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The effects of affects: The place of emotions in the mobilizations of 2011

Tova Benski and Lauren Langman
Current Sociology 2013 61: 525 originally published online 17 April 2013
DOI: 10.1177/0011392113479751
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479751
2013

CSI61410.1177/0011392113479751Current SociologyBenski and Langman

Article

CS

The effects of affects: The

place of emotions in the
mobilizations of 2011

Current Sociology
61(4) 525540
The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/0011392113479751
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Tova Benski

The College of Management-Academic Studies, Israel

Lauren Langman
Loyola University, USA

Abstract
We have recently seen the proliferation of a variety of progressive, democratic social
movements across the globe. In the wake of various contradictions and implosions of
capitalism, from the meltdown of the US banks to the euro crisis, vast numbers of people
have challenged neoliberal globalization. In this article the authors offer a theoretical frame
for the analysis of the most recent challenges posed to neoliberal social and economic
policies as they were shaped in late capitalism. The authors first note Habermass thesis
that legitimation crises take place at both the macro and micro levels, and that they foster
various understandings as well as emotional reactions.The authors focus on the emotional
aspects that are vital to social mobilizations. To do this they draw on theoretical frames
from social movement and the sociology of emotion perspectives. More particularly they
see the process of emotional liberation coined by Flam, as the equivalent of McAdams
cognitive liberation and both as part of the process of subjectivation as put forward
by Touraine. These formulations lead to considerations of the emotions that tie people
to authorities and/or withdraw legitimacy from authorities, in order to understand
which emotions need be mobilized in order to liberate people from their loyalty to
authorities. The authors found a constellation of incongruent emotions such as distrust
and disrespect for authorities/elites or their perceived agents, indignation and righteous
anger, humiliation, and in turn hope for an alternative future. The value of the authors
proposed structure of argument lies in the powerful combination of macro and micro
processes and the combination of cognition and emotions.
Corresponding author:
Tova Benski, School of Behavioral Sciences, The College of Management-Academic Studies, 7 Yitzhak Rabin
Blvd, Rishon Lezion 7502501, Israel.
Email: tovabenski@gmail.com

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Keywords
Emotional liberation, greedy capitalism, legitimation crisis, neoliberal ideology, protest,
social movements, young adults

Introduction
Throughout the world we have recently witnessed the proliferation of counterhegemonic, democratic mobilizations in which vast numbers of people have challenged
neoliberal capitalist ideology and practices, and the legitimacy of the elites whose selfinterested loyalties to transnational capital have ill served the majorities. Most recently
these include Arab Spring, the Spanish M15, the Greek, Portuguese and Israeli summer
mobilizations, and the Occupy Wall Street movement, to mention just a number of these
mobilizations around the world.
While each of these movements is somewhat unique, each shaped by local cultures,
traditions, values, and organizations, they share some common characteristics: namely the
adverse impacts of neoliberalism with its growing inequality, growing unemployment,
privatization of resources and services, etc., that elicit powerful emotional reactions such
as anger, fear, anxiety, and humiliation. The first actors to mobilize in many places were
the young adults aged 2035, the employed, underemployed, underpaid or unemployed
members of the precariat (Standing, 2011). Many of the participants have been ordinary
tax-paying citizens who have been in one way or another adversely affected by late capitalism neoliberal practices. In many of these mobilizations women are very prominent
both among the protestors and the leading figures of these leaderless mobilizations. We
have also witnessed a proliferation of local and international teams of researchers and
early studies of these mobilizations, some of which are still in progress. This research is
being presented at a large numbers of local and international conferences. This wave of
mobilizations has invigorated the academic study of social movements and has encouraged new empirical studies and a critical reappraisal of our theories and research. Our
work is part of this new wave of theoretical and empirical interest.
The thesis that we present here offers a theoretical frame that can be applied to the
understanding of both democratic and authoritarian directions in the most recent waves
of mobilization. This article, however, is focused on one aspect of the democratic mobilizations. It turns attention to the emotional processes that are an integral aspect of these
mobilizations. These processes have not been given enough attention in previous analyses of social movements and protest cycles.
Why is it important to study the emotions of protest and to theorize the role of emotions in oppositional mobilizations? The answer is simple. Even though emotions have
been absent from sociological accounts of protest and social movements for decades
(mainly due to the traditional duality of emotion vs. rationality in social research), during
the past 20 years, with more and more research and theory on the sociology of emotions,
it has been recognized that emotions and feelings provide fundamental stances to the
world, they are basic to our experiential responses to the ongoing events of the everyday
life world, and inherent to involvements with that world, relationships to others, and to
our very self (Barbalet, 2002), including protests (Jasper, 1998, 2011). Emotions motivate people to join with others to mobilize (Benski, 2011; Flam, 2005). Emotions are
generated through and during protests and mobilizations (Benski, 2011; Jasper, 2011;

