

In and of itself we might dismiss this as so much political rhetoric. History is littered with speeches that inflame or incite, exaggerate or boast. We might think of it as idealising or romantic, even. But Thucydides directly demonstrates the substantial truths of the Periclean view by immediately following the speech with his narrative account of the plague that ravaged the city. As the city unravels in chaos, it is precisely the failure of all the qualities enumerated by Pericles that are blamed. The narrative sequence mocks Pericles’ insight into the depths of Athenian courage and neighbourliness, showing that the population was as wont to be overcome by passions as any other. In the process of failing to overcome the worst of passions in the worst of circumstances, Athens went to the wall. There was a state of ‘unprecedented lawlessness’, ‘self-indulgence’ and hedonism. ‘As for what is called honour, no one showed himself willing to abide by its laws,’ Thucydides wrote, noting that honour became conflated with pleasure and immediate gratification, such was the fear that one might be dead by tomorrow. The same fear made people feel immune to the system of justice, and the abundant death and desolation shook their faith in the gods: ‘No fear of god or law of man had a restraining influence.’¹⁴ Thus, the passions made history, one way or another. When controlled and applied to virtuous ideas and love of the city, they brought about success and honour. When they ran rampant and virtuous ideas were lost, they brought shame, dishonour and death. Circumstance dictated what emotions practically implied.

It is only in recent years that analyses of historical causation in works such as Thucydides’ could take at face value the account of emotional prescription, control and rupture as having directly influenced and characterised events. Thucydides’ highly esoteric conception of human nature was often taken in its most simplistic sense by historiographers who, according to a certain reading of the Greek ...