An Emotions Lens on the Rise of the Right

(Vortrag in englischer Sprache)

To help advance our thinking about the rise of the right, I suggest to conceptualize a tool kit of emotion-management practices, the effect of which is to evoke and suppress feelings of a pre-disposed population.

Most important in this tool kit is a resonant master story which evokes the feelings of a leader’s base and establishes rules governing how much of what feeling to direct at whom. In the US, Trump has strongly appealed to downwardly mobile, blue-collar white Americans whose loss of well-paid jobs, community and intact families have led many to feel in him relief from fear and shame and enjoy the elation of being chosen winners. He pictures the world as a place of brutal Hobbesian struggle of winners against losers, us against them. In this Manichean splitting, “we” are rightful winners, strong, socially attached and loveable, while people considered “them” are weak, hostile and deserving of disdain. Guided by this narrative, Trump poses himself as the powerful director of the nation’s emotional traffic. Taken as a whole, such practices effectively manage the evocation and suppression of feeling so as to legitimate his regime and to offer himself as a model to other right- wing leaders around the world.

Arlie Russell Hochschild, ist emeritierte Professorin an der University of California, Berkeley. Sie gilt als eine der bedeutendsten Soziologinnen der Gegenwart, ihr vielgelobtes Buch Fremd in ihrem Land. Eine Geschichte der amerikanischen Rechten stand auf der Shortlist für den National Book Award 2016. Ihr Buch Geraubter Stolz. Verlust, Scham und der Aufstieg der Rechten (Aus dem Englischen von Ulrike Bischoff) wird im September in der Hamburger Edition, dem Verlag des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung, erscheinen. 

Begrüßung: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Knöbl, Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung

Grußwort: Senatorin Maryam Blumenthal, Senatorin für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Gleichstellung der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg

Laudatio: Prof. Dr. Sighard Neckel, Soziologe, Universität Hamburg, DFG-Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe »Zukünfte der Nachhaltigkeit«. Die Kultur des emotionalen Kapitalismus. Einleitung. In: Arlie Russell Hochschild: Das gekaufte Herz. Die Kommerzialisierung der Gefühle. Erweiterte Neuausgabe, Frankfurt/New York 2006: Campus.

Mehr Informationen zum Siegfried Landshut-Preis des HIS