The Appropriateness of Political Emotions

2.1 Three Forms of Appropriateness

According to the standard account, put forward by D’Arms and Jacobson (2000a), we need to distinguish three ways in which emotions can be appropriate or inappropriate: their fittingness, their moral appropriateness, and their prudential value.

First, we can assess whether the emotion gets things right in the following sense: first, whether the object of the emotion in fact has the evaluative properties ascribed to it by the emotion, or whether the emotion has the right shape; second, whether the emotion is proportionate, or has the right size. For instance, we can ask whether my colleague’s remark indeed was offensive and hence merits resentment, and if so, we can still ask whether a reaction of raging resentment is proportionate to the offense that the remark constituted or whether the offense would rather call for some mild indignation. More recently, in addition to shape and size, a third dimension of fittingness has been introduced, namely that of duration and issues of temporal development at large (Na’aman 2021a; 2021b; Cholbi 2017; Howard 2023; see also Bittner 1992 and Hieronymi 2001). For instance, while it might be fitting for me to feel angry at you as an immediate response to your willful offense, my anger might no longer be fitting after you have expressed sincere regret and properly apologized.

This is what is called the fittingness of the emotion. According to one view, sometimes called the “alethic view” (see Howard 2018), norms of emotional fittingness then are “norms of correct representation” (Na’aman 2021a: 532). An emoter accurately answering these norms is responding to objective normative reasons. But, analogously to the rationality of beliefs, fittingness is also dependent on the epistemic reasons that are available to the emoter. The latter reasons constitute whether an emotion is rationally justified given the apparent evaluative properties of its object. This is the fittingness of an emotion in terms of its being “warranted” (D’Arms & Jacobson 2000b; Na’aman 2021a). Thus, envy of my neighbor’s wealth is not fitting if he doesn’t possess much, but it will still be warranted if I haven’t realized that there is little behind the facade.

Second, in moral terms, we can assess whether it is good or bad, virtuous or vicious to have the emotion in question. Which moral standards one applies thereby is dependent on which moral theory one favors, e.g., a virtue ethical, consequentialist, deontological, or care-ethical one. In a virtue ethical framework, for example, we can ask whether the character expressed in an emotion is virtuous or vicious (e.g., Pettigrove 2012; Bommarito 2017); in a consequentialist one, we can ask whether having an emotion maximizes a specific non-moral good. We do not want to commit ourselves to any specific moral theory here. In either case, as D’Arms and Jacobson (2000a) argue, it would amount to a “moralistic fallacy” to infer that just because an emotion is morally (in)appropriate, it is also (un)fitting. For instance, if someone threatens to kill thousands of people unless I become angry with you; while it may be morally appropriate for me to be angry with you, this in itself does not make my anger fitting, because it provides me with what is sometimes called “the wrong kind of reasons” (see Gertken & Kiesewetter 2017).

Third, in prudential terms, we can assess whether having the emotion is conducive to one’s aims. For instance, we may inquire whether climate despair is a politically productive or destructive emotion (and again, if it turns out to be destructive, this in itself is not a reason for it to be unfitting).

2.2 Political Emotions and Moral Assessment

In recent years, the distinction between the fittingness, moral appropriateness, and prudential value of emotions has been applied to political emotions, most notably by Srinivasan (2018). Srinivasan offers a defense of anger in the context of racial oppression and thus opposes views that reject anger for being politically destructive, prominently put forward by Nussbaum (2013; 2016; see also Pettigrove 2012). As Srinivasan points out, anger as a reaction to racial oppression may be fitting even if politically counterproductive. In cases like these, the oppressed are faced with a dilemma: either they feel fitting anger, thereby acknowledging past and present injustices yet exacerbating their situation, or they repress their anger, thereby bettering or at least not worsening their situation yet failing to appreciate racial injustices. They are exposed to an “affective injustice” that often remains unrecognized but is psychologically taxing.

