ABSTRACT
States, research centres, paradigms, and theoretical approaches are just some of the legacies that have emerged from the work of Karl Marx which, without any doubt, qualifies him as a classic figure of the social sciences.
That the sociology of emotions anchors its roots in the classics of the social sciences as shown in this book implies, among others, two levels of importance of great relevance for sociology: (a) In the century of global sensibilities, it is revealing to know that the sociology of emotions has an important plexus of “historical” sources, and (b) continuing attention to some of these classics becomes a necessary and vital resource to transform the comfortable theoretical assumption that the sociology of emotions is supposedly of recent origin.
This chapter seeks to point out some of the central reasons why it can be argued that Karl Marx offers a classic contribution to the sociology of emotions, based on a critical hermeneutic of some axes that appear in Capital. To achieve this objective, the chapter will (a) explicate the place of the connections between senses, muscles, brain and flesh as elements that allow visualizing the body/emotion connection and (b) reconstruct his vision on cruelty as a basic component of the politics of sensibilities of the political economy of truth. In the end, some systematized reasons are offered as to why we can consider Marx as a sociologist of emotions.
