The term emotion regime (also rendered by William Reddy as emotional regime, and in German published work as Gefühlsregime or "regime of feelings") refers to the particular set of shared expectations that guide how individuals are to feel and express themselves in particular social settings. The differing structures of these social norms influence expectations that guide everyday conduct and vary across historical periods and communities. Reddy defines an emotional regime as a configuration of prescribed "emotives" (expressions involved in the description and production of feelings), together with the rituals and practices they are conveyed through. The term was introduced and elaborated by Reddy in The Navigation of Feeling, where he analysed shifts in dominant emotion regimes during the French Revolution. The concept is often discussed alongside Barbara Rosenwein's framework of emotional communities; groups that share norms, valuations, and styles of expression. Historians have also situated emotion regimes within broader historiographical debates about how community expectations of proper or acceptable behavior are formed and how they change over time. As an analytic tool, the concept of an emotion regime can be used to describe how emotional norms are organized, maintained, and contested, and demonstrate how political, religious, professional, or familial settings can result in the formation of expectations that influence conduct and constrain autonomy. Analysts have used the framework to investigate institutions, identity groups, political movements, and digital cultures, analysing how they enforce standards of affective expression and how individuals navigate, adapt to, or resist them. Major definitions and scholarly debates on emotion regimes are presented alongside accounts of the adjacent mechanisms they operate through, the historical and contemporary cases they appear in, and their application across institutional, social, political, and digital contexts.
Overview
The term emotion regime is used to describe the shared expectations that prescribe how individuals ought to feel and express themselves in particular settings. These arrangements are historically situated and shaped by social power, a point emphasised in analyses in which it is argued that emotions are structured responses shaped by cultural environments, as opposed to merely private states of mind.
Visibility of emotion expectations People routinely navigate settings in which expectations about appropriate feelings are clearly marked. In schools, students may learn that enthusiasm is welcomed while frustration must be carefully controlled. Workplaces likewise cultivate expectations about demeanour; for instance, studies of service labour show how organisations encourage workers to display cheerfulness as part of professional conduct. Online platforms also promote recurring affective patterns as users learn which styles of expression are rewarded, which are discouraged, and how circulating feelings come to organise participation.
Relevance Identifying such patterned expectations is the core contribution of the concept of emotion regimes. Examination of group-specific emotional norms shows that institutions and communities display shared valued and disvalued feelings. The hypothesis proposed is that cultural formations organise emotions in ways that reinforce or challenge social power.
Definition Historians use the term to describe patterned structures that shape how feelings may be expressed, interpreted, and regulated in specific settings.
Simple definition An emotion regime can be understood as the patterned environment of emotional expectations that surrounds people in a particular setting. It refers to the ways that social groups, institutions, or societies indicate which feelings should be expressed, which should be repressed, and how individuals are expected to display those feelings in everyday interactions. These expectations may be conveyed through routines, rituals, or informal cues about what counts as an appropriate response in a given situation.
Canonical academic definition In the historical study of emotions, the concept takes on a more precise meaning. Rosenwein summarizes William Reddy's definition as "the set of normative emotions and the official rituals, practices, and emotives that express and inculcate them." In Reddy's framework, regimes prescribe which feelings count as legitimate, how they should be articulated, and how individuals are expected to orient themselves toward those norms.
Conceptual elements Emotion regimes consist of several interconnected elements:
They articulate norms that define which feelings and expressions are valued, discouraged, or prohibited. Regimes rely on rituals and practices that reinforce these norms in daily life, with examples being commemorations, public declarations, gestures, or forms of address. They establish mechanisms for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate feelings, whether through praise, censure, or more formal sanctions. Emotion regimes are historically and culturally specific: they emerge in response to particular social conditions, and shifts in regimes often occur when their norms generate significant emotional strain or conflict.
Distinction from related concepts
Although related to several neighboring terms, "emotion regime" has a distinct analytical focus. Rosenwein's concept of emotional communities describe groups bound together by shared norms, values, and styles of emotional expression focusing on the affective cohesion of a community rather than the externally-imposed standards enforced by authorities. By contrast, an emotion regime highlights regulation, prescription, and the power-laden processes by which emotional norms are maintained. Reddy's concept also intersects with sociologist Arlie Hochschild's idea of feeling rules, which identify micro-level expectations guiding individual emotional expression, but emotion regimes encompass broader institutional and political structures that set and enforce those rules.
