Anger in History
Autumn 2024
Mon., Sept. 9, 2024 – 4:00 to 5:30:
“Anger Management: Dignity, Indignity and the Rhetoric of Resentment,” Robert A. Schneider, Professor of History, Indiana University Bloomington
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Psychologists and advice columnists tell us that anger is not good—it’s not good for us and it’s worse for those around us. But political anger—that is, the collective expression of angry discontent—surely can be, and has been, effective as a tool for asserting grievances and making claims. In any case, whatever its virtues or liabilities, anger seems to be all-pervasive in our contemporary political culture. We are in, according to Pakaj Mishra, an “Age of Anger.”
In this presentation, I will explore a variety of ways anger and resentment have been deployed, emphasizing not so much “anger” itself—that is, the raw emotion—but rather the modes and means by which anger is expressed or performed. In part, this will be an exploration of the rhetoric of anger (or resentment), looking at how various writers have themselves thought hard how to “be angry” while preserving a measure of dignity. Indeed, for some, especially in the tradition of Black Liberation, from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King, Jr., to present themselves in a “dignified” way seemed as important, perhaps even more, than to make a display of their anger. And this is largely true with other collective struggles in the West, including labor movements and the campaign for women’s rights. Since the 1960s, however, the tendency to yoke anger to dignity has seemed to prevail less and less. Instead, “dignity” has been increasingly eclipsed by “self-expression.” Today, commentators like Vincent Lloyd (Black Dignity, Yale, 2022) argue for a very different conception of dignity, one which calls into question traditional, largely liberal, notions of dignity as undermining the quest for liberation.
Robert A. Schneider is a Professor of History at Indiana University Bloomington. He is the author of four books, most recently The Return of Resentment: The Rise and Decline and Rise Again of a Political Emotion (Chicago, 2023). He has received grants and fellowships from the Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the French Government (Bourse Chateaubriand). He has been a visiting fellow at All Souls College and Oriel College, both at the University of Oxford; a visiting lecturer at Ecole des Hautes Etudes Paris (three times); and a visiting scholar at Bristol University, the Université de Toulouse, and the University of Pennsylvania. From 2005 to 2015 he was Editor of the American Historical Review.
Co-sponsors: Department of Political Science; Mershon Center
Mon., Oct. 7, 2024 – 4:00 to 5:30:
“Bruegel’s Anger,” Mitchell Merback, William Arnell and Everett Land Professor, Art History, Johns Hopkins University
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At the start of his career, Pieter Bruegel’s anger (Ira) appears in allegorical guise, trodding a landscape cluttered with the follies, perversities, and monstrosities his reign on earth has unleashed. Capitalizing on the craze for works in the manner of Bosch, the engraving, part of a series of the Virtues and Vices, was no doubt a money-maker and a boon for the young Antwerp painter. But how much of Bruegel’s own outlook on anger does it convey? With the exception of another early work, the personification of martial fury known as Dulle Griet (“Mad Meg”), anger practically disappears from Bruegel’s oeuvre. Yet this absence deceives us if we regard anger only as moralizing subject. Anger remained a potent preoccupation in Bruegel’s art, not as a social evil to be combatted but a passion of the soul in need of remedy. Bruegel’s modern interpreters have sought the coordinates of his philosophical outlook in the humanist circle of Abraham Ortelius and its non-partisan Spiritualism, a worldly piety informed by Christian Stoicism. As the Low Countries erupted in religious factionalism, civic unrest, iconoclasm, and inquisitorial terror — the time Bruegel’s career was cresting — consolation was sought in the works of Cicero and Seneca, who recommended the practice of philosophia to combat the deformations wrought by anger. Bruegel depicted the triumph of death over humanity, the shunning of Christ by Christians, and slaughter of the Bethlehem’s innocents without a hint of anger. Was that attitude irenic, ironic, or medicinal?
Mitchell Merback is the William Arnell and Everett Land Professor in Art History at Johns Hopkins University. His art-historical work centers on northern Europe during the Later Middle Ages, Early Modern and Reformation periods, with the arts of Germany, Austria, the Low Countries and France comprising the principal arena of investigation. His publications include: Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Durer’s Melencolia (Zone Books, 2017), Pilgrimage and Pogrom: Violence, Memory and Visual Culture of the Host-Miracle Shrines of Germany and Austria (University of Chicago Press, 2013), and Beyond the Yellow Badge: Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture (Brill, 2008).
Cosponsored by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Department of Art History, and the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature.
