Abstract
Politics and society today are characterized by anger and rancour. This paper reflects on this issue by linking: first, Norbert Elias’s sociological account of the complex dynamics of processes of civilization and decivilization, his thoughts on the interrelationship between technological and social organization and human habitus; second, the work done on the concept of ressentiment, introduced by Nietzsche and developed by Scheler and others. Linking these two conceptual frameworks enables a deeper reflection on the role of contemporary communications technology and the ‘new structural transformation of the public sphere’ in the expanding significance of ressentiment in social and political life today. My argument will be that it is important to see the shifts taking place today as part of the interweaving of technological and social changes, with the spread of ressentiment in social media being the latest episode in the ongoing interweaving of processes of civilization and decivilization.
No group of people is pleased when it realizes that it is now more dependent on others than before. . . . ‘integration and disintegration tensions’ . . . dominate the social figuration of states in the late twentieth century. . . . the civilizing thrust is joined by a de-civilizing counter thrust. The tensions and conflicts which the growing interdependence brings with it are – so far – only of secondary importance. Let us hope that this will never change. (Elias, 1995: 36)
It has become impossible to avoid noticing that a striking feature of communication and interaction in the public sphere today is the lack of emotional restraint and the tendency towards highly emotive, aggressive and abusive language and often action. Politics, society and the public sphere more generally are strongly characterized by anger and rancour, often associated with the development of political populism. In itself, such a widespread emotional tone is not particularly new. In 1927, for example, the French writer Julien Benda (2017 [1928]: 15) declared his age one of ‘the intellectual organization of political hatreds’; in 1937, the Dutch essayist Menno et Braak (2019) observed in relation to the rise of fascism that rancour had become a human right; and Pankaj Mishra’s (2017) account in The Age of Anger emphasizes the historical roots of current expressions of political anger in the post-Enlightenment emergence of modern society. More broadly, anger features, in one way or another, in the political emotions of any historical period (Rosenwein, 2018, 2020) – it has not suddenly emerged alongside the Enlightenment destabilization of previous social and political forms in early modernity, globalization, popular revolts against capitalist exploitation and state repression, or populist political challenges to liberal democracy. On the contrary, the historical orthodoxy is rather to see anger as more typical of earlier historical periods and having undergone a long-term process of domestication (Stearns and Stearns, 1986), an understanding that appears to have become decreasingly stable in the early years of the 21st century, demanding revised forms of analysis. Chantal Mouffe (2002: 8) observes that the two dominant tendencies in democratic political theory – to approach political action in terms of either interests or reason and morality – fail to acknowledge ‘passions as the moving force in the field of politics’, being constitutive of collective political identities. An important conceptual challenge today, then, is to clarify the continuing role played by anger in the current configuration of politics.
Both historical memory and amnesia are central to the form taken by passion in politics, in negative as well as positive senses. Ernst Renan, for example, observed that ‘Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation’. The ‘essence’ of any nation, wrote Renan (1990), ‘is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things’, so that it is ‘good for everyone to know how to forget’ (pp. 11, 16). More recently, Hutton (2017) wrote, along similar lines:
There is too much remembering. [. . .] Europe is plunging ever deeper into an orgy of unforgiving remembrance. [. . .] A collective curse has settled over our continent, in which past triumphs are contrasted with present grievances. Only independence, taking back control and avenging a continuum of injustice can restore justice, prosperity and lost glory. [. . .] Europe, with so many tribes boasting so much history in so many countries, is the memory capital of the globe, where too many states are so vulnerable to the agonies of secession and fragmentation.
But, contrary to Renan and Hutton, historical error clearly has its own problems, with the historical amnesia surrounding issues like the violent foundations of state formation and nation-building and the realities of slavery and colonialism obstructing the identification of the longer historical roots and the deeper logic driving current social and political divisions and instabilities. The attempt to disrupt the results of the 2020 US election on 6 January 2021, for example, has been perceived as an anomalous disruption of US democracy, when in reality it was consistent with numerous endeavours of similar sorts ever since Independence Day in 1776 and a manifestation of structural features of US society and politics (Bryant, 2024).
The form taken by historical memory and amnesia, and the selective construction of grievances, is in turn integrally bound up with their representation in collective communication, so that their analysis is in principle always also an analysis of structure and dynamics of the public sphere, as well as the modes of media communication, in turn shaped by their technological possibilities. As Anderson (2006 [1983]) emphasized, large-scale collective entities such as the ‘nation’, consisting of groups of people living parallel to – but not in direct contact with – each other, are by definition ‘imagined’ communities, constituted by the available modes of communication. The manifestations of anger and rancour in the public sphere take distinctive forms in differing social and also technological contexts – saying that the present is anchored in the past does not mean that they are identical, and today the speed and ease of the expression of anger and resentment on social media, including the possibilities for anonymous communication, gives the formation of collective, public emotions a particular configuration.