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Ost, 2004) and shape the goals of the movement. Emotions can be both a means (Gould,
2002) and an end (Yang, 2000). As such, the study of emotions is highly instructive for
any attempt at understanding both present-day and past mobilizations.
This article has three parts. First we begin with a critical examination of the place of
emotions in social movement theory. We then present the general outline of our theoretical argument concerning the place of emotions in the current mobilizations and finally,
we present the process of emotional detachment, the withdrawal of feelings of loyalty to
authorities. Based on the premise that there is no cognition without emotions (Melucci,
1995) and following McAdams (1982) cognitive liberation concept, we present the
notion of emotional liberation processes (Flam, 1993), which we further link to
processes of subjectivation the formation of activist identity, whose agency can foster
social change (Touraine, 1995). It is on the bases of these theoretical arguments concerning emotions and identities that we claim that a process of emotional liberation is essential for the most recent mobilizations as it is for any process of mobilization. The content
of what one is liberated from might be different in different mobilizations but according
to our present theoretical knowledge and reasoning, the principle is the same.

Rethinking the paradigms: Social movements and

emotions
Theorizing social movements first began with the gradual appearance of the Collective
Behavior (CB) tradition, leaning heavily on Gustav Le Bons conceptualizations depicting the protestors as mass behavior which consisted of emotional driven irrational
crowds going berserk (Le Bon, 1960 [1895]). CB theories (Smelser, 1962) depicted the
masses, the dangerous classes, as out of control and/or duped by powerful, unscrupulous
leaders. Thus, for a number of reasons, the affective was considered irrational and unworthy of study. This line of thought dominated the social sciences till the 1960s. Since the
1970s and 1980s, thinking about social movements has fallen into two broad camps,
Resource Mobilization (RM), and New Social Movement theory (NSM), that attempt to
explain the mediation processes between structural conditions and possible mobilizations (Klandermans and Tarrow, 1988).
RM theorists have stressed the rationality of activism (Zald and McCarthy, 1987).
They depicted social movement leaders as shrewd entrepreneurs, rational actors coolly
calculating the costs and benefits of participation, and noted that people were mobilized
by incentives rather than by passionate anger or righteous indignation. The cognitive
emphasis is visible in the political process theory as well and is articulated in the cognitive liberation theme, even though McAdam (1982) acknowledged the importance of
grievances to the development of the definition of the situation as unjust along lines
parallel to Turner and Killians emergent norm theory of injustice (1972 [1957]). But he
focused exclusively on the cognitive definition of the situation.
Moreover, the cultural turn in the study of social movements that has evolved into the
NSM theories in Europe and the framing approaches in the US have retained the cognitive focus (with the notable exception of feminist studies of movements). Thus, Melucci
(1995: 45) incorporated the emotional element in the form of emotional investment
of participants and stated that there is no cognition without feeling. Yet beyond

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investment he did not explore the emotions of protest and his view of collective identity
emphasizes its cognitive components (Goodwin and Jasper, 2006). Gamson (1992: 32),
whose experiments gave a push to framing theories and studies, argued that the righteous anger that puts fire in the belly and iron in the soul is a necessary condition for
social mobilizing to get started.
Despite these comments by Gamson and Melucci, in the 1990s, culture was perceived as made up of customs, beliefs, values, artifacts, symbols, and rituals (Johnston
and Klandermans, 1995: 3), ideas and beliefs (Mueller, 1992: 13), and ideas, ideology,
[and] identity (McAdam, 1994: 36). Thus, culture was perceived as exerting an influence on potential members through shaping their cognitions rather than their emotions.
We hold that both RM and NSM perspectives fail to address the important role of
emotions and feelings in precipitance, emergence, and functioning of social movements. We join the efforts of Flam (1993, 2005), Jasper (1998, 2011), Goodwin et al.
(2001), Goodwin and Jasper (2006), and Benski (2011) in the attempt at readdressing
the issue of emotions in analyses of social movements with a particular focus on the
most recent mobilizations.