Interestingly, Srinivasan phrases the conflict as, first and foremost, one between the fittingness (or “aptness”) and the prudential warrant of anger. However, we can easily see how moral considerations play a crucial role here too. More specifically, moral values can play a threefold role when assessing the fittingness and appropriateness of political emotions such as anger or resentment. First, they are built into our assessments of fittingness because, as a moral emotion, anger is fitting if it rightfully targets an offense. Srinivasan (2018: 129) acknowledges this in portraying anger as a form of moral perception. Second, they may be built into our prudential considerations. This is the case when the goals by which we assess anger’s productivity are themselves moral in nature, such as when we ask whether anger, ultimately, helps or hinders our pursuit of racial justice. Indeed, the classic counterproductivity critique of political anger, as Srinivasan (2018: 123–127) presents it, incorporates moral values. According to this critique, anger about racial injustices is counterproductive because (in a racist world) it fuels racist violence, thereby undermining the antiracist struggle for more racial justice. However, other examples that Srinivasan discusses point to a broader understanding of prudential reasons, including, for instance, the effect of anger on one’s personal well-being. Third, the moral builds an assessment category of its own. As Srinivasan argues, anger might, for instance, be immoral insofar as by causing harm to oneself or others, one violates a duty towards oneself or others.

While in the case of anger, moral values are built into our assessments of fittingness, in the case of other political emotions, fittingness is independent of moral values. In this respect, it is helpful to look at Stockdale’s (2021) discussion of the difference between essentially moral political emotions (e.g., anger), non-essentially moral political emotions (e.g., hope), and mixed political emotions (e.g., bitterness), and the respective tighter or looser connections between fittingness and moral appropriateness. Take, for example, political hope, which involves a distinct standard that has to do with the probability of the hoped-for outcome being realized and how the emotion tracks the evidence about its likelihood (Stockdale 2021: 61–65, 91).⁹ In this specific sense of fittingness, we can assess the hope for all racial injustice to end worldwide in a year from now as unfitting (the probability is close to zero) independently of any moral values. Similarly, there is an epistemic dimension to bitterness that we can assess independently of any moral values. Following Stockdale, we here conceive of bitterness as an anger-like perception of a wrong without much hope for acknowledgment and repair. For instance, if it is highly unlikely that anything will rapidly change for the better, bitterness in the face of gender biases in hiring processes in one’s department is fitting, independently of any moral considerations.

Generally, we need to be careful and explicitly elaborate when and why the reasons for the fittingness or for the prudential appropriateness of a political emotion are reasons for its moral appropriateness (or vice versa), and when they do not converge. Importantly, these reflections are in line with D’Arms and Jacobson’s observation that “we can allow that some reasons why it is [morally] wrong to feel an emotion are also reasons why that emotion doesn’t fit” (2000a: 82). They warn us only against concluding that just because an emotion is immoral or counterproductive, it is also unfitting. This still allows for cases in which moral values play a role for the fittingness or prudential appropriateness of emotions (see also Achs & Na’aman 2023).

To summarize, while its overall moral or prudential merit qua being a moral or prudential merit does not make a political emotion fitting, moral values often do play a role in the assessment of the fittingness or productivity of an emotion. This especially applies to those political emotions that essentially entail moral evaluations, such as anger, moral disgust, collective guilt, or forgiveness. This is one of the reasons why assessing the fittingness or prudential value of these emotions is so contested: Our judgment invariably will be informed by our moral values.

3.1 A Focus-Based Account of Fittingness

When assessing the fittingness of political emotions, we might worry that we might never come to an agreement: which political emotions we take to be fitting depends on which values and concerns we have. For example, to a nationalist who is committed to an essentialist ideal of national identity, fear of immigrants who allegedly threaten this ideal might seem fitting; by contrast, a committed advocate of multicultural values might reject the nationalist’s values and, therefore, reject his fear as unfitting. The conflict about the fittingness of the emotional reaction here points us to a more fundamental disagreement about political ideals and values. Indeed, the sphere of the political is fraught with disagreements. One might even argue that the political sphere is the sphere in which such disagreements arise, or that it is constituted by conflict, as post-foundational theorists hold. But even if one disagrees with this move and believes that consensus on political matters (at least in principle) can be reached, it is still a matter of fact that disagreement abounds in the sphere of the political. How should we respond to this? Does the acknowledgment of (contingent or fundamental) political disagreement force us to give up the idea of fittingness altogether because conflicts about the fittingness of political emotions restate or even instigate conflicts about political values?