An important conceptualization here is that of the ‘new structural transformation of the public sphere’ (Habermas, 2022), referring to the ways in which, as the public sphere was transformed in various ways in the course of the 20th century, with the digitalization of communications and the emergence of social media it is now being again structurally transformed, constituting ‘a caesura in the development of the media in human history comparable to the introduction of printing’ (Habermas, 2022: 158). Couldry and Hepp (2017: 53) frame it as, after the emergence of the printing press and the electrification of communications media, the third historical wave of ‘mediatization’, which they see as ‘a process of the increasing deepening of technology-based interdependence’. For Couldry and Hepp, the digitalization of communication both increases the intensity of social interdependence and generates a greater dependence on media for the realization of relations of interdependence. As Seeliger and Sevignani (2022) point out, the digitalization of communication, its commodification and continuing globalization, especially in social media – what Elias would call ‘lengthening chains of interdependence’ – generate new boundaries between the public and the private, ever-increasing degrees of communicative complexity, and new and an increasing number of sources of authority for knowledge. Since all readers, listeners and viewers are simultaneously authors (Habermas, 2022: 146, 159) and everyone can ‘do their research’, new patterns and forms of social integration and disintegration are created, along with an increasing differentiation of the public sphere into multiple ‘publics’, and new types of deterritorialized social interaction across multiple, shifting social boundaries. All of these changes collectively are often referred to as the ‘socio-digital revolution’ (Sassen, 2006). Although the media system, as Staab and Thiel (2022: 134) note, cannot be reduced to social media, they do constitute an important window onto the structural changes taking place.
There is a significant connection, then, between developing forms of media technology and the precise ways in which anger plays a role in social and political life. As Appadurai (2006: 100) emphasizes, although the sparks of the ‘geographies of anger’ establishing the construction of determinate enemies – terrorists, infidels, barbarians – remain embedded in local fears and anxieties concerning the distinction between purity and impurity (one could also say cooked and raw, order and chaos, or civilized and barbarian), the fuel for those sparks is also mediated by the mass media used to turn them into raging fires. Perhaps the most frequently-used tactic to inflame collective anger – the European wars of religion in the 17th and 18th centuries are only one example, the Rwandan genocide would be another – is the atrocity story: cannibalism, killing of babies, rape, physical mutilation, grotesque forms of torture, gross violations of non-negotiable religious principles, and so on. The images formed in the collective mind of self and other, friend and enemy, ‘we’ and ‘they’, indigenous and alien – images that frequently underpin unremitting intolerance and the infliction of enormous hatred-driven ethnocidal and genocidal violence – are given particular form and force by the media technology of the day – pamphlets, newspapers, radio, television, social media – which is central to the globalization of culture, religious and ethnic identity, and ideology.
This raises a number of interrelated questions: what is the relationship between changes in communication technology and the current expressions of anger and rancour, and in what ways is that relationship to be understood theoretically in terms of the continuing development of long-term social processes? What theoretical concepts are useful in understanding both the current developments and their history?
In order to address these sorts of questions, in this paper I will reflect on what can be gained by linking two complementary bodies of research and analysis: first, Norbert Elias’s sociological analysis of the complex interwoven dynamics of processes of civilization and decivilization, as well as his thoughts on the interrelationship between technological and social organization and human habitus. As Mouffe (1999: 754) notes, a central challenge for democratic politics is the domestication of hostility, as well as ‘trying to defuse the potential antagonism that exists in human relations’, and responding to this challenge is central to Elias’s whole enterprise: that of providing one of the most systematic sociological accounts of the social and historical dynamics of a variety of processes driving the pacification of hostility and the defusing of antagonism. He wrote about the emotions that drive such antagonism, including aggression, anger, embarrassment, fear, shame, happiness, sadness, hatred, repugnance and disgust, and alongside his concern with the ways in which antagonism in human relations has been pacified over time, in his analysis of the process of civilization, he also had important things to say about the contexts where hostility and aggression are heightened, in processes of decivilization accompanying those of civilization (Fletcher, 1995; Mennell, 1990). A central element of Elias’s approach is his concept of ‘figuration’, which can be seen to function in a similar way to that of ‘assemblage’ (Couldry and Hepp, 2017), in the sense of thinking in terms of complex social networks of interdependencies also encompassing non-human elements such as architecture and technology, to which he adds his concern with the formation of emotional dispositions and habitus. In this sense his conceptual framework can be used to look more closely at how developments in media technology intersect with longer-term processes of both civilization and decivilization.
Second, the discussions of the concept of ressentiment, first transformed into a technical term by Nietzsche (1967 [1887]), 1 developed in a more sociological direction, first by Scheler (1972 [1915]) and then by a number of subsequent commentators, including Weber (1978 [1968]), Deleuze (1983 [1962]), and Girard (1984, 2015) to become a depth-analysis of collective forms of shared anger. 2 As Mishra (2017: 9) points out, Nietzsche’s reference to the emotional state of ressentiment captures ‘a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible and insatiable in outbursts’; Mishra sees ‘ressentiment as the defining feature of a world where mimetic desire . . . endlessly proliferates, and where the modern promise of equality collides with massive disparities of power, education, status and property ownership’ (p. 31). The form taken by anger in the public sphere can usefully be understood both in Eliasian terms as the manifestation of either the ‘dark side’ of the civilizing process 3 or a decivilizing process and also as the current expression of collective ressentiment. 4
My overall argument will be that it is important to see the shifts taking place today as part of a long-term process of the interweaving of technological and social changes, with the spread of ressentiment in social media being the latest episode in the ongoing interlinkage of processes of civilization and decivilization, as social media open up a new social space for both processes, just as, for example, the emergence of the printing press did in the 16th century (Eisenstein, 2005 [1983]) and the electrification of media technology did at the turn of the 20th century (Couldry and Hepp, 2017: 46). The core concern here is to open up connections between Elias’s analysis of civilization and decivilization and theories of ressentiment – ‘the most dangerous of all explosives’ (Nietzsche, 1967 [1887] III: 15) – in analysing the role played by digital communication technology in collective remembering and forgetting, in the formation of subjectivity as well as social and political relations.