A road map of the analysis of the most recent

mobilizations
In this article we argue that understanding the mobilizations of 2011 requires considerations of the macro objective/structural conditions, their contradictions, and their consequences at the micro level. As Habermas (1975) has argued, crises at the objective level,
e.g., the economic system and/or the state, and/or the cultural system of legitimating
values can and do migrate to the subjective/micro-social levels and aspects of self, identity, and emotions. The neoliberal logic of global capital has led to a growing centralization of wealth and power in the hands of the elites which has fostered greater inequality.
Moreover, neoliberalism has encouraged state retrenchments in the allocation of various
entitlements, from education and job training to unemployment benefits and retirement
pensions. Further, there has been a privatization of government services which has
eroded the sociopolitical contract between the state and its citizens and left the individual
on his/her own to cope with various adversities. This has in turn had devastating consequences for the careers and life plans for many but this has been especially the case for
young adults in the Middle East, in Southern Europe, and the United States, who have
increasingly become part of the precariat (Standing, 2011). In some countries like Spain
and Greece, half of the young workers are unemployed and for many, their entering into
and/or remaining within the middle classes has become problematic.
These macro processes, especially structurally based under- and/or unemployment,
have interfered with the ability of the young adult generation to sustain themselves economically and fulfill the modern expectations of financial independence, controlling
ones own life, and the ability to lead a life that is self-sustaining, fulfilling, and productive economically, socially and culturally (see Kalleberg, 2011; Standing, 2011).
Moreover, work generally provides a basis for dignity, recognition, and membership in
the community. As a result, many of the economically distressed see themselves politically marginalized and their interests disenfranchised and ignored by elites, and feel
humiliated, deprived of the basic requirements for a decent and dignified life.
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Figure 1.Visual outline of the theoretical argument.

As a result of these macro- and micro-social aspects of the political economy, legitimation crises and emotional processes have especially impacted those in economically
vulnerable social locations who feel angry toward the elites, fearful and anxious about
their futures, and especially indignant about being ignored. These emotions prompted
many to engage in protests and mobilizations as an expression of contentious politics
that become mediated through interpersonal networks (Melucci, 1996) and/or access to
electronically mediated communication such as the internet and social media that has
enabled the rapid flows of information and communication and has enabled the proliferation of new framings of the situation in terms of both the cognitive (new citizenship
claims) and affective (anger, humiliation, and pride); eventually they have mobilized in
vast numbers (Langman, 2005). These claims are presented in Figure 1.
We now turn our focus to the place of emotions in fostering the most recent mobilizations, the central box in Figure 1. We focus on the crises of legitimation in late capitalist
societies and their micro-level counterparts.

Legitimation crises when capitalism hits the fan!

For Habermas (1975) legitimation crises take place when there is a failure of the steering mechanisms of advanced capitalism at both the macro and the micro levels. The
objective macro-level crises include the economy, the state, and the cultural system. The
subjective moments of these macro-level crises infiltrate into the life world of individuals where motivated identities are experienced and performed. Economic crises such as
structural problems, contradictions and implosions of the economy that create unemployment or underemployment, sudden price hikes and/or shortages especially of basic
commodities (food, oil, utilities) retrenchments of entitlements, and so on, that threaten
survival or maintenance of living standards, or social status, undermine the legitimacy of
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political leadership and legitimating ideologies. But at the same time, these macro conditions impact the life world, the micro level of feelings, identities, and values.
Legitimation crises lead to crises of meaning (culture). They impact individual life
worlds, they migrate to and affect motivation and identity. As people withdraw commitments from the social order creating spaces for alternative views and understandings.
While Habermass analysis shows how system crises elicit crises of motivation/identity,
what is overlooked is that these reactions are not only cognitive/evaluative, but when
people face threats to their very survival, as well as their dignity, they experience fears,
anxieties, and anger; such emotional reactions may act as threats to the very core of ones
self-identity and self-esteem. This migration of system crises into the life world in the
form of rising prices, stagnant or declining incomes, or for many, often educated youth,
no incomes at all, means individual actors experience distress. And in face of these realities there have been a number of emotional reactions in the form of constellations of
anger and fear, anxiety and despair, and often hopelessness of the very viability of the
self. In addition to these emotions, the humiliation and degradation that people experience when they are unable to work in ways that provide both substance and dignity, often
lead to what Durkheim called fatalistic suicide as a last resort, an escape from the pains
of living. This is clearly shown by the suicides of rural farmers in India, or the case of
Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian college student, turned vegetable peddler who set himself ablaze when harassed by the police. And these are not isolated incidents and these
feelings have been fundamental causes of the events that have ignited the Arab Spring.
Accepting Meluccis warning that we need to remember that there is no cognition
without feeling (Melucci, 1995: 45), our first and most basic argument is that some of
the cognitive processes that we can identify, such as the attribution of blame and envisioning alternatives, are also in effect, emotional. Thoughts, judgments, and perceptions
are not only cognitive but also rest on emotional constellations. This assumption underlies our thesis. Thus our article endeavors to locate the emotional processes that accompany the withdrawal of commitment from authorities and indeed anger and indignation
toward these same authorities that have generally supported the economic elites and
whose reactions to the implosions have favored elite interests, for example, the embrace
of austerity programs at times of growing unemployment. Given Habermass claim
about system crises migrating to the individual level of an actors subjectivity and identity, especially the ways in which work provides adaptation, dignity, and self-esteem,
when crises of the economic system lead to massive unemployment/underemployment,
there are strong emotional reactions. Crises, especially those that affect peoples everyday lives in ways that often humiliate and denigrate the self, lead to strong emotions of
the angerhatehumiliation family which form powerful emotionally based motives to
seek amelioration. As Scheff (1990) has long noted, anger is often a way of defending
against unconscious shame and in many cases, people that either lose jobs or cannot
find them, notwithstanding the structural basis of such unemployment, nevertheless,
often blame themselves. Thus, emotional reactions dispose the person to accepting certain frames of explanation for their circumstances, envisioning alternatives, while the
anger and indignation toward the elites may not only motivate joining and participating
in social movements, but further protect the self from feelings of shame and humiliation. Meanwhile, joining and participating in social movements can per se provide the