Here, we want to remain neutral with regard to this question and bracket the complicated meta-ethical discussion on the epistemology and metaphysics of moral and political values. Instead, we want to introduce what we call the “focus-based account of fittingness”¹⁰—that is, a refined account of fittingness that allows us to assess the fittingness of political emotions in a way that accounts for (contingent of fundamental) political disagreement. Recall that the focus of an emotion is the concern the emotion is based on. For instance, my anger about the discriminatory treatment of Muslims in Dutch society is based on my concern for justice; justice, thus, is the focus of my anger.

The basic idea of the focus-based account of fittingness is that when we assess whether an emotion is fitting, we should not ask whether the object of the emotion has the evaluative properties that the emotion purports to disclose, for instance, whether the professor whom I despise for her intellectual ostentations really is despicable. Rather, we should ask whether the evaluative properties disclosed by the emotion really mirror what matters to the emoter (qua their having that emotion). In this regard, my contempt for my professor might be fitting if humility is what really matters to me (and matters to me in having that emotion). It would be unfitting, however, if what really matters to me is academic achievements, and if my contempt serves as a coping mechanism to cover my own feelings of intellectual inferiority and envy vis-à-vis my professor. The mismatch here is between the concern that the emotion commits me to (in this case, a concern for humility) and the concerns I really have (in this case, a concern of academic achievements). Our focus-based account of fittingness relies on the idea that emotions involve an implicit commitment to their focus, a so-called “focal commitment” (Helm 2001), that comes with a normative pressure to feel, think, and act in a certain way. In the example above, for instance, my contempt commits me to the value of humility; at the same time, my attachment to the value of humility commits me to admire rather than despise humble people. If, thus, my other emotions, thoughts, and actions reveal that humility does not really matter to me, that might speak in favor of the second type of interpretation of my contempt as disguised envy. As such, our focus-based account of fittingness is in line with accounts that highlight the agent-relative nature of emotional fittingness.¹¹

To illustrate, consider two sets of cases of political emotions that are not focus-fitting. The subjects in these cases wittingly or unwittingly but deceptively refocus what really matters. This includes cases in which there is a mismatch between the public display of an emotion and the concern and cases in which there is some mismatch between the experience of the emotion and its focus. First, take virtue signaling. For instance, people might publicly express outrage about racist practices, yet what really matters to them are not anti-racist values but a sense of belonging, moral superiority, or public recognition (see also Cherry 2021: 130–134).¹² Their outrage, in this case, is unfitting in terms of the focus-based account because their concern for belonging, moral superiority, or public recognition does not render their affective evaluation of racist practices as outrageous intelligible. Similar considerations apply to so-called (white) “saviorism,” whereby members of the dominant group allege that without their emotions (say racial anger) on behalf of the oppressed, the latter would be doomed on their own (Cherry 2021: 134–138). Rather than racial justice, what really matters to the emoters in this case is, again, their own morality or the morality of their group.

Second, take hatred. Hatred is a sentiment that appraises its target—a person or group of persons—as evil or hateworthy. Paradigmatic cases in the political context are xenophobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, homophobia, or forms of racism.¹³ As a “global” rather than local attitude, hatred targets the person or group of persons as a whole rather than specific properties or actions of the other (as, e.g., fear or anger does). Furthermore, hatred is an overgeneralizing, essentializing, and collectivizing attitude (see Szanto 2020; 2021). It is overgeneralizing in that it picks out a limited number of actions or properties of the other and yet assesses the other as a whole. It is essentializing in that it tends to treat the features in question as inherent to the other and, therefore, as unchangeable. Finally, it is collectivizing in the following two senses: first, the target of hatred characteristically fluctuates between individuals, groups, and proxies (“the refugees”; “this typical unemployed person”, etc.); second, it is characteristic of hatred that the hate-community becomes affectively invested in their own hatred. Their collective identity becomes dialectically interwoven with their target. On the one hand, haters aim to eliminate their targets; on the other, they need the targets to uphold their sense of identity. Indeed, it is this “negative solidarity” with one’s own hate-community that lends affective weight to the emotion, rather than some determinate affective concerns (as, e.g., overcoming oppression with anger or climate goals with hope) (Szanto 2020; 2021; see also Ahmed 2004; Katsafanas 2022). What really matters to hating communities is, thus, to establish and uphold their sense of identity, cohesion, and superiority over and against an outgroup rather than their alleged aim to eradicate the “evil” target from the face of the earth. Political hatred thus becomes focally unfitting: The targets do not have the affective import for the emoters they purportedly have (being hateworthy or evil); rather, the haters have other, often unacknowledged and rather diffuse concerns underlying their hatred, such as the ethnic homogeneity of their country, a reinforcement of their collective identity and superiority, or the positive feelings of belonging associated with negative solidarity with their fellow haters.¹⁴