Mon., Nov. 18, 2024 – 4:00 to 5:30:
“Righteous Anger as a Political Emotion: Jews, Arabs, and the Question of Palestine, 1947-1949,” Derek Penslar, William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University
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Anger is an emotional response to an unmet desire, a protest against deprivation. Righteous anger, also known as indignation, asserts the right to that which has been denied to a person. Like other feelings, righteous anger can be scaled up from the realm of individual interaction to that of the collective. In domestic and international politics, the performance of righteous anger anchors an interest group and legitimizes its cause, especially when it is in conflict with other actors. This talk analyzes the role of righteous anger in Jewish and Arab discourse on the disposition of Palestine between 1947 and 1949. During the debates at the United Nations about the Palestine Question in 1947, both sides claimed to have been overlooked and betrayed by the international community. Their indignation was a protest against the indignity that had been visited upon them (by antisemitism and colonialism respectively) and an assertion of entitlement. The 1948 war only deepened each side’s grievances and belief in its own righteousness. As the subsequent history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has demonstrated, righteous anger is a durable political emotion that can be transmitted across generations.
Derek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. His books include Jews and the Military: A History (2013), Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (2020; German ed. 2022); and Zionism: An Emotional State (2023). He is currently writing a book titled The War for Palestine, 1947-1949: A Global History. He is a past president of the American Society for Jewish Research, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and an Honorary Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford.
Co-sponsors: Near Eastern & South Asian Languages and Cultures, the Melton Center, and the Mershon Center
Spring 2025
Tues., Feb. 25, 2025 – 4:00 to 5:30 p.m.:
“Do you have to be angry to slaughter? Reflections on the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre (France, 1572),” Jérémie Foa, Associate Professor of Modern History, Aix-Marseille University
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This talk will explore the mechanisms by which the principal killers of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre achieved their ends. The question of the killers’ ideological motivations has often been raised, in particular to highlight the religious anxieties at the core of their behavior. However, other emotions should also be addressed, such as anger, desire for revenge and frustration. After investigating the role of these emotions in the process of violence, this talk will examine whether anger is sufficient to kill, and what the prerequisites are for a guilt-free massacre.
A former student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud, Jérémie Foa is a Associate Professor at Aix-Marseille University, a member of the TELEMMe laboratory, and an honorary member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the Institut Universitaire de France. A specialist in the Wars of Religion and mass violence in the 16th century, he recently published Tous ceux qui tombent. Visages du massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy, Paris, La Découverte 2021, in which he proposes a micro-history of the massacre, an investigation “from below” of both the victims and the ordinary murderers of the summer of 1572, in Paris and in the provinces. Next book : Survivre. Une histoire des guerres de Religion, to be pushed, Seuil, 2024. He is currently working on a project, in collaboration with Diane Roussel, on the siege of Paris (May-August 1590), which resulted in tens of thousands of deaths.
Tues., Mar. 18, 2025 – 4:00 to 5:30:
“What is Honor?,” Douglas Cairns, Professor of Classics, the University of Edinburgh
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Honor is a topic on which a great deal has been written, but it remains very poorly understood. A typical failing is to ghettoize the phenomenon – as limited only to some forms of interaction (found in some contexts and not in others), as a concern only of one social stratum among many, as a male-gendered phenomenon, as a characteristic only of certain forms of social organisation. This can extend even to the claim that there are ‘honour societies’ that differ fundamentally from ‘dignity societies’ (echoing the older and now widely discredited antithesis between ‘shame cultures’ and ‘guilt cultures’). Such antitheses entail a distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic values that is useful for analysing individual tendencies and historical and cultural differences. But there is no group and no historical society (and perhaps, except in extreme pathological cases, no individual either) in which some combination of both tendencies is not found. Despite strong reasons for believing that contemporary Western societies – and especially their elites – are subject to an ever stronger pull in the direction of extrinsic values, educated elites within those societies have used and continue to use labels such as ‘shame-culture’ and ‘honor society’ to denigrate and patronize internal and external others – inner-city gangs, citizens of the US South (and their Scots ancestors), immigrants (e.g. the Irish and the Italians in the US), native Americans, the Japanese, southern Europeans, north Africans – and the ancient Greeks (to name but a few). Ancient Greek evidence on the nature of honor, by contrast, supports contemporary thought in a range of disciplines (such as developmental psychology, sociology, and political philosophy) on the interplay of esteem and self-esteem, recognition and dignity, as fundamental to social interaction in any society worthy of the name.
Douglas Cairns is Professor of Classics in the University of Edinburgh and author of Aidôs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (1993), Bacchylides: Five Epinician Odes (2010), and Sophocles: Antigone (2016). His most recent edited volumes include Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity (with Miranda Anderson and Mark Sprevak, 2018), A Cultural History of the Emotions in Antiquity (2019), Emotions through Time: From Antiquity to Byzantium (with Martin Hinterberger, Aglae Pizzone, and Matteo Zaccarini, 2022), Contempt, Ancient and Modern (2023), and In the Mind, in the Body, in the World: Emotions in Early China and Ancient Greece (with Curie Virág, 2024). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the British Academy, and a Member of Academia Europaea.
Co-sponsor: The Department of Classics