A Macro Sociology of Emotion: Class Resentment

Abstract

Emotion inheres simultaneously in individuals and in the social structures and relationships in which individuals are embedded. Beginning with a critical examination of T.H. Marshall's account of class resentment, this paper considers the emotional patterns of resentment in class inequality, in trade cycle changes in costs and opportunities for income, and in class cultures. Arising from social relationships, emotion is the basis of action that subsequently affects the structure of social relationships. Thus emotion connects phases of social structure separated by time. The purpose of this paper is to expand the consideration of emotion to a macroscopic conceptualization. I do so by demonstrating both the place of an emotion, resentment, in class structure and its significance for class processes. Class rather than some other aspect of social structure is treated because although the class literature is well developed, scholars now recognize an impasse in class analysis, which the conceptualization of emotion presented here can overcome. The structural basis of resentment was explored in Max Scheler's (1961) Ressentiment, first published in 1912. The scope of the present work differs from Scheler's classic study in three fundamental ways. First, Scheler used the term ressentiment in a limited sense drawn from the Nietzschean dichotomous states of being, as either power or impotence: ressentiment is the condemnation of what one secretly craves but cannot achieve. In the present paper, resentment is used in a more prosaic and more conventional sense. The Nietzschean notion, however, gives special place to unacknowledged resentment as an explosive force in social relations, and thus removes it from the plane of consciousness; we shall return to this point below. Second, Scheler conceptualized social structure at the level of social roles. In this respect he anticipated elements of Robert Merton's account of social structure and anomie, and is acknowledged for having done so (Merton 1968, pp. 209-10). Although this paper includes role-related categories such as reference group behavior, the conceptualization of social structure here has a wider scope that includes class systems. Finally, Scheler understood emotion psychologically, as referring to internal states. The treatment of resentment in the present paper is predicated upon the social dimensions of emotion. Emotion and social class occupy ostensibly quite different existential and theoretical domains. Persons have emotions but belong to classes: emotions are psychophysiological phenomena of micro-sociological or social psychological concern, whereas classes are socioeconomic phenomena of macro-sociological or political economic concern. Yet class theorists are beginning to recognize the limitation of structural accounts; they cannot show,