To take a more specific case of political hatred, as Salice and Montes Sánchez (2023) have recently argued, sometimes racial hatred is grounded in repressed envy (see also Nussbaum 2018: ch. 5; Protasi 2021: ch. 5). What is envied, for instance, might be power, success, talent, and, ultimately, recognition (values that might be actual or alleged, rendering the underlying envy fitting or not). Since envy is a heavily stigmatized emotion whose acknowledgment would require the painful acknowledgment of one’s own partial inferiority vis-à-vis the other, it tends to get repressed and masks itself in affective attitudes such as resentment or hatred. The rival is no longer experienced as superior but as inferior, blameworthy, or evil; the self is no longer experienced as inferior but as morally superior (yet aggrieved). What originally mattered to the envier (power, success, talent, recognition, etc.) fades into the background; the others are hated simply for who they are.

The affective mechanism that transforms painful self-regarding emotions of shame, envy, and feelings of powerlessness into a range of other-directed antagonistic emotions such as resentment, contempt, or hatred has been discussed under the label of “Ressentiment” (Salmela & Capelos 2021; cf. Szanto 2022). As such, Ressentiment-induced contempt (as it was described in the initial example) for the initially envied success of, say, the “elites” will not be fitting in a focal sense since it does not pick out in the relevant way the value of success. Rather, contempt here is based on a sour-grapes style, often self-deceptive, transvaluation of the others’ success (Capelos & Demertzis 2022), devaluating it, say, as built on nepotism or corruption.¹⁵

To summarize, the focus-based account of fittingness allows us to criticize political emotions as unfitting without imposing our own normative standpoint on those whose emotions we are assessing. According to this account, political emotions are unfitting when the emotion does not mirror what really matters to the emoters. Complementing the class of cases that we discussed here in which it is the emotion that gets things wrong, as frequently discussed in the literature, there are other cases in which emotions rightly gain epistemic authority over our value commitments—as when grieving for the loss of distant others impacted by war (see Butler 2009) makes us extend our narrowly personal circle of concern. That said, one might be worried that the account only shifts the original problem to a different level of the analysis: Who is to decide and diagnose what really matters to the emoters? Before we address this worry and discuss the clashes between personal or existential grievances, on the one hand, and of political or moral values, on the other (§3.4), we introduce two further sets of appropriateness standards: the first pertaining to the scope of the target; the second to the scope of the subject of political emotions.

3.2 Target-Appropriateness

In the previous subsection, we introduced the focus-based account of fittingness. This account assesses the fittingness of emotions based on the question of whether the emotion mirrors what really matters to the emoter. In this section, we turn to a second important element of the affective-intentional structure of political emotions, namely their target. We restrict our analysis to those political emotions that target persons or groups of persons.

Clearly, political emotions can go wrong when they have the wrong target. For instance, my anger at refugees who allegedly exploit our social security systems might be unfitting if the real problem is austerity politics that erodes our social security systems. But political emotions can also go wrong when, in principle, they have the right target yet the wrong scope, that is, when they target a group of persons that is either too large or too narrow. In the following, we discuss examples for these three cases of target-inappropriateness: (1) target-upscaling; (2) target-downscaling; and (3) target-refocusing.

First, consider a case of target-upscaling. Cherry (2021: 16–17) conceptualizes a version of such target-inappropriate anger as “rogue rage,” whereby the subject of moral anger positions herself in opposition to everyone else. Think, for instance, of anti-misogynistic anger that targets not a particular male colleague’s sexist behavior but all men or all members of the faculty. One of the instrumental problems involved in political emotions going rogue is that they do not aim at any resolution, change, or reform but seek simply “to hit back at the world” (Cherry 2021: 17). But we can also imagine cases in which the emotion is target-inappropriate and yet focally fitting, morally appropriate (e.g., from a consequentialist perspective), and politically productive, for instance when one’s anger has an expressive and deterring force, hindering relevant future harms.

