Introduction

Contemporary scholars point to the role of emotions such as anger and fear in the election of populist demagogues, in the empathic or shameful treatment of refugees, in public anxiety around climate change, in the transformation of intimate relationships and love in the era of online dating and in the rise of the ubiquitous ‘happiness’ industry. It is timely to bring holistic sociological theories about contemporary society to the study of emotions, and likewise consider emotions as a necessary component of any such sociological ‘grand theory’. It is particularly apt that people revitalise a key concept of extreme relevance to an increasingly individualised, commercialised and reflexive age: late modernity. Emotions have always been fundamental to human experience, but their relegation to a secondary status behind reason and rationality has obscured their important role in the functioning of late modern society, and in surviving its contradictions.