ABSTRACT
The sociology of emotion is a new, growing field within the larger discipline of sociology,1 and part of a wider interdisciplinary renaissance in interest in emotion. All of the nineteenth-century founders of sociology touched on the topic of emotion and some did more. As the American sociologist Randall Collins has pointed out, Max Weber elucidates the anxious ‘spirit of capitalism’, the magnetic draw of charisma, and he questions what passes for ‘rationality’. Emile Durkheim explores the social scaffolding for feelings of ‘solidarity’. Karl Marx explores alienation and, in his analysis of class conflict, he implies much about resentment and anger.2 Max Scheler explores empathy and sympathy, and Georg Simmel a rich variety of sentiments. Sigmund Freud calls attention to the primacy of conscious and unconscious emotion (what he called affect), though not to its sociological character.