Second, consider a case of target-downscaling in which the emotion just targets isolated incidents or single individuals rather than the relevant underlying structural or institutional causes. Think of the above anti-misogynistic anger that solely targets a particular person using sexist slurs, instead of (also) focusing on the institutional culture enabling those slurs or prevalent gender biases in academia. One might argue that in a case like this, the emotion that targets the individual offender is appropriate, yet what is missing is an additional affective awareness of or reaction to the underlying structural injustices. In merely being angry at the individual offender and their concrete offense, the emoter seems to miss an important dimension of the situation.

Third, take a case of target-refocusing. The most prominent and perhaps most harmful form of target-refocusing is that of scapegoating, as when refugees are blamed for abusing social benefits or feared for taking away jobs. Cherry distinguishes scapegoating, or what she calls “wipe rage,” from so-called “pain-passing.” While in the latter, one passes on the pain to others who have not caused it, wipe-rage is directed at those “racial ‘others’” whom the outraged believes, even if wrongly, to be the actual cause of one’s harm (Cherry 2001: 18). In contrast to Cherry, we take scapegoating to be a specific type of deliberate pain-passing where one is made or makes oneself believe that “others” are responsible for one’s harm, a mechanism often exploited by right-wing populists, who deliberately misconstrue, say, refugees as harmful or blameworthy. This of course makes scapegoating not just target- but also morally inappropriate, blaming those who are actually not responsible for the harm. This case also shows up an important difference between our account and the standard account of fittingness that assesses whether the target of the emotion in fact has the evaluative properties that the emotion allegedly discloses. On the standard view, in the example above, scapegoating is unfitting because it is not the immigrants who are responsible for high unemployment rates but independent austerity measures. On our account, the emotion is focally fitting but target-inappropriate because one refocuses one’s emotional reactions on the wrong target. Our account is, thus, more nuanced than the standard account because it allows us to capture the difference between cases in which an emotion is unfitting because the emotion does not properly mirror what matters to the emoter (focus-unfittingness) and cases in which the emotion is unfitting because it has the wrong target (target-inappropriateness).

As these examples suggest, inappropriately scaling up or down or refocusing the target typically arises for antagonistic or hostile political emotions, such as anger, resentment, contempt, or hatred. But there is no principled reason why this cannot arise for pro-social, inclusive, or forward-looking emotions as well. Suppose an unbounded compassion “sliding” from a real-enough harm that happened to a particular man falsely accused of sexual harassment to compassion for all men in the face of potential accusations (corresponding to the first type of target-inappropriateness that we described). This case is related to but different from the harmful logic of misogynistic “himpathy,” discussed by Manne (2017): a form of excessive sympathy for particular male perpetrators of sexual assault. Or think of wrongly “inferring” from an isolated, promisingly friendly exchange one witnesses between white police officers and a black suspect the over-optimistic hope that racial biases will soon no longer be a societal issue. This case is the inverse of the second type of target-inappropriateness we described above. While in those cases of target-downscaling one ignores the systemic dimension of a particular harm, here, one overgeneralizes from a particular case and accordingly forms over-optimistic emotional reactions.

To summarize, we can assess the appropriateness of political emotions by zooming in on their target and asking whether the emotion has the right target and whether the emotion’s target has the right scope. Political emotions can go wrong in scaling up, scaling down, or refocusing their target. Importantly, an emotion can be focus-fitting and yet target-inappropriate. This is the case, for instance, when one is angry about one’s colleague’s racial slur and yet perceives this slur as only an isolated incident. The emotion is focally fitting because it mirrors what really matters to the emoter, namely racial justice; it is unfitting, however, in that the emotion or emoter fails to affectively recognize the structural and systemic nature of racism.

While cases of target-refocusing, -upscaling or -downscaling are not explicitly mentioned in the standard account, they can be integrated into it. Thus, our aim here is not to show that the standard account is wrong but rather that it fails to recognize important differences in how political emotions can be inappropriate, in the present case in terms of their target or scope.