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actor with a variety of more pleasant gratifications, from a sense of community to a

reaffirmation of an individuals worth and dignity.
Second, we adopt the most recent insight that emotions are amorphous categories,
that they tend to merge into each other, and that in many cases, emotions tend to appear
as complex structures that include more than one emotion at the same time or in succession in very close temporal proximity (Barbalet, 1998; Benski, 2005; Collins, 1990;
Flam, 2005; Scheff, 1990; Yang, 2000). Hence we suggest to adopt the concept of constellations of emotions coined by Benski (2011) to deal with the complex nature of the
emotional dimension. Benski (2011) suggested that complex situations give rise to complex emotional experiences which quite often cannot be adequately accounted for by
focusing on a single emotion. She offered a basic distinction between congruent and
non-congruent constellation of emotions. Each such case will need to be studied in depth
in order to establish its characteristic behavioral responses, motivational direction, and
identities that are fostered. Constellations that are composed of congruent emotions are
constellations in which the different emotions work in a similar direction and thus
amplify the basic expected behavioral consequences, like for example disgust, contempt,
and outrage (Benski, 2005). Constellations composed of a mix of contradictory or noncongruent emotions like the example of the mix of hope and contempt (Flam, 2005), or
the mixes of fear and anger, and shame and anger, in which again the behavioral consequences were different from the emotion, rule expectations of each of these emotions
alone (Yang, 2000).
Third, following Westen (2007), Lakoff (2008), Ekman (1999), Barbalet (1998), Flam
(2005), Jasper (1998, 2011), and others, emotions and feelings dispose a variety of
thoughts and actions and most importantly, emotional considerations help us understand motivation (Barbalet, 1998, 2002) and identity (Reger et al., 2008). Thus we claim
that people generally seek positive emotional feelings such as love, dignity, pride, and
joy, and seek to avoid unpleasant emotions such as fear, anxiety, anger, shame, disgust,
humiliation, or depression. We are not suggesting a rational felicific calculus a la
Bentham, but rather that most human behavior has an emotional underpinning that is
often not conscious. More specifically, as some biologists and psychologist suggest, people are born with an inherent affect system, but in the course of socialization and development, these affects become socialized and transformed into emotions aroused by social
cues and expressed, or suppressed according to social norms. In turn, these are often
experienced as feelings. But the events that trigger emotional responses are often symbolic events we rarely fear attacks by a hippopotamus, but can and do fear the loss of a
job rooted in fears of survival both of our physical being and indeed our very selfidentity which requires recognition from others to exist.
For the purposes of understanding the role of emotions in social mobilization, we suggest that there are four basic desires to experience certain emotional states that help us
understand the hows and whys of social life. We are not offering a theory of personality as
such, but a sociological typology that helps us understand social mobilization. People need:
1. Attachments to others, a sense of belonging, and attempt to avoid loneliness and
the family of sad feelings that accompany loneliness (Berezin, 2001; Jasper,
2011; Kemper, 2001). While rooted in the helplessness and dependency of

