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Doing Emotions History
By Susan J. Matt, Peter N. Stearns UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09532-0
CHAPTER 1
Modern Patterns in Emotions History
Peter N. Stearns
After thirty to forty years of serious, informative work on emotions history, scholars have not clearly answered what would seem a vital and timely question: do emotions and emotional standards change when a society moves toward modernity? This essay seeks to explore the current status of the issue, to indicate promising lines for renewed attention, and to urge greater priority for analysis and discussion.
Current indecision (at best) or neglect results from three factors. First, modernity itself is a contested notion. Most would agree that industrial, urban societies differ from agricultural ones, but how widely this spills over onto areas like politics and culture is hardly a settled item. Second, emotions history raises some particular challenges for inquiries into change, because emotions have some biological and psychological basis that resist even powerful transforming forces, and because all societies, premodern or modern, need some regulatory efforts in some negative emotional areas. Modern change may, as we will argue, be real, but it is not going to involve sweeping contrasts.
But it's the third constraint that really invites the most urgent attention: current analysis is deeply shaped by excessive scholarly oscillations over the past thirty years.
There is no question that some earlier efforts to characterize modern emotions, primarily in the Western context, oversimplified to the point of being well off the mark; this was initially true of efforts to describe premodern families as lacking love and affection—the catch phrase was "about as much emotion as one would expect to find in a bird's nest," but it extended also to claims about unregulated anger. Overgeneralizations about premodern fear or grief have also stirred rebuttals. On the other hand, the key issues have been subsequently unduly displaced by medievalist critiques. It is worth reopening questions about emotional concomitants to modern progresses like industrialization or urbanization. The goal here is to relaunch a discussion, inviting contributions from both premodern and modern sides and with a special plea for work—still unusual— that bridges between the two. We should look at some of the claims that have been offered, a few of which have needlessly fallen from view, and, of course, to remind ourselves of the many problems that have been noted. Above all, we need to examine the emotional implications of some key modern structures themselves—the piece that, it seems to me, has been notably absent in many of the discussions to date.
There is precedent for a relaunch of this sort from work in the history of childhood. Here too, initial claims about the modern were clearly excessive, provoking an (arguably equally excessive) backlash from premodernists; this in turn generated some years of needless confusion or silence but ultimately yielded the opportunity for a more sophisticated discussion of change and continuity. The childhood debate began with claims by Philippe Ariès, sometimes enhanced by subsequent exaggerations from other historians, that premodern Western society had not recognized childhood as a clearly separate stage in life, which might in turn have promoted various forms of inattention or ill treatment. The hypothesis did spur important research in what had been a neglected field. Fairly quickly, however, it led to counterthrusts by medievalists and early modernists, bent on showing that people in their cherished periods did value children and (in some extreme counterclaims) should not be differentiated as parents from their modern counterparts. The resultant stalemate actually slowed research for a time—after all, if there were no real distinctions why do history, particularly amid such contested interpretations. It turns out, of course, that some valid lines can be drawn between premodern and modern childhoods—for example, in the move from predominant work to predominant schooling—without claiming total differentiation or some systematic premodern severity. And historians working on other regions, such as Japan, actually have found some premodern-modern differences in childhood recognizability that are not totally different from those posited by Ariès.
On a broadly similar basis, there is no reason that some careful claims about modernity in emotion need rouse premodernists to battle. The claims can be fully compatible with acknowledging emotional complexities and nuances in premodern periods—including recognition of the common humanity involved.
They do not have to assume uniformity or stagnation in premodern emotions—all sorts of change and variety are possible within the long framework of agricultural societies. At the same time, a careful assertion of claims about modern change must acknowledge important continuities, both because the modern-premodern line is never rigid in any area of endeavor and because of the biopsychological basics that no historical periodization will erase. Invoking care is not the same thing, however, as ignoring modern factors altogether, which (as with childhood earlier) some premodernists have come close to contending. It should not promote emotions history as a series of pointillist inquiries without the possibility of some larger dynamics—among other things because the result might essentially remove history from participation in interdisciplinary inquiry on grounds of excessive detail and caution. Again, it's time for some new approaches to what a modern framework for emotional change might entail.