3.3 Subject-Appropriateness and Standards of Sharedness

In the previous subsection, we argued that political emotions that have persons as their target can be inappropriate in terms of the scope of their target. In this subsection, we zoom in on the other side of the affective-intentional relation, namely the subjects of the emotion. We suggested that political emotions properly speaking are emotions that are shared in a robust sense among participants (§1). We will now show how the sharedness generates additional normative standards. We subsume these standards under the label “subject-appropriateness” because they all concern how the subjects of shared political emotions relate to each other or concern potential misidentifications as to who feels the emotions. Crucially, what we are debating in this section is neither the focus-fittingness nor the target-appropriateness of political emotions. Subject-appropriateness is an independent standard of assessment since a focus-fitting and target-appropriate emotion can nevertheless be subject-inappropriate.

To begin with, let’s recapitulate what the sharedness of political emotions entails. First, political emotions focus on a shared matter of political import and have a background concern for the political community as such; second, they implicitly or explicitly make a claim to public recognition of the shared concern; third, there is a reciprocity between the members’ emotions: the sharedness of political emotions feeds into the members’ personal concern for the matter and for the polity as such, as well as into the expression, regulation, and indeed the very felt experience of political emotions.¹⁶

Now, given this rather demanding account, there are several ways in which individual and shared concerns might come apart or be mismatched. We focus here on the politically most relevant ones and set aside further possibilities that are of more conceptual or metaphysical relevance.¹⁷ Specifically, we distinguish three main types of cases: various membership misidentifications; narcissistic misidentification; and forms of false, kitschy, or phony allyship. In the first set of cases, there is a misalignment between personal and shared concerns; the misalignment may be witting or unwitting and is not necessarily strategic. In the second set of cases, subjects narcissistically narrow down their concern to themselves rather than being concerned with their community. In the last set of cases, we have various epistemic, affective and/or political problems resulting from inappropriate and often strategically biased sharing of political emotions.

In all the following cases, what is at stake is the subject-appropriateness of the emotion, not its fittingness. They may or may not be (focally) fitting. Our analysis here goes beyond the standard account in that it draws attention to how political emotions can go wrong in terms of their shared character. This cannot be fully captured by the distinction between fittingness, moral, and prudential standards.

3.4 Aim-Appropriateness and the Political Legitimacy of Emotions

In the previous three subsections, we revisited the standard account of the appropriateness of political emotions through a reflection on the focus-, target-, and subject-appropriateness of political emotions. However, we also need to account for a fourth dimension when assessing the appropriateness of political emotions, namely whether an emotion is compatible with our understanding of “the political” as such. What is at stake here is the political legitimacy of an emotion. We call this form of appropriateness “aim-appropriateness” because the legitimacy of a political emotion depends on whether its aim is reformative or destructive, or whether it aims positively at social change towards justice and equality; or rather only at voicing grievances, marking hostilities, or seeking retribution. Underlying this standard is the intuition that there are types or tokens of political emotions that are not just inappropriate in that they do not adequately mirror what really matters to the emoters (focus-unfittingness); they are not just inappropriate in that they are mis-targeted (target-inappropriateness); they are not just inappropriate in that they involve some form of misidentification (subject-inappropriateness). Rather, they are “anti-political” (Vargas González 2024) in that they constitute a threat to the public space or the sphere of the political as such. What does this mean?

Whether a specific type or token of emotion is regarded as politically legitimate depends on our underlying understanding of the political itself. Very roughly, we can distinguish three understandings of the political: consensual; antagonistic; and agonistic. According to the consensual understanding, which is sometimes attributed to Arendt¹⁹; politics, though it starts with plurality and disagreement, is all about recognizing commonalities, forging associations, and achieving consensus (see Wolin 1994). According to the antagonistic understanding most prominently exemplified by Schmitt (1932), politics is about conflict between enemies and the sovereignty of political communities to wage war against each other. The agonistic understanding represented by proponents of post-foundational or radical democracy theory such as Laclau and Mouffe (1985/2001; Mouffe 2005) shares with the antagonistic understanding the conviction that politics is essentially about conflict. However, it differs from the antagonistic view in that it does not frame the conflicts in question as conflicts between enemies that are ultimately to be solved violently but as conflicts between adversaries that require non-violent tools, where one recognizes the political legitimacy of one’s political opponents. In this respect, the agonistic view resembles the consensual understanding of the political. However, the former disagrees with the latter in holding that there is no rational ground on the basis of which we could come to a consensus about fundamentally disputed political concerns and values about which we disagree.

