Introduction

The history of emotions in sociology draws on a range of socio-historical and theoretical dimensions which include a broad spectrum of classical and contemporary theorists. This chapter looks at four aspects of how emotions have been theorized in sociology. The first is to review how emotions have been understood within classical sociological theories; the second is to consider the intervention around ‘civilizing emotions’ (Elias, 1978/82; see also Brooks, 2014; Lemmings and Brooks, 2014); thirdly, the chapter focuses on contemporary sociological analysis in late modernity, including Foucault (1965, 1977), Bourdieu (1984), Beck (1992), Giddens (1992) and Baudrillard (2005). This last section will also focus on the ‘emotionalization of reflexivity’ and will lead into the broader debates around emotions in late modernity in Chapter 3.

Part I. The emotions in classical sociological theories

Despite the lack of an explicit acknowledgement of the emotions in sociological theorizing, particularly in classical sociological theorizing, Powell and Gilbert (2008: 394) state: ‘There are strong intimations of theoretical understanding of emotions in classical and contemporary social theories in the rise of Enlightenment philosophy and the consequences for emotion with Kant's analysis of rationality (Ritzer, 2004)’.

As the author has noted elsewhere (Brooks, 2014), when classical sociologists began offering models of modern society, they described modernity as a move away from the alleged emotionality of ‘traditional societies’. Max Weber (1864– 1920) described the spread of a bureaucratic form of rationality linked with capitalism, and Norbert Elias (1897– 1990) wrote about the encroachment of a ‘civilizing process’ which included forms of effective restraint and self-control. As Brooks (2014) also notes: