ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on charting the history of emotions in sociological theorizing drawing on European and American traditions from 1800 to the present. 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” that included forms of affective restraint and self-control. Georg Simmel (1858–1918) was alone among early male theorists in developing a theory of gender relations, modernity, and rationality, providing a gender differentiated thesis on the relationship between cognition and emotion. Women theorists in the early social sciences, for example, Marianne Weber (1870–1954), challenged these traditional models of rationality and “value neutrality” and offered a critique of the binary established between cognition and emotion. Their work provided early interventions into debates on affect and the emotions in the social sciences, which were later developed by feminist and gender theorists into epistemological challenges to conventional theories of emotion and cognition. Theoretical development in this area became part of “the turn to affect” movement in the social sciences.