Reading Elias: Interdependence, Democracy, Civilization and Decivilization
Although the main elements of Elias’s sociological approach are well-known, especially to readers of Theory, Culture & Society, it will be useful to highlight the particular reading of his work that I will be drawing on here. His best-known work, On the Process of Civilization (Elias, 2012 [1939]), has been read, incorrectly, as concerning a more-or-less constant process of ever-increasing pacification of human aggression, with the arguments then related to the extent to which this may or may not reflect reality. However, his argument can be read much more simply. It is hardly controversial to note that all human social groups operate with some sort of distinction between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’, a distinction which can also be understood as that between sacred and profane, cooked and raw (Lévi-Strauss, 1969 [1964]), or between interior and exterior of a culture or society. Elias’s initial observation was that the form taken by the distinction at any given point in time will always be the provisional end-point of a long-term historical process, in which the development of specific social ‘units’ or institutions is interwoven with the development of particular emotional and psychological dispositions, or habitus, with the changing role of the management of aggression and violence central to those developments.
A crucial aspect of the historical development of European societies was their gradually increasing density – driven by population growth, urbanization and state formation – and what Elias characterized as ever-lengthening chains of interdependence. Such increasingly complex and lengthy chains of interdependence generate more complex demands on individual psychological and emotional dispositions, requiring ever-more elaborate forms of ‘automatic’ self-restraint, and ever-more encompassing and demanding standards of behaviour in relation to the harnessing of drives, impulses and emotions for the purposes of social life. Those who manage, in the formation of their habitus, their emotions and drives, more successfully would also become more successful in all other areas of life.
He saw this process of change – which he termed the ‘civilizing process’ for lack of a workable alternative, and referring to the self-perception of any human group of itself as ‘civilized’ rather than ‘barbarian’ – as an outcome of the constantly lengthening chains of interdependence, the logic of social competition, and the effects of functional democratization. Elias used the term ‘functional democratization’ to refer to the long-term, unplanned process, interwoven with lengthening chains of interdependence, of the gradual lessening of power gradients and social distance between interdependent groups in societies that have become increasingly differentiated as well as interdependent. ‘All democratisation’, he wrote, ‘requires a strengthening of self-constraint’ (Elias, 2013 [1981]: 199) and ‘democratisation carries along the civilising process . . . the necessary codes of behaviour will establish themselves on their accord, fumblingly, without being imposed from above. . . . In societies where inequality between groups is diminishing, greater self-control becomes necessary’ (Elias, 2013 [1974]: 181). The movement away from political authoritarianism towards a democratic polity ‘requires’, wrote Elias, ‘the learning of new social techniques and skills which make greater demands of people’s independence and self-control and ability to make judgements of their own’.
An important issue raised by Elias’s account is that of the emotional content of ‘lengthening chains of interdependency’ and increasing functional democratization, because such developments involved shifts in status differentials and shifting forms of competition which some groups will find uncomfortable, with concerns about immigration, multiculturalism and religious diversity being obvious examples. Lengthening and increasingly differentiated chains of interdependence also ‘become more opaque and, for any single group or individual, more uncontrollable’ (Elias, 2012 [1978]: 64). Mario Erdheim observed in relation to Elias’s conception of the increasing differentiation driving the civilizing process that
Elias did not realise that these processes of civilisation are accompanied by other, less visible processes of de-differentiation. The process of civilisation not only makes a culture more complex, but also dismantles existing structures, thus impoverishing it. Accordingly, the individual must not only learn to cope with the higher complexity, but also with the atrophy of culture. (Erdheim, 1988: 308, my translation)
Along similar lines, Breuer (1991 [1988]: 405) discussed this point in detail, highlighting the fact that one aspect of functional differentiation concerns the effects of the organization of capitalist societies around the logic of the market. Longer chains of interdependence may demand greater foresight and calculation, argued Breuer, but markets also display ‘a dimension of contingency and anarchy, which undermines the calculability of individual action’. Market competition does not simply produce ever-larger and better integrated ‘survival units’, argues Breuer, it also generates ‘the atomization of the social, the increasing density and negation of all ties – asocial sociability’. 5 Following Horkheimer and Adorno’s concept of the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’, Breuer suggests a more dialectical conception of civilization as itself producing its own dark side, of civilization and decivilization as different sides of the same coin, always developing hand in hand. The important question being raised here is the extent to which the civilizing process actually generates barbaric conduct, rather than simply being its opposite (van Krieken, 1999).
These themes are not central to his best-known works, but they are picked up in his later writings on Germany (Studies on the Germans– published in German in 1989, after Breuer’s intervention), where he examines how the trajectory followed by the formation of German national identity and habitus constitutes a case study in the combination of civilization and decivilization, a particularly important issue to address given the Holocaust. An important development of Elias’s concept of civilizing processes was the greater attention he paid in this later work to their accompaniment by decivilizing processes, either as reversals or counter-trends. He observed that social norms had an ‘inherently double-edged character’ (Elias, 2013 [1989]: 174), since in the very process of binding some people together, they turn those people against others. Elias also drew out the implications of the fact that processes of inclusion are always the other side of the coin of processes of exclusion (see also Goodin, 1996) by paying particular attention to the structuring of figurational dynamics around an ever-present – and ever-changing – opposition, in one form or another, between established and outsider groups (Elias and Scotson, 2008 [1965]), as an inherent feature of all types of social change. Nationalism as an archetypical formation of ‘established’ identity, is constituted by the linkage of the value attached to the nation – the ‘we’ identity, the ‘established’, or the ‘imagined community’ – to personal self-worth – the ‘I’ identity. Elias (2013 [1989]) saw the ‘central question’ in analysing the ‘civilized barbarism’ of the Hitler period as one of ‘how the fortunes of a nation over the centuries become sedimented into the habitus of its individual members’ (p. 24), but this is also the central question for all forms of national identity and the structure of power and status, both for groups within a state and across states in the global system (Nachtwey, 2017: 137).