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infancy and its fears of abandonment if not annihilation, attachment behavior qua
ties to others is the basic way that fears are assuaged.
2. People need a sense of agency/empowerment, and attempt to avoid helplessness
and a feeling of powerlessness (Kemper, 2001).
3. People seek recognition and self-esteem, a sense of pride, dignity and worth, to
feel good about who one is and what one is doing. Conversely, people attempt to
avoid feelings of humiliation, degradation, and worthlessness (Kemper, 2001).
4. And finally, people seek alleviation of fear threats to the self and/or ones
attachments and agency; as scholars from Kierkegaard to Freud to Heidegger
have shown, emotions such as anxiety and uncertainty tap the deepest, most
archaic fears of death and annihilation and in turn, people seek to assuage such
feelings (Becker, 1973).
Every culture, and/or subculture, provides different cues, physical or symbolic, and
codes that arouse/evoke certain feelings or perhaps assuage negative feelings. It is clear
from a long tradition of research studies going back to the Great Depression that economic and political crises are experienced by many as fears and anxieties that impinge
on ones livelihood, ones identity, status, and self-esteem (Elder, 1999). It is thus the
case that in many cases in democratic societies, crises of authority that migrate to the
subjective level evoke emotions that people usually try to avoid. Given the anxieties and
insecurities of jobs, together with the inequalities caused by neoliberal capitalist practices, people have strong emotional responses from fear and anxiety about their survival, to feeling humiliated by actions, or non-actions of authorities and/or anger toward
the structure of the very society and/or the nature of its leadership.
According to Moghadam (this issue), democracy involves citizens obligations but
also rights. A more expanded definition of democracy refers to a political regime in
which citizens enjoy an array of civil, political, and social/economic rights that are institutionalized, and [they] participate through the formal political process, civil society, and
social movements; it also refers to a society or culture governed by the values of tolerance, participation, and solidarity. These can be translated to the language of emotions
along lines suggested by Berezin (2002) as a basic agreement between democratic states
and their citizens, within which states are expected to provide security and various services and benefits, in exchange for loyalty and confidence from their citizens. In view of
these expectations on the part of the citizens, the adverse effects of neoliberal capitalism,
most particularly the increasing inequality, privatization, and the cutback of governments services, frustrate expectations that form the foundations of democracy. When
these frustrations are framed in terms of governmental corruption or indifference, many
law-abiding, tax-paying citizens begin to rethink the nature of the social contract and
consider it to have been broken by the government. As they rethink the social contract,
they also rethink the nature of citizenship and civil participation that they are practicing
especially as citizenship changes from passive support of the nation, and loyalty and
acceptance if not blind obedience to its leaders, to more active critiques, contestations,
and mobilizations against elite power. And this can lead to resistance, challenges that
would seek to transform nations and change leaders. All this is highly evident in the
slogan that was chanted all over the world starting with Tahrir Square, Madrid, the USA,

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and Israel: The people demand social justice. Without entering into an analysis of what
kind of social justice the people demand, it is clear that by demanding social justice,
the protestors have framed the situation in terms of certain principles of justice, fairness, and equality that have been violated, unjustly perhaps without the consent of the
people by authorities.

Getting there: Bringing emotions back into focus

Emotional liberation/detachment processes and their constellations of
emotions
As we turn to look for the emotional equivalent of the cognitive process of the withdrawal of commitment from authorities that according to Habermas occurs at times of
crises of legitimacy, we need to examine the literature on the cognitive processes that
are seen as necessary for social mobilization. McAdams political process theory that
introduced the idea of cognitive liberation seems to be a central concept for starting
our inquiry. This line of thought postulates that in order for movements to mobilize and
people to become social movement actors, some cognitive changes need to occur
(McAdam, 1982). In his analysis of the civil rights movement, McAdam (1982) suggested that a process of Cognitive Liberation was a precondition for mobilization into
oppositional movements. He claimed that Before collective protest can get under way,
people must collectively define their situation as unjust and subject to change through
group action (McAdam, 1982: 51). These beliefs, based on certain notions of justice
and morality, and understandings, were instrumentally employed to interpret cues from
authorities to the protesting group. There was no discussion of the meaning of liberation. Goodwin et al. (2001) claim that whereas the word liberation hints at emotion,
the word cognitive immediately denies it. As noted below, hope is a powerful emotion that can shape our cognitive understandings of the world and motivate us to act
upon that world, and in the case of progressive movements, envision emancipation as
the belief in the ability to change the course of events. But the question of what is one
liberated from? was not raised and/or dealt with. To deal with this issue of what is one
liberated from? we turn to Touraines thesis of the subject (individual and collective)
in which self-production is seen as the means to change the future and achieve
emancipation.
Touraine (1995) claims that in order to become a subject, an agent of change/a social
movement in late modernity, individuals and groups have to undergo processes of subjectivation. To become a subject capable of change, to assert agency, individuals and collectivities have to free themselves of constraining social norms and roles; in some measure,
they need to de-integrate themselves personally, socially, and culturally. The ability to
become a subject thus depends on ones ability to problematize ones internalized reality
and to inhabit the space at the seam between commitment and non-commitment.
It is the gesture of refusal, of resistance, that creates the subject. It is the more restricted ability
to stand aside from our own social roles, our non-belonging and our need to protest that allows