Function Emotion regimes operate through interlocking patterns of customary behavior that guide how people are expected to feel, express themselves, and interpret social situations. Prescriptive rules, interpretive frames, sanctions, ritual forms, and possibilities for change are examples of several mechanisms that writers in the field describe as influencing patterned emotional conduct within specific settings.
Feeling rules
Hochschild introduced the concept of "feeling rules," defining them as shared standards that specify how a person "ought to feel" in particular situations and how those feelings should be expressed in order to sustain proper social relations. These norms help determine whether individuals should induce, suppress, or modify feelings, and they are central to workplace settings, where interaction with clients or passengers requires managing one's affective display. Hochschild argues that individuals engage in "emotion management" to meet these rules, a process that may involve either surface acting or deep acting when the emotional expectations built into a job demand sustained forms of cheerfulness, patience, or calm. Feeling rules thus provide the shared expectations that emotion regimes rely on to indicate what counts as appropriate conduct.
Expectations and interpretive frames Beyond explicit feeling rules, people learn to interpret situations through culturally-shared frameworks that guide the emotions they take to be appropriate on any given occasion. Drawing on Erving Goffman's account of the interaction order, analysts emphasize that social encounters rely on tacit definitions of the situation that structure alignments, obligations, and expectations. In face-to-face encounters, participants continuously manage "face" (their social value) by orienting to cues that signal respect, deference, or involvement. These frames help organize emotional expectations by indicating whether embarrassment, reassurance, restraint, or warmth is situationally appropriate. In collective settings, shared ways of understanding situations also shape the feelings people learn to use, helping them identify what counts as a grievance, which emotions are seen as acceptable, and which responses are socially approved.
Sanctions and social enforcement
Emotion regimes are sustained through formal and informal sanctions that encourage conformity to patterned expectations. Thomas Scheff argues that shame and embarrassment form a central mechanism through which individuals monitor one another's adherence to social bonds and interactional obligations. Even subtle signs of rejection, a missed conversational beat, or withheld acknowledgment, can produce shame and thereby reinforce norms of deference and alignment. Reddy similarly maintains that divergence between personal experience and a dominant regime's prescribed emotives can generate emotional suffering, as individuals struggle to navigate norms that do not correspond to their lived experience.
Symbolic and ritual components Goffman's analysis of ritual elements shows that greetings, partings, honorifics, and other ceremonial gestures help reproduce shared understandings of propriety, thereby embedding the feelings a situation calls for within the fabric of social interaction. Such ritualized practices affirm the value of particular emotional stances, for example, reverence in formal ceremonies or composure in professional settings. Practice-oriented researchers further note that these enactments become habitual and embodied, as repeated gestures and patterned interactions train participants to respond with dispositions that align with the prevailing order.
Change, breakdown, and emotional agency Emotion regimes are not fixed; they may loosen, fracture, or be replaced when their norms no longer align with lived experience. William Reddy introduces the concept of "emotional liberty" to describe moments when individuals or groups articulate feelings that exceed or contradict dominant prescriptions, so that they can experiment with alternative forms of expression. Such moments often emerge in periods of political upheaval, institutional instability, or cultural transformation. Analysts of social movements further show how new sentiments can mobilize collective action when actors contest prevailing norms or construct alternative emotional scripts.
Historical emotion regimes
Historians of emotions use the idea of emotion regimes or emotional regimes to describe historically specific configurations of prescribed feelings, evaluative vocabularies, and sanctioned practices that link inner experience to public order over time. Building on William Reddy's analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France and Ute Frevert's work on modern Europe, research has traced how such regimes emerge, how they organise norms of feeling and expression, and how they are transformed through political upheaval, social change, and shifts in the language of feeling.
Reddy's foundational historical cases In The Navigation of Feeling, Reddy introduces "emotional regimes" as ensembles of prescribed "emotives" – speech acts that both express and help shape feeling – together with the rituals and institutional arrangements that support them. In his typology, regimes can be more or less strict: highly constraining regimes secure stability partly by producing "emotional suffering", Reddy's term for the distress that arises when individuals cannot reconcile their own feelings and goals with socially mandated patterns of expression. An important criterion for evaluating historical regimes is thus the degree of "emotional liberty" they afford – the extent to which people can reorient their projects and relationships without intolerable inner conflict.
