Anger: The Conflicted History of an Emotion, by Barbara H. Rosenwein

A medievalist, Barbara H. Rosenwein is one of the pioneers of the history of emotions and has dedicated, among other works, two important monographs and a university textbook to the approach. With this book, she offers a cross-historical survey about one single emotion, anger. Rosenwein rightly draws attention to the political and social importance of anger in modern day public discourse, from Trump’s America (when she was writing the book), to protests against health measures, to religious or inter-ethnic conflicts. The goal of the book is clearest in the introduction to the last three chapters. In Chapter Eleven, ‘Society’s Child’, Rosenwein presents the socio-constructivist vision of anger (and emotions) that has underpinned the new history of emotions from its early days. Chapter Twelve, ‘Anger Celebrated’, develops the main argument of the book, alluded to briefly in the introduction, presented here in an explicitly constructivist light. Anger, according to the author, is omnipresent in the modern world and more than that, it is celebrated for the first time in Western history—hence its political and social importance. While it has been perceived as a male way of exercising strength and power, it has been recently appropriated by women, and by the new generation of activists as a legitimate way to communicate in the public space. Each person and group tends to asserts that their own anger is righteous—an attitude which makes communication virtually impossible. In the conclusion Rosenwein recalls that the different ways of conceiving anger discussed in the book may serve as reservoirs of alternative ideas to compete with, or argue against, today’s escalating use of public anger.

Beyond these contemporary resonances, the reader experiences the author’s writing talent, sense of humour and a dose of common sense. Intended for an educated public and careful about using accessible language, the book ranges far beyond the comfort zone of its author, that is, western medieval Christendom. The reader learns about problems raised by gender and race, present in several chapters; about specific cultures of anger in some non-western societies; but also about questions raised by modern-day events, such as the persecution of Muslim Rohingyas by Buddhists in Myanmar versus the (supposedly general) Buddhist rejection of anger, or the representation of the anger of Black women in the USA.

The book is constructed in three parts, according to three ways of thinking about anger: ‘Anger Rejected’ (chs 1–5) is one way that societies and communities have tried to deal with this difficult emotion. Anger understood ‘as a vice but also (sometimes) as a virtue’ presents another approach to anger through history, where anger is conceived of within a theological or moral framework of thought: this is well known in western monotheism. Finally, ‘Natural Anger’ includes scientific approaches from western Antiquity to the present day. Chapter by chapter, the book presents each approach to anger diachronically, in ways that are always stimulating and sometimes debatable.

The immensity of the field surveyed, the vivid discussion and a great conceptual clarity in the presentation invite the reader on an unforgettable journey. Rosenwein combines her knowledge both of classical authors and of the most recent scholarship in psychology and neurosciences with a great culture in philosophy and anthropology of emotions, while she reorders topics and materials in a very creative way. Most of the great authors and attitudes toward anger that one may expect to read about are discussed in this book, from Aristotle to Seneca, from Galen to Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas, from Descartes to Darwin and William James, from Ekman to Feldman Barrett.

The book raises a few important questions. Both the choice of the longue durée and that of studying attitudes towards anger help to evaluate and compare different periods and cultures, and require the huge range of knowledge and intellectual flexibility of the author. However, this methodology necessarily involves sacrifices in terms of historical precision and sometimes conceptual clarity. To understand the goal of the book, the term emotionology—coined by Peter and Carol Stearns to designate ‘the attitudes or standards that a society, or a definable group within a society, maintains toward basic emotions and their appropriate expression’—may be helpful; the second half of their definition, ‘ways that institutions reflect and encourage these attitudes in human conduct’, as well as those ways by which people appropriate, adopt or circumvent them, indicates what is sometimes missing in the book under review here. Discussion about vocabularies and their specific meaning in a given society or community, and the anchoring of one historical form of anger in a specific moment and place, seem to be sacrificed—although short biographical indications and a few paragraphs of contextualisation at key places are indeed always present.

The author relies on the concept of ‘emotional communities’—an idea that Rosenwein created twenty years ago to argue that the same society could produce different cultures of emotions. For this reason, case-studies give hints about emotional communities, so that sometimes one single author embodies a whole universe—Primo Levi for concentration camps, Thomas Aquinas for scholasticism—leading to affirmations that the use of neighbouring authors and the ever-growing amount of existing scholarship could complicate. These choices enhance, indeed, the impression of fragmentation of the image we get. The only overall picture, painted with brio, concerns our modern world: nowadays, it is argued, we find the strange culture of anger celebrated, which has migrated from one community and one society to another—and from one gender (men) to another (women). This makes it difficult to understand or follow historical causality as well: how and why, for instance, monastic stoicism gave place at one point in the West to Aristotelian flexibility (the two being treated in an reverse order, in Chapters Six and Seven). Before the last two chapters, which discuss in a very clear way the diversity of contemporary scientific approaches and underline the main importance of social constructivism, anger comes across as an almost universal emotion—an idea with which, I think, Rosenwein would never agree.

Despite this necessary criticism, this is a refreshing and stimulating book about anger’s conflicted histories. By the end, we better understand the real scope and genre of the book: an essay, reflecting on the social and political power of anger and its possible uses and misuses through history. Offering a generous panorama, a crystal-clear sight of the different conceptions of anger which are strongly related to conceptions of emotions, and a very welcome political argument, the book helps the reader reflect on personal, political and historical issues. It challenges us to think about anger in our lives and societies; to think about—and deal with—this difficult emotion in historical evidence; but also to think about any emotion as a social phenomenon in different kinds of societies.