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each of us to live as a subject. And subjectivation is always the antithesis of socialization, of

adaptation to a social role or status. (Touraine, 1995: 274)

Bridging these two different cognitive theoretical formulations, one can claim that
cognitive detachment/liberation is actually part of this process of subjectivation, it is
the prelude to the de-integration spelled out by Touraine (1995). In terms of content, it
means the liberation of the individual and groups from their total commitment to the
social system and the roles and rules that it imposes on them. However, both of these
formulations restrict their analyses to cognitive aspects of reality. Yet as Melucci and
other scholars of the sociology of emotions (Goodwin et al., 2001) argued, cognition
and emotions are intertwined. Hence it follows that this process of cognitive liberation
from roles and commitments is accompanied by a process of emotional liberation/
detachment as suggested by Flam (1993, 2005), which means liberation from emotions that tie us to the system. As Flam puts it, ones emotional transformation, relaxation and cutting off the old emotional attachments, and the construction of new
emotional bonds (Flam, 2005: 3132).
What are the emotions that tie us to the system and why are they so important? To
begin with, the system in democratic societies cannot function without inputs from and
the support and loyalty of the people. This support forges relationships among the individual, society, and the polity. These are expressed in terms of the social contract which
specifies the rights and obligations that are at the basis of trust between the individual
and authorities and define their duties and expectations as citizens in a democratic society. Jasper (1998: 402, 406) discusses trust and respect as examples of basic affects that
have important political implications. Both are reflexive emotions and according to
Jasper (2011), belong to the category of affective loyalties. They are attachments
(Jasper, 2011), deep tendencies to have faith in the other, in our case, the government,
since they are based on an assumption that the government will fix things without public
pressure (Jasper, 1998: 402). Flam (2005: 21), following Simmel, discusses loyalty and
gratitude as the two emotions that cement and bind people and social relations. Loyalty
in particular is considered by Max Weber as the key emotion which links the powerless
to the powerful. Trust in and respect for authorities, loyalty to and gratitude toward
authorities, all have a dampening effect on protest. But when the expectations involved
in trust and respect are not met, then loyalty and gratitude diminish and the counterparts
of these emotions tend to appear in the form of disrespect, distrust, anger, and indignation. When peoples expectations are not only frustrated but, as is argued in all the articles in this monograph issue, when people suffer from anxieties about the future, and feel
betrayed, then humiliation needs to be added to this constellation. Such a constellation is
exactly the type of emotional package that people try to avoid and has been discussed
earlier in this article.
This can now be linked back to Habermass structural/system crises migrating to life
worlds at the micro level with emotional liberation/detachment forming an important
manifestation of crises of legitimacy, leading to movement mobilization. Thus, these
emotional processes such as fear, anxiety, anger, and indignation can not only weaken
commitment to the social order, but as people experience strong emotions in face of
system dysfunction, hegemonic ideologies heretofore firmly anchored within collective