Reddy develops these concepts through a detailed reconstruction of France between 1700 and 1850. In chapters 5–7 he argues that, under the absolute monarchy, courtly codes of honour and deference formed a relatively strict regime that tightly regulated how subjects could express anger, loyalty, or affection toward the king, lovers, and one another. He suggests that this configuration created incentives for courtiers and provincial elites to seek what he calls "emotional refuges" – alternative settings such as salons or literary circles in which they could pursue more expansive sentimental ideals without directly confronting the constraints of court society. According to Reddy's analysis as presented by later commentators, the French Revolution can be understood as both a political and an emotion regime crisis. The prerevolutionary "sentimentalist" regime, nourished by literature and philosophy that prized sincerity and transparent feeling, encouraged actors to treat intense sympathy and virtue as markers of political authenticity. In this context, revolutionary leaders came to demand visible proofs of love for the patrie and hatred of its enemies; doubts about others' sincerity escalated into spirals of suspicion. Reddy interprets the Jacobin Terror as a moment when the sentimentalist regime's own norms of intense, publicly displayed feeling helped generate the emotional suffering – fear, anxiety, and guilt – that undermined its stability. After the fall of Robespierre, Reddy sees a shift toward a more sceptical post-sentimental configuration, visible in the Directory and Napoleonic periods, in which overt displays of feeling in politics were treated with suspicion and more weight was placed on self-control and calculation. Yet, in his view, this new regime also redirected intense passions into reconfigured "emotional refuges" in private life and culture. The subsequent settlement that Reddy labels "liberal reason, romantic passions" – with its combination of constitutional politics and Romantic ideals of inward depth – is interpreted as a regime that offered somewhat greater emotional liberty, while still generating characteristic tensions between public restraint and private intensity. Through these French cases, Reddy seeks to demonstrate that changes in political order are closely entangled with shifts in permissible feeling, available vocabularies of self-description, and the institutions that channel affective life. His narrative illustrates how internal contradictions within a regime – for example between demands for sincerity and the impossibility of fully transparent feeling in revolutionary politics – can contribute to regime breakdown and the emergence of new norms of feeling.
Frevert and the cultures of feeling in modern Europe Ute Frevert extends this kind of analysis beyond a single national case, offering a macro-historical account of how norms of feeling developed in Europe from the early modern period to the twentieth century. In Writing the History of Emotions she speaks of "emotional cultures", by which she means historically specific constellations of valued and disapproved feelings, patterns of expression, and institutionalised expectations in different social fields. Rather than positing a single, linear progression, she emphasises how state formation, capitalist economies, gender orders, and international politics generated multiple, intersecting cultures of feeling that can be analysed in terms of regimes of feeling. One central theme in Frevert's work is the role of honour as a key node in European regimes of feeling. In her studies of "practising honour", she shows how aristocratic and later bourgeois codes required men in particular to display readiness to use violence to defend status, while simultaneously subjecting such conduct to legal and moral regulation. Honour thus acted as a dynamic mediating point of shared expectations, linking and transforming inner dispositions (courage, sensitivity to insult) and outward practices (duelling, courtroom testimony, military discipline). Across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Frevert traces how these honour cultures were reshaped by the expansion of state institutions and public spheres. Frevert also analyses how emerging capitalist orders were accompanied by distinctive "emotional economies", a canonical term in her work for the patterned ways in which feelings such as greed, trust, and happiness were bound to market structures and moral judgements. In chapters on "Capitalist Cold?" and on money and happiness, she argues that nineteenth- and twentieth-century debates over the supposed coldness of markets, the proper place of compassion in economic life, and the pursuit of happiness as a measure of well-being reflected attempts to stabilise new regimes of feeling appropriate to capitalist societies. In her discussion of "emotional politics", Frevert examines how European rulers and political movements in the long nineteenth century sought to cultivate loyalty, love, and trust among citizens. Monarchies and later nation-states developed various symbols, ceremonies, and narratives intended to produce affective attachment to the polity, including the portrayal of monarchs as caring paternal figures and the dramatisation of national suffering and sacrifice. These practices can be understood as elements of emotion regimes insofar as they prescribed appropriate ways of feeling about rulers, fellow citizens, and enemies, and linked those expectations to institutional routines such as schooling, conscription, and commemoration. Frevert's work thus complements Reddy's French focus by showing how, across different European societies, regimes of feeling co-evolved with changing configurations of power, law, and economy.
Regime formation and transformation across eras Jan Plamper summarises Reddy's definition of an "emotional regime" as the ensemble of prescribed emotives and the rituals that sustain them, noting that Reddy's historical chapters demonstrate how such ensembles are anchored in specific institutional settings – courts, revolutionary assemblies, bureaucracies – and supported by explicit and implicit norms of feeling. Frevert, in turn, highlights how armies, legal systems, markets, and international relations have each generated their own characteristic expectations about fear, courage, shame, empathy, and other key