What does this imply for the political legitimacy of emotions? How do these three different understandings of the political translate into claims about which political emotions constitute a threat to the political sphere as such, are “anti-political,” and, therefore, politically illegitimate? Some proponents of the consensual framework such as Nussbaum reject any constructive political role of antagonistic political emotions such as fear (2018), disgust (2006), and anger (2016). By contrast, the Schmittian framework allows even for hostile antagonistic emotions such as hatred, contempt, and retributive forms of anger.²⁰ An agonistic framework, finally, allows for antagonistic emotions but only as long as they do not turn hostile or aim at the annihilation of the other (Osler & Tietjen 2024). For instance, it allows for what Cherry (2021) calls “Lordean rage,” an inclusive and transformative anger targeting racial injustice (cf. Lorde 1997). Indeed, given its understanding of the political as a sphere of conflict, the agonistic paradigm even advocates antagonistic emotions; however, it condemns hatred or forms of anger that call for retributive punishment or the expulsion of others from the sphere of politics altogether.

We see, then, that the implicit or explicit understanding of the political itself, as a normative framework, determines which emotions are considered politically legitimate or illegitimate. Given that we conceive of illegitimate political emotions as those that constitute a threat to the sphere of the political, both specific types (e.g., hatred, Ressentiment-induced contempt) and subtypes (e.g., retributive forms of anger), as well as tokens of political emotions (e.g., hope for the elimination of one’s opponents) can be classified as illegitimate. Although there are dozens of accounts that stress the pro-social, moral, or reformative functions of antagonistic emotions for politics,²¹ this question of how one’s underlying understanding of the political shapes one’s account of which emotions count as politically legitimate and illegitimate is hardly addressed explicitly.

We introduced the idea that some emotions might constitute a threat to the public sphere as a distinctive standard of appropriateness. However, this standard shares some important features with other standards.

First, the answer to the question of whether a specific emotion is politically legitimate depends, in part, on the motivational character of the emotion and its aims. For instance, hatred may be seen as anti-political because it aims at the annihilation of its targets, as might some forms of anger because they do not voice injustices or seek to repair moral harm but only strive for vengeful retribution. In this regard, the assessment is connected to prudential standards that assess whether having or displaying an emotion is conducive to certain individual or collective aims. Moreover, if the reason for classifying an emotion as politically illegitimate is that it threatens the public sphere as such, this can also be seen as a prudential claim as it refers to an undesired consequence of the emotion, namely of destroying the very sphere in which it can be operative.

However, what is distinctive about this standard of appropriateness is that it does not make recourse to any particular political value that might be threatened by a given political emotion. Rather, it refers to threats to the public sphere whose existence is a condition of the possibility of us developing, expressing, and cultivating political emotions, in addition to being a condition of the dignity and autonomy of human beings who only flourish in the public sphere (see Arendt 1958). In this regard, the standard resembles a “transcendental” or “anthropological” rather than a prudential assessment. Again, in this regard, the standard for determining the legitimacy of political emotions will be a “meta-normative” one. And yet, any understanding of the political as such will inevitably introduce normative considerations. To illustrate, both antagonistic and agonistic theorists will question a conception of the political that essentially relies on the notion of a “public sphere” that is exclusively defined in formal-procedural or deliberative terms. Although we use the notion of “public sphere” in a broader sense, this exemplarily shows that all our political concepts are normatively connected to our understanding of the political.

Second, the assessment of emotions as anti-political is also closely connected to moral standards of assessment. This is most clearly the case when one determines the bounds of the political by moral values such as the demand to recognize the other as equal, even in cases of fundamental political disagreement, partisanship, and conflict. While we think it is true that these limits can be, and most often are, spelled out in moral terms, we remain neutral here on the question of whether this need necessarily be so or whether the underlying values could not be seen, in turn, as distinctively political.²² In either case, emotions will arguably play a key role in negotiating our fundamental political and/or moral values and their legitimacy.