There were four peculiarities to the formation of German national identity and experience: first, the specific position of the German state within a larger figuration of nation-states; second, the relative weakness of the German state in relation to surrounding states; third, the relatively large number of breaks and discontinuities; and fourth, the ideological weakness of the bourgeoisie in relation to the military aristocracy. The comparatively late development of the bourgeoisie relative to older elites and the fragility of German state-formation – brought particularly to the fore by the German loss in the First World War and the punitive conditions of the Versailles treaty – generated a fearfulness and existential anxiety about national ‘worth’ (Weber, 2023) which encouraged a tipping of the balance towards a commitment to the demands and authority of the collectivity as opposed to the expectations of a respect for individual self-worth. All of these characteristics of the formation of the German nation gave a particular stamp to the typical German habitus that made the turn to fascism possible, with an unstable and fragile national identity encouraging a hostility towards those constructed as ‘outsiders’ or ‘foreigners’ threatening that national identity, taking a particularly virulent form in relation to the Jews. In this sense, Elias’s approach is best understood as a theory of the ways in which civilizing and decivilizing process are interwoven with each other, in different ways in different parts of the world, rather than simply a theory of ‘the civilizing process’. 6 What role, then, does ever-changing technology play in this analysis?
Elias and Technology
To begin with, there is a sense in which all of Elias’s work concerns, by definition, social technology. The analysis of court society, for example, is about a particular social form, dealing with the structural arrangement of social position, techniques of indicating and reworking social status, and modes of communication (Elias 2006 [1969]). Elias notes the significance of the arrangement of physical space in architectural technology, and his concept of ‘figurations’ always includes non-human elements.
Second, technology is a central aspect of his understanding of how human beings relate to their natural environment through the ‘control and manipulation of non-human natural processes’. The changing form taken by the control of fire is an important example of the practical application of human knowledge (Goudsblom, 1992). Military technology is clearly central to competition and struggles between ‘survival units’, the state formation process, and the civilizing process itself. The state’s monopolization of violence is about the ‘civilization of the technology of violence’, so that technology can be said to play a central role in that civilizing process. His sociology of scientific knowledge encompassed the development of the natural sciences, included engineering and architecture; for example, he highlighted the importance of thinkers such as Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo, and saw the design and building of bridges and the management of water, as well as fire, as essential aspects of the relationships between humans, their environment and each other. Elias’s (2012 [1939]) conceptual argument in On the Process of Civilisation revolved around a rejection of simplistic technological determinism (p. 424): he saw science and technology needing to be understood as manifestations of the particular form taken by the ways human beings tend to behave, relate to each other and manage their relationship with their selves, the habitus prevailing at that particular time.
These general points are developed in detail in the one place where he talks more specifically about technology as it is usually understood, referring to the evolution of transport technology since the 19th century – in particular, the emergence of the motor car and the airplane – and how developments in that arena relate to his broader theory of the civilizing process. He defines ‘technization’ as ‘the process by which, as it progresses, people learn to exploit lifeless materials to an increasingly greater extent for the use of humankind, by treating and processing them, in war and in peace, mostly in the expectation of a better life’ (Elias, 1995: 7). The changes in the forms taken by social relations characterizing the process of civilization are inherently bound up with the technology currently mediating those social relations. Technological change, wrote Elias (1995), goes hand-in-hand with changes in the relevant forms of social organization, integral to the increasing social interdependence characterizing the process of civilization, so that processes of technization and civilization are ‘interwoven strands’ (p.12).
Elias then identified two key problems in the way in which that interweaving of process of technization and civilization unfolded. First, there is the problem of the ‘lag’ between technological developments and the kind of human habitus they require, the imperfect ‘fit’ between technization and civilization. The emergence of the automobile placed new demands on individual personality structures, requiring new forms of discipline and coordination with the constant flow of other car drivers, a new mode of uniform self-regulation highly attuned to an entirely new environment very different from the usual contexts of social interaction. On the one hand, ‘it is’, wrote Elias (1995), ‘one of the immovable features in the accelerating pace of change that people’s whole outlook on life continues to be psychologically tied to yesterday’s social reality, although today’s and tomorrow’s reality already differs greatly from yesterday’s’ (p. 35). On the other hand, the relationship between technization and civilization is not one of cause and effect: technization ‘already demanded a relatively high degree of civilizing self-regulation’ (Elias, 1995: 18), so that the emergence of a ‘technological habitus’ builds on an already-existing patterning of self-regulation. In the sense that technological change is the outcome of a learning process, significant new technological shifts – the railway, the car, the automobile, radio, telephone, television, the internet – are both cause and product of a ‘civilizing spurt’.