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identities become subject to contestation and renegotiation. However, as Benski (2011)

and Langman (this issue) have shown, following Ernst Bloch (1986), hope is one of the
most fundamental human emotions and motives for seeking change. For Bloch, hope
was rooted in the Freudian notion of the dream as a wish fulfillment, especially the daydream in which through anticipatory consciousness, we can imagine an alternative
future free of the adversities of the present. For the various progressive social movements, hope becomes one of the primary motivations for seeking other emotional gratifications when concerted action is envisioned as leading to benevolent social
transformations. These may include greater economic justice or dreams of democratic
governance that genuinely represents the interests of the majority of citizens rather than
the elites. Some may seek a world based upon social equality, toleration of difference,
and the inclusion of all within a caring and sharing community. If hope for a better world
and better life borders on the utopian so be it.
In sum, what can be inferred from all of this is that the constellation of emotions that
are salient at the first stages of mobilization is what Benski labeled elsewhere the constellation of non-congruent emotions (Benski, 2011), such as: distrust of and disrespect
toward authorities/elites and/or their perceived agents, indignation and righteous anger
about conditions, and humiliation and hope for change (Jasper, 2011). Meanwhile, the
framing processes that are essential aspects of social movements (Benford and Snow,
2000) diagnose the situation and promote moral frames that denote injustice and designate enemies, villains, and the good guys, provoke hope for an alternative social order.
At each moment of social mobilization, emotions such as humiliation and anger are
evoked when ones very identity is denigrated and/or marginalized by authorities, while
indignation and anger are directed toward those deemed responsible for their adversities.
People refuse to pay the price for what they believe are irresponsible, unjust government
practices and the misconduct of global finance by its agents who are supported by
authorities and are designated as greedy capitalist. The intensity of their feelings can be
seen in the picture taken from a demonstration in Tel-Aviv (Figure 2). The man in the
picture is holding a sign that says: When the government is against the people, the people are against the government.

Concluding remarks
The mobilizations of summer 2011 were major news stories for a number of months. In
various societies, all over the globe, grassroots mobilizations of vast numbers of people
took to the streets to protest what they framed as swinish capitalism, governments
neoliberal capitalism, demanding social justice. In some societies the struggle is still
raging (Syria for example). In other societies, we have seen renewed efforts at mobilizing massive demonstrations, but such efforts have failed, for example in Israel. In still
other societies we are witnessing a reawakening of activism (Egypt, Greece), but it is not
yet certain that these will become a full blown second wave of global protests. Given the
fluidity of the scene, in this article we focused on the summer of 2011.
The thesis that we presented here offers a theoretical framework that can be applied to
the understanding of both democratic and authoritarian directions in the most recent waves
of mobilization. However, we focused on one aspect of the democratic mobilizations,

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Figure 2. Placard from demonstration in Tel-Aviv, Israel.

turning attention to the emotional processes that are integral aspects of these mobilizations.
These processes have not been given enough attention in previous analyses of social movements and protest cycles. Indeed, both RM and NSM perspectives have failed to address
the important role of emotions and feelings as precipitating factors in the emergence, functioning, and course of social movements. Following on the work of many prominent sociologist of social movements and of emotions, the theoretical outline that we sketch in this
article rests on the simple premise that cognitive processes always involve emotions.
Following this logic we adopted the concept of emotional liberation as the emotional
aspect of cognitive liberation processes as addressed by McAdam, and conceptualized
both as aspects of the process of subjectivation offered by Touraine as the route by which
individuals and social movements become active social agents of change. Given Habermass
theory of legitimation crises in which the structural intrudes into the life world, the micro
level of self, identity, relationships and values, crises foster the withdrawal of allegiance
from authorities and create the conditions for subjectivation. At this point, our analysis has
led us to identifying emotions which forge the bond between the individual and society/
authorities, and as a result we suggested that there is an emotional constellation in which a
number of emotions or affects, that have a unique combination of non-congruent emotions
that bring anger and indignation together with hope, provide actors with the motivation to
mobilize to attain emotionally gratifying liberation from the current forms of distress.
The theoretical arguments presented here go beyond the RM and NSM theories in that
the economic factors that are essential for our theoretical formulation have generally
been excluded from the analyses of NSM theorists; at the same time, the concerns with
identity focus remain crucial, but not simply as the identity politics implied by the new
social movements approach that would valorize the marginalized, without considering
the economic basis of marginalization.

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While this has been a theoretical presentation, the value of our proposed structure
of argumentation is in the powerful combination of macro and micro processes and the
combination of cognition and emotions that are both responses to the situations and
motivation for social change. It is not enough to simply understand that the situation or
actions of authority are unjust. One must be motivated to act, and this motivation usually comes through emotional processes which accompany this cognition, particularly
among those who are most adversely affected by the crisis in ways that frustrate ones
basic emotional needs. We contend that this is the initial step toward mobilization; this
is what impels joining or participation in a network of refusal, places where people can
renegotiate their subjectivities in hopes of realizing a different kind of society.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