Before proposing a partially new tack, however, it's important to review the current state of play, including modernist assertions that have been made to date and ensuing rebuttals, because the combination establishes a few points that need not be lost, and certainly a number of initial cautions.
It's vital, of course, to approach the topic with some notion of what "the modern" is all about. A new Oxford University Press series marks 1500 as the point at which the modern begins, though it is hard to know why. To be sure, Western society after 1500 became more commercial and launched its long process of colonial expansion. Most studies of the modern, however, would wait at least another two centuries, when the rise of science, some political systemization, and some of the beginnings of industrialization mark a more decisive set of changes—first Western, but ultimately global. For emotions history, key initial questions involve whether any emotional changes accompanied the onset of greater modernity, and certainly what emotional shifts the changing economic and social structures would generate.
While serious work on the issue of modern emotions began virtually at the same time as Lucien Febvre's famous appeal for opening the field as a whole, as noted in the Introduction, it was only in the 1980s that an initial picture began to emerge. By this point, several historians were staking claims about discrete emotions, offering analyses that can still be usefully plumbed. But it was the revival of an earlier, more sweeping theoretical framework that spurred the greatest interest, stimulating additional research but also calling forth a devastating critique that spilled beyond the initial target. Reassessing this debate and diversion is an essential preliminary to any new advance.
The Civilizing Distraction
The most ambitious response to the challenge of emotional modernity derived from the intriguing work of Norbert Elias (who built in turn on observations of scholars like Johan Huizinga). The key notion was a "civilizing process" that progressively curbed raw emotional spontaneity as well as crude somatic impulses. Elements of the Elias findings are compatible with some of the more specific early work in emotions history—particularly around anger—but the two approaches are decidedly not identical. Indeed, the clearer and more ambitious theoretical structure around the Elias formulation has often obscured the other set of options, arguably more empirically grounded, prompting as well some of the more strident critiques. The result is a combination that may well have miscast the debate around the modern much as the Ariès claims long bedeviled the history of modern childhood. For there are significant and distinctive features of the Elias theory in its own right, beginning for our purposes with the real possibility that the civilizing process framework, while certainly warranting scrutiny, is not so much a statement about modern emotional patterns as an interesting gloss on premodern adjustments on the eve of modernity.
The idea of a civilizing process, presumably beginning with the Renaissance, extending with the development of royal courts in other parts of Europe and ultimately trickling down to other social classes, focuses more on manners than on emotions per se, but there is unquestionable overlap. To meet new standards of polite society, people were encouraged to become more restrained, whether the focus was on physical manifestations, like belching, or emotional outbursts, such as open displays of anger. The sweep and ambition of the Elias theory have attracted a great deal of enthusiasm, and many historians and social scientists have found the approach congenial. A major study of manners in nineteenth-century America, for example, directly uses the civilizing process theory to talk about how an aspiring urban middle class sought to shake off frontier habits and simultaneously distinguish itself from immigrant and working-class elements in the growing cities. New levels of emotional control were a vital part of the evolution. On another front, historians looking specifically at anger have plugged into the theory, noting for example that the word tantrum, to designate an unacceptably wild and, it was ultimately decided, childish display of this emotion—and through this to formulate new levels of disapproval for this particular lack of emotional control—emerged for the first time in the later eighteenth century.
