What is the History of Anger a History of?

Abstract

This essay uses the history of emotions to make two arguments – one destructive and one constructive. It uses examples from intellectual and cultural history to undermine the idea that the modern English term ‘anger’ refers either to a clearly defined mental state or to a coherent emotional concept. At the same time, it also questions the diagnosis of the present as an ‘age of anger’. Constructively, the essay uses the intellectual and cultural ancestries of modern ‘anger’ as a case-study in a distinctive approach to the history of emotions. With reference to works by linguists and anthropologists, to ancient philosophical and literary texts, and to some of the most influential visual representations of the irate body and the furious face, from Hieronymus Bosch to Charles Darwin, the essay explains and defends a pluralist and interdisciplinary approach, arguing that ‘anger’ is a modern English word without a stable transhistorical referent, and proposes the method of genealogical anatomy as a way to avoid the twin dangers of anachronism and essentialism in the history of emotions.