Second, the increasing interdependence and the requirements for new forms of self-regulation bound up with technological developments also generated new civilizational problems which in turn also ‘triggered a spurt in the opposite direction, a move towards de-civilization. Viewed in terms of the theoretical concept of civilization, the motor vehicle had two faces’ (Elias, 1995: 15). On the one hand, people learned new techniques of motor coordination, attention, perception, physical and emotional self-regulation, management of fatigue, and impulse control. On the other hand, they were often not very good at exercising these new techniques, generating high levels of mortality and disability, as well as property damage, requiring legal regulation and policing of speed, the rules of the road, use of seatbelts, maintenance of vehicle safety, use of alcohol and drugs, and currently the use of mobile phones while driving. Technological developments of all sorts – whether it concerns changing modes of transport or communication – always generate new civilizing tasks for people, wrote Elias, ‘and that is difficult. It cannot be said in advance whether they can handle this situation or not’ (Elias, 1995: 38). It is the discussion of ressentiment that addresses this question of the ‘difficulty’ of the civilizing process in detail.
Ressentiment – Injustice, Powerlessness, Nationalism
Mishra and others have turned to Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment to analyse the inner logic of the formation and broader social role of collective anger, both currently and across history, today especially in relation to the emergence of populist political movements. However, Nietzsche’s account highlights quite specific aspects of collective emotions that are not reducible to ‘resentment’. He used the French word, rather than, say, the German word ‘Groll’ for a reason: to capture the wide-ranging role that a particular emotional disposition has played in modern social life and value systems.
Ressentiment, wrote Nietzsche, is ‘the self-deception of impotence’ that ‘interprets weakness as freedom’ (Nietzsche, 1967 [1887]) I (13): 46). It is resentment left unresolved and thus incorporated into a society’s overall value system as well as the emotional dispositions of the individuals making up that society. The values of equality, freedom, truth, emancipation, justice and beauty, central to Christianity, are held precisely by those denied those qualities of life, translated from what is their real source, resentment against that denial. As Weber (1978 [1968]: 494) put it, ressentiment is the ‘theodicy of the disprivileged’, ‘a concomitant of that particular religious ethic of the disprivileged which, in the sense expounded by Nietzsche . . . teaches that the unequal distribution of mundane goods is caused by the sinfulness and the illegality of the privileged, and that sooner or later God’s wrath will overtake them’. Nietzsche used the term ‘slave revolt’ to refer to this dynamic, as one of rebellion of the weak against the strong. ‘The slave revolt in morality’, wrote Nietzsche (1967 [1887]), ‘begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge’ (p. 36). ‘Like a wave over a rock’, wrote René Girard, ‘the desire for revenge shatters against the triumphant other and flows back toward the subject, who is left to become continuously submerged in ressentiment’ (Girard, 2015: x). However, this is not simply an unfortunate dimension of Western thought that could be avoided if only people could control their emotions, desires and impulses more effectively to become sufficiently enlightened and self-aware. Nietzsche saw ressentiment as the driver of all morality and culture, and in reality a highly creative force (Abbas, 2015: 1).
A little over two decades later, engaging with very different social and political conditions, the German phenomenological sociologist Max Scheler placed the concern with equality far more central to his account of ressentiment, rejecting Nietzsche’s conception of Christianity as the driving moral force for the concern with equality, and placing the emphasis on the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, and all the social and political movements for human rights and emancipation: the labour movement, the women’s movement, and all those disaffected by the various dimensions of the march to modernity. The central issue for Scheler was that equality was an illusory value, doomed to constant disappointment in the face of the unavoidable inequality structuring any complex, modernizing society. His ‘sociological law’ concerning ressentiment was:
. . . that this psychological dynamite will spread with the discrepancy between the political, constitutional, or traditional status of a group and its factual power. It is the difference between these two factors which is decisive, not one of them alone. . . . Ressentiment must therefore be strongest in a society like ours, where approximately equal rights (political and otherwise) or formal social equality, publicly recognized, go hand in hand with wide factual differences in power, property, and education. While each has the ‘right’ to compare himself with everyone else, he cannot do so in fact. Quite independently of the characters and experiences of individuals, a potent charge of ressentiment is here accumulated by the very structure of society. (Scheler, 1972 [1915]: 28, original emphasis)
Here Scheler was echoing de Tocqueville’s (2000 [1863]: 189) observations about the instability at the heart of any political system placing a high value on equality, because they ‘awaken and flatter the passion for equality without ever being able to satisfy it entirely’. More recently, Brown (1993) has framed the tension slightly differently, as lying, not between equality and some impossibility of its attainment, but between equality and individual liberty, given the organized interventions into social, political and economic life required to realize egalitarian principles.
Scheler also stressed the way in which ressentiment had become directed not only at particular social figures – for Nietzsche, ‘the strong’ – but also at abstractions such as ‘the establishment’, the government, or the economy (Meltzer and Musolf, 2002: 251), not to mention ‘the deep state’, shape-shifting lizard people, ‘Big Pharma’, or ‘the Great Replacement’. This then in turn underpins the infinitely self-reproducing character of ressentiment, so that the experience of injustice becomes integral to the sense of self, in many ways easier to live with than the pursuit of its correction. Scheler argued that political parties were in many senses structured around negation, so that:
. . . improvements in the conditions criticized give no satisfaction – they merely cause discontent, for they destroy the growing pleasure afforded by invective and negation. Many modern political parties will be extremely annoyed by a partial satisfaction of their demands or by the constructive participation of their representatives in public life, for such participation mars the delight of oppositionism. It is peculiar to ‘ressentiment criticism’ that it does not seriously desire that its demands be fulfilled. It does not want to cure the evil: the evil is merely a pretext for the criticism. (Scheler, 1972 [1915]: 29)
For Brown (1993), the various forms of identity politics are a central example of the current configuration of ressentiment, using the term ‘wounded attachments’ to capture its logic, although a more accurate expression would be ‘attachment to wounds’. Against the background of the constitutional centrality of ressentiment to post-Enlightenment Western culture, Brown (1993) argues that there are a number of features of the development of social life since Nietzsche’s day that intensify and expand its centrality to collective emotional dispositions (p. 401).
First, referring to Connolly’s (1991) discussion of the effects of increasing ‘global contingency’, she identifies the increasing complexity and extent of the global networks enmeshing individuals – what Elias would term ‘lengthening chains of interdependence’ – as generating ‘an unparalleled individual powerlessness over the fate and direction of one’s own life, intensifying the experiences of impotence, dependence, and gratitude inherent in liberal capitalist orders and constitutive of ressentiment’ (Brown, 1993: 401). Second, the disenchantment of the world – for Nietzsche, the death of God – radically expands the range of figures and agencies that can drive differing forms of ressentiment. Third, the ever-intensifying process of individualization – often driven by the pursuit of ‘freedom’ – leaves people increasingly exposed to that wider variety of sources of ressentiment, decreasingly protected by family or community bonds. ‘Starkly accountable’, writes Brown (1995), ‘yet dramatically impotent, the late modern liberal subject quite literally seethes with ressentiment’ (p. 402).
The interweaving of the individual sense of worth with the triumphs and losses of the nation identified by Elias then also makes the nation, in particular the relationship between nations and the possibilities for a sense of grievance about the status and prestige of one’s own nation, a significant vehicle for the generation and expression of ressentiment. Greenfeld (1992) outlines the ways in which French nationalist thinking was driven above all by ressentiment against the English, and the French support for the American revolution was anchored as much in their hatred of the English as their love of political freedom. The same, incidentally, might also be said of the Dutch support for the American revolutionaries. Zwaan (1996) also points out, along the same lines as Elias’s point that mechanisms of inclusion can only ever be the corollary of mechanisms of exclusion, that nationalism as a positive ‘we’ identification is always also accompanied by ressentiment against opposing ‘they’ groups.
There is an ambiguity in Elias’s conception of the distinction between the process of civilization as he analysed it, which develops in more or less similar ways across the West, and the self-awareness of ‘being civilized’, which was structured in terms of distinct national identity – French, German, English. As he put it, ‘nations came to consider the process of civilization as completed within their own societies; they came to see themselves as bearers of an existing or finished civilization to others, as standard-bearers of expanding civilization” (Elias, 2012 [1939]: 43). This configuration of the civilizing process along the lines of separate nations tends, until he published Studies on The Germans (Elias, 2013 [1989]), to remain in the background of his analysis of a more broadly shared civilizing process. Elias (2012 [1939]) quotes, for example, Napoleon exclaiming to his troops on their way to Egypt, on 22 June 1798: ‘Soldiers! You are undertaking a conquest with incalculable consequences for civilization’ (p. 57). While it is true that a central aspect of Napoleon’s mission was indeed to bring ‘civilization’ to the Orient, it was very much French civilization that he was thinking of. Equally, if not more important, was France’s rivalry with England, hoping to sever its route to India. His declaration was actually longer: ‘. . . consequences for civilization and world trade. You are about to inflict upon England the most certain and telling blow she can suffer, until the day comes when you can deliver the blow that finishes her off’ (Strathern, 2008: 70). ‘[I]n order to destroy England’, he had written in 1797, ‘we must take possession of Egypt’ [cited in Harten, 2003: 40].
National identity constitutes a crucial fault-line running through the civilizing process, with increasing state monopolization of intra-state violence being accompanied by frequent and indeed increasing manifestations of violence between states as well as between state and non-state actors such as indigenous populations and minority groups within a given nation-state (Burkitt, 1996: 142; de Swaan, 2001: 268–72). A crucial and highly productive source of national sensibility is, then, ressentiment about some past military defeat, political humiliation, economic dependency, or structural dependency – and even the possibility of any of these characteristics of a nation-state’s biography. The political populism of recent years is only the most recent and glaring example of this interdependency of nationalism and collective ressentiment, but nationalism is very often driven by concerns such as recovering national honour lost in some past collective trauma, restoring some past glory or at least continuing to bask in its glow, centuries later. This characteristic of collective political emotion then also constitutes fertile ground for ressentiment entrepreneurs, social, political and economic actors skilled in the art of shaping, channelling and directing political ressentiment. 7 The paradox that nations are inherently and increasingly interdependent with the rest of the world, that sovereignty both depends on relations with the surrounding world and is structurally compromised by it, is, then, a bottomless pool for the manufacture of ressentiment around national identity and the pursuit of impossible chimeras such as ‘taking back control’ or ‘making America great again’.