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Author biographies

Tova Benski is a senior lecturer at the Department of Behavioral Sciences, the College of
Management-Academic Studies, Rishon Lezion, Israel. Her fields of academic interest and
research include: qualitative research methods, gender, social movements, peace studies, and the
sociology of emotions. She has been engaged in research on the Israeli womens peace mobilizations since the late 1980s and has published extensively and presented many papers on these topics. Her co-authored book Iraqi Jews in Israel won a prestigious academic prize in Israel. The
former president of RC 48 of the International Sociological Association, currently she is a member of the Board RC 48 and a member of RC 36 and RC 06, of the ISA.
Lauren Langman is a Professor of Sociology at Loyola University of Chicago. He received his PhD
at the University of Chicago from the Committee on Human Development and received psychoanalytic training at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. He has long worked in the tradition
of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, especially relationships between culture, identity, and
politics/political movements. He is the past president of Alienation Research and Theory, Research
Committee 36, of the International Sociological Association as well as past president of the Marxist
section of the American Sociological Association. Recent publications deal with globalization,
alienation, global justice movements, the body, nationalism, and national character. His most
recent books are Trauma Promise and Millennium: The Evolution of Alienation, with Devorah
Kalekin and Alienation and Carnivalization, with Jerome Braun.

Rsum
Nous avons vu rcemment la prolifration dune varit de progressiste, dmocratique
mouvements sociaux partout dans le monde. la suite de diverses contradictions et
implosions du capitalisme, de leffondrement des banques amricaines la crise de
lEuro, le grand nombre de personnes ont contest la mondialisation nolibrale. Dans
ce document, nous proposons un cadre thorique pour lanalyse des plus rcents dfis
poss nolibral politiques sociales et conomiques comme ils taient en forme de
capitalisme. Nous avons dabord remarque Habermas la thse que crise de lgitimation
lieu, tant au niveau macro et micro-conomique qui favorisent diverses ententes ainsi
que ractions motionnelles. Nous allons nous concentrer sur laspect motionnel qui
est vital pour ces mobilisations sociales. Pour ce faire, nous devons nous inspirer de
cadres thoriques des mouvements sociaux et la sociologie des motions. Pour ce faire,
nous devons nous inspirer de cadres thoriques des mouvements sociaux et la sociologie
des motions. Plus particulirement nous voir le processus de libration motionnelle,
invente par Flam, comme lquivalent de la McAdam cognitive libration et les deux,
dans le cadre du processus de subjectivation comme prsent par Touraine.
Mots-cls
Le capitalisme avide, crise de lgitimit, les jeunes adultes, lidologie nolibrale, la
libration motionnelle, les mouvements sociaux, la protestation
Resumen
Recientemente hemos visto la proliferacin de una variedad de movimientos sociales
progresistas y democrticos a lo largo del planeta. En la ola de diversas contradicciones

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e implosiones del capitalismo, desde la fusin de los bancos americanos a la crisis del
euro, un gran nmero de personas ha desafiado la globalizacin liberal. En este artculo
ofrecemos un marco terico para el anlisis de los desafos ms recientes planteados
a las polticas social y econmica del neoliberalismo como han sido formuladas en
el capitalismo tardo. Sealamos primero la tesis de Habermas de que la crisis de
legitimacin tiene lugar a nivel macro y micro que favorece diversas interpretaciones
y reacciones emocionales. Nos centramos en el aspecto emocional que es vital para
las movilizaciones sociales. Para ello nos basamos en los marcos tericos de los
movimientos sociales y la sociologa de las emociones. En particular, vemos el proceso
de liberacin emocional, acuado por Flam, como el equivalente al de liberacin
cognitiva de McAdam, y ambos como parte del proceso de subjetivacin propuesto por
Touraine. Estas formulaciones nos han conducido a tener en cuenta las emociones que
vinculan a las personas con las autoridades y/o retiran la legitimidad a las autoridades
de cara a entender qu emociones necesitan ser movilizadas para liberar a las personas
de su lealtad a las autoridades. Hemos encontrado una constelacin no congruente
de emociones como desconfianza y falta de respeto a las autoridades o lites o sus
agentes, indignacin y clera, humillacin y, al revs, esperanza en un futuro alternativo.
El valor de la estructura argumentativa propuesta descansa en la fuerte combinacin
entre procesos macro y micro, y la combinacin entre cognicin y emociones.
Palabras clave
Capitalismo codicioso, crisis de legitimacin, ideologa neoliberal, jvenes adultos,
liberacin emocional, movimientos sociales, protesta

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