Emotions and Power: Habitus and Change in Late Modernity

This book draws on insights from a range of disciplines, including sociology, philosophy, psychology, history and politics to explore the relationship between emotions and social change in late or ‘liquid’ modernity. Using the Republic of Ireland as an illustrative case, the author develops a distinctive theoretical framework, based on a variety of approaches in social theory, to engage with the concept of habitus, and to argue that three concepts - emotion, power and habitus - are central to understanding the constitution of, and effect of ‘social change’ upon, people’s emotional lives. Engaging with the thought of Bauman, Bourdieu, Whitehead and others, the book shows how emotions have become valorised and pathologised (or re-pathologised) in late modernity, thus offering a critical analysis of emotion and power and the ambiguous effects of emotionalisation for contemporary life and politics. A theoretically sophisticated study, Emotions and Power will appeal to sociologists and social theorists with interests in the emotions, power, social change and modernity.