For Nietzsche, it was the figure of the priest who played the role of ressentiment entrepreneur, but soon the priest had increasingly conceded ground to the politician and the demagogue. In the case of Germany, it was the feelings of aggrieved national honour in relation to the outcome of the First World War and the terms of the Versailles treaty 8 that for Hitler – ressentiment entrepreneur par excellence – and too many of his compatriots, tipped the existing inclination towards violence directed at Jews, characterizing European societies into the high-octane, murderous hyper-anti-Semitism of the ‘Final Solution’ (Klüners, 2019; Weber, 2020, 2023). Elias (2013 [1989]) noted that the decision to exterminate all Jews was ‘one of the most striking examples of the power that a belief, in this case a social and more specifically a national belief, can gain over people’ (p. 236). As media technology develops, at any given watershed moment it creates new social spaces for ressentiment entrepreneurs to go about their work of shaping structural tensions, paradoxes, conflicts and sources of disappointment, grievance, aggression, feelings of lost honour, status or prestige turned into ressentiment, with the emergence of social media and the internet being the most recent of these watershed conjunctures. 9
These arguments link back to Elias’s account of the process of functional democratization, constituted by long-term decreasing inequality and power differences. Apart from the observations that can be made about parallel tendencies in the opposite direction – increasing inequality and power differences (Mennell, 2007) – there is also the question of whether increasing interdependence encourages not an increase in self-observation and restraint but precisely the opposite, in terms of ressentiment about decreasing inequality if that shift is regarded and experienced as somehow unfair or inappropriate. There is a contradiction, then, running through Elias’s work, between his apparent assumption in his more general conceptualization of the civilizing process that people will simply be ‘carried along’ by increasing interdependence and their shared habitus will adjust automatically, and his sensitivity to people’s tolerance of, indeed attachment to, existing inequalities, in his analysis of the relationships between established and outsider groups (Elias, 2008 [1976]). 10 We have seen that there are the occasional hints in Elias’s writing where he indicates some hesitation about this assumption, where he notes the ‘difficulty’ of civilizing tasks, and these are the points of most fertile contact with the analysis of ressentiment.
In relation to social media, Habermas (2022: 160), for example, notes the need to learn how to use social media, just as the printing press produced the need to learn how to read: ‘But how long did it take until everyone was able to read?’ The new civilizing tasks include learning how to sort and select from an infinite array of information, how to process that information, how and where to direct one’s attention in the economy of attention (van Krieken, 2019), how to distinguish between relatively ‘true’ and ‘fake’ or slanted information (essentially getting up to speed on managing the social construction of knowledge), how to be an author and relate to readers, viewers or listeners, lining up one’s communicative style with the effects one wishes to achieve and managing the responses – often highly emotionally coloured – to one’s intellectual productions, and working out how to position oneself in relation to the bi-directionality of digital communication, a central aspect of ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff, 2019, 2022). Digital hyperconnectivity, to use Brubaker’s (2023) term, has ‘recast social relationships, lifting them out of the here and now, disciplining and re-formatting them, and infusing them with new obligations, new expectations, and new anxieties’ (Brubaker, 2020: 772).
Overall, it is important to approach ressentiment as both a driver and a product of all social and cultural development and indeed the civilizing process itself, at least since early modernity, and especially within capitalist social and economic relations, not simply a characteristic of disaffected and disgruntled individuals and groups. Vogl (2023: 117), for example, emphasizes the ‘effective, reciprocal relationship between instances of ressentiment and capitalism’. He argues that ressentiment should be considered ‘not as a subjective mood or mental state, but rather as a structure of relations and a mode of communication’ (Vogl, 2023: 118), revolving around comparison, evaluation, judgement, competition, that is central to the ‘spirit of capitalism’ (Vogl, 2023: 118) and ‘the capitalist economy of affect’ (Vogl, 2023: 133), or as Konings (2015) would put it, the ‘emotional logic of capitalism’. As an emotional disposition, the ‘cunning of ressentimental reason’ (Vogl, 2021: 157–182) 11 is that it fragments the experience of power relations, constituting an obfuscation of the logic and power relations of global capitalist structures and dynamics, diverting attention instead to the various objects of ressentiment. One could add that this point applies to the emotional logic of any structure of power, not just capitalism, especially when there are significant shifts in power balances, as Erdheim (1988: 318) has shown in relation to the linkages between the 16th-century witch hunts and the Absolutist state’s monopolization, not just of the means of violence, central to Elias’s account of the civilizing process, but also of ever-expanding aspects of all social life. Instead of resisting the king, the ruled fought the devil; witches were hunted down instead of nobles.
In addition, it is further driven by the paradoxes running through all of modern, liberal democratic and capitalist social life. They include the relationships between individual freedom and collective well-being and equality, between the promises of democracy and the capacity to deliver on those promises, 12 between democracy as ‘the will of the people’ and democracy as protection of individual rights, between the virtues of stability and those of change, between the removal of pain and harm in one place and its associated creation in another, between increasing demands for individuation combined with decreasing capacity to realize individuality, between processes of modernization and the undermining of their conditions of possibility (Honneth, 2004). The slogan of the French Revolution – liberty, equality, fraternity – is usually interpreted simply as a list of desirable aspirations, when in fact they are three separate legs or pillars of a modern democracy, and the slogan serves to identify the central problem of a post-Absolutist nation-state, that of securing a relatively stable balance between these three, usually antithetical and competing concerns.
Although Nietzsche’s analysis of ressentiment is critical, what he was most critical of is its disguise as something higher or more noble. In itself he saw ressentiment as a motor of everything interesting about human beings: ‘The history of mankind would be far too stupid a thing if it had not had the intellect of the powerless injected into it’ (Nietzsche (1967 [1887] I: 7). His observation that it was because of the priests (aka intellectuals) scheming with the slaves (the powerless) that ‘man first became an interesting animal’ (Nietzsche (1967 [1887] I: 6) applies, then, equally to the logic of the process of civilization as Elias understood it, and the civilizing process itself – greater interdependence, greater equality and claims for equality, functional democratization – is both a driver of ressentiment and one of its products.
The Paradoxes of Civilization/Decivilization
There are, then, a number of reasons why Elias’s hope that ‘the tensions and conflicts which the growing interdependence brings with it’ are and would remain secondary to the trend towards a more united and pacified humankind, that decivilizing processes would remain secondary to civilizing processes, might have been misplaced. In addition to all the existing motors of ressentiment built into the paradoxical interlinkage of civilizing with decivilizing processes, there are two more that are worth mentioning here: the ways in which civilizing processes are actually experienced as civilizing offensives, and a central characteristic of the globalized, digital world, ever-accelerating speed (Rosa, 2013, 2017).
Given his overall concern to highlight the unplanned character of social institutions and social change, Elias devoted little attention to the fact that the civilizing process was in fact often translated into or carried by organized, intentional human action aiming at precisely the disciplining of human subjectivity that lies at its core, ‘in the shape of lawyers, judges, police officers, inquisitors, teachers, employers, and so on, all giving their own particular form to “the civilizing process”, turning it into a civilizing offensive’ (van Krieken, 1990: 362) that cannot be reduced simply to a product of changing social circumstances. If the civilizing process often takes the form of a civilizing offensive, as well as constituting the basis of a parallel decivilizing process (van Krieken, 1999), this also provides a target of resistance against the demands of the civilizing process, a dynamic of push-back against the requirements of civilizing tasks. While it is true that a majority of individuals in advanced industrial societies do internalize the changing demands of social life to a greater or lesser degree, making them ‘second nature’, it is not clear that such adjustment to those demands is not also accompanied by a simmering ressentiment that constitutes a central aspect of the passions underlying collective political identities. Richard Rorty (1998: 90), for example, was able to identify the affective underpinnings of the attraction to figures like Donald Trump well before he did actually emerge, when he wrote about the hope that the right ‘strongman’ will ensure that
the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. . . . All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
There is a sense in which the more demanding civilizing processes are of changes to existing habitus formations, the more likely it will be that they will generate ressentiment against those demands, directed at easier targets than those processes of change and their agents.
In addition to the length of chains of interdependence, Glezos (2011, 2014), drawing on observations by Brown (2001), also highlights the increasing speed of interactions within broadening and lengthening interdependencies. He argues that a significant degree of ressentiment is also generated by the increased contingency, uncertainty and complexity generated by that acceleration, producing more of a sense of dependence than interdependence. Brown notes, along similar lines to Bauman (2007), the fluidity of contemporary social life, and highlights the paradox that we are moving towards the future at an increasing rate while knowing and understanding it at a decreasing rate.
Moving at such speed without any sense of control or predictability, we greet both past and future with bewilderment and anxiety. As a consequence, we inheritors of a radically disenchanted universe feel a greater political impotence than humans may have ever felt before, even as we occupy a global order more saturated by human power than ever before. (Brown, 2001: 138–9)
This paradox – increasing speed together with decreasing capacity to keep up – is, argues Glezos, an important source of ressentiment, because it is impossible to resolve, leading to anger and rancour directed at those groups spotlighted by ressentiment entrepreneurs – asylum seekers, migrants, criminal youth, elites, feminists, the upwardly mobile. 13
Writers such as Connolly (1991), Mouffe (2000) and Brown (2001) have emphasized the paradoxes of liberal democracy, and we have seen that a central manifestation of those paradoxes is ressentiment, itself a product of the civilizing process requiring the management of those paradoxes, rather than an alien intrusion into it. What is important is to see the concepts of civilizing, decivilizing and ressentiment as interwoven with each other. The civilizing process generates both demands of individual habitus that can never be satisfactorily met – learning to manage contingency, uncertainty, vulnerability, precarity, and increasingly opaque risks – resulting in ressentiment against the imposition of those demands, which then feeds into and amplifies the already-existing decivilizing aspects of the civilizing process.
The concept of ressentiment provides important insights into the dynamics of the range of responses to the combined civilizing tasks facing individuals and groups in contemporary social life, including the need to manage the tsunami of information, adjusting to ever-changing forms of social interaction, the complexities of ever-lengthening and increasingly complex chains of global interdependence, ever-increasing precarity, constant destabilization of established outsider relations, and the need to manage the various paradoxes running through liberal-democratic, post-industrial social life, constituting a significant point of articulation between civilizing and decivilizing processes. In relation to the various types of conflicting logic running through social life, Mouffe (2000: 45) notes that the conflicts and paradoxes are essentially irresolvable, and ‘there can be only temporary, pragmatic, unstable and precarious negotiations of the tension between them’.
Exactly how the linkage of civilizing and decivilizing processes works can only be properly understood with a grasp of the central role played by the form taken by media communication and the workings of ressentiment. The new social space created by social media technology, as well as the changes wrought on existing social spaces, generates a new kind of logic driving these interactions between civilization, decivilization and the dynamics of collective ressentiment. Here I have only been able to attend to the very modest task of reflecting on the underlying logic of those interactions, without analysing the differing ways they play out in different settings. At a time when the sphere of politics appears especially unpredictable and unstable, we appear to need to deepen our understanding of these interactions, in order to manage their interrelationships in ways that reduce to a minimum their destructive effects.
Footnotes