In its own right, but even more as a statement of modern frameworks for emotional standards and experience, the civilizing process approach has some important limitations, even aside from the criticisms it has engendered from historians of premodern emotion. Geographically, it is explicitly Western, which doesn't undermine the theory—after all, Elias intended a comment on the Western experience—but which may suggest some liabilities in terms of characterizing a more widely applicable set of modern factors. More important, its chronological focus raises some knotty problems for any explicit consideration of the modern. Tensions over chronology have already loomed large—even aside from the outright critiques of the whole approach. Is it plausible, amid all the developments associated with modernity, that an emotional culture and associated physical etiquette launched amid the Renaissance upper classes would almost uniquely maintain a hold on modern patterns five centuries later? Seizing on the Renaissance as the beginning of a new behavioral and emotional etiquette may be quite accurate, but it hardly identifies the civilizing process with the emergence of modern European society: the inception is too early in a situation where even the most ardent proponents of modernization do not seriously venture before the late seventeenth century and the rise of science. Elias, in other words, may be quite right, but his findings are orthogonal to any full discussion of the interrelationship between modern conditions and emotional change. His process may spill over into the modern, or at least its first stages, but not necessarily through any structural link. Here in turn lies one of the reasons that the most ardent Elias partisans—disproportionately located among Dutch historians and sociologists—have had to struggle so mightily to find continuity in his process into identifiably modern times. Connections may survive into nineteenth-century middle-class culture, as John Kasson agrees, linking newly restrictive manners in the United States to a civilizing offensive imported from Europe—but they risk running aground in the fiercely anti-Victorian mood of the twentieth century. Use of civilized restraint to distinguish respectable from unrespectable groups did not disappear, but the emphasis shifted considerably toward greater inclusiveness (or less de facto tolerance). Further, a variety of overt reactions against nineteenth-century Victorian formulas called for far less repression and reticence. There are several core mismatches between the theory and a more comprehensive focus on modern change.
The strong suggestion is, then, to disentangle any ongoing assessment of the civilizing process approach from a discussion of modernity and emotion. In Western history, tendencies toward greater restraint deserve attention as part of early modern adjustments, and they may have contributed to a rather short-lived Victorian culture as well. But they don't describe a modern framework—any more than an assessment of changes in monarchy, however important for the immediate premodern centuries spilling into the nineteenth century, helps much with modern Western political trends. And this distinction returns us ultimately to the question of what, independent of the Elias model, we know about modern emotional change. But first we need briefly to acknowledge the medievalists' counterattacks and the implications that often extend well beyond Elias's findings.
The Complexities of Premodern Emotion
Led tirelessly by Barbara Rosenwein, who deserves great credit for both empirical and theoretical correctives to the first generation of work in Western emotions history, medievalists (and others interested in premodern emotion) have lambasted the Elias approach and in the process have introduced a number of indisputable points applicable to emotions history (evidence permitting) in any time or place. Most fundamentally, we must be aware how unlikely it is that any organized society can ever afford to be as impulsive or unrestrained as Huizinga or Elias tended to represent for the medieval West. Rosenwein properly warns of the weaknesses of what she calls the hydraulic model of emotion, in which a cauldron of feelings may swirl without cognitive input or constraint. This is not how emotion works, which means, of course, that a modern/premodern divide based on an introduction of impulse control is, by definition, off the mark. While some evidence may suggest higher rates of per capita violence in the Middle Ages than later on (Rosenwein perhaps shies away from this issue more than she should), there is no reason to assume that any society will ever seek or manage to avoid some definite rules on responsibilities for control. Earlier visions of the Middle Ages lacked an adequate range of evidence and were distorted by a smug modernist sense of progress and teleology inaccurately applied to the realm of emotion. The baseline for the idea of civilizing change was wildly distorted—and so the theory cannot represent any full process of change. Whether the whole theory must be rejected—we've already noted some of its difficulties on the modern end—or subjected to much more nuanced scrutiny as a passage from the complexities of the Middle Ages through the early modern centuries, may still warrant some discussion, and it's worth remembering that medievalists themselves have divided over this point. At the least, the counterattacks by medievalist-revisionists make it clear that any restatement will face formidable obstacles.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Doing Emotions History by Susan J. Matt, Peter N. Stearns. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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