Abstract:

In the middle decades of the twentieth century there emerged what I am calling the “Resentment Paradigm.” With intellectual roots in Nietzsche’s notion of ressentiment (The Genealogy of Morals), but more urgently in response to the historical experience of fascism and other forms of right-wing extremism, largely in Europe but in the US as well, scholars and intellectuals fashioned a well-wrought analysis of these movements and their ideological appeal that hinged on popular resentment against modernizing forces as the decisive explanatory factor. The main figures in this intellectual enterprise were well-established American academics and public intellectuals: Talcott Parsons, Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and others; but they also acknowledged the influence of writers associated with the Frankfurt School and especially the important 1950 publication, The Authoritarian Personality, in which Theodor Adorno played a central role. In the post-WWII era, this paradigm, I will argue, achieved a hegemonic reach when it came to explaining such movements as populism, anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, nativism, and all variations of fascism. (It was much less deployed to explain movements from the left.)

By the later decades of the twentieth century, however, this paradigm lost its appeal and in most academic and intellectual quarters was largely discredited. Several factors explain its decline, but they can be summarized in a turn away from an intellectual identification with both a psychological (or in many cases a psycho-analytical) approach and modernization theory. Historians and social scientists, starting circa-1970, tended to be more attentive to the grievances and interests that animated popular movements, and less inclined to see their protest and discontent as symptoms of a maladjustment to “modernity.” Interestingly, the decline of this paradigm coincided with the wide-spread social and political protest movements of “the sixties.” Indeed, as I will demonstrate, for the most part these movements were not “coded” in terms of “resentment.” Nor, as I will additionally suggest, was resentment a core emotion among those who identified with them. In short, the “Resentment Paradigm” “fell” both as an intellectual diagnosis and as a lived experience.

As a coda to my paper, I will point to the revival of “resentment” as an explanation in recent decades for a range of phenomena—from religious fundamentalisms around the world, to nativist, xenophobic movements, to Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US. But I will also note how our deployment of this term lacks the rigor that once characterized it. And I will propose that we need to rethink our casual and often unthinking reliance on it to explain some of the most puzzling and disturbing movements of our times.

Biography:

Robert Schneider is Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is a specialist in Early Modern French history, having published several books on the subject, including Dignified Retreat: Writers and Intellectuals in the Age of Richelieu, forthcoming from Oxford University Press this year. He has held fellowships from the Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the French government (Bourse Chateaubriand). He has been a visiting fellow at All Souls College and Oriel College (Oxford), a visiting professor at the National Irish University at Maynooth, and three times Directeur d’Etudes Invité at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris. From 2005-1015 he was Editor of the American Historical Review. His current book project is on “The Return of Resentment: The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of a Political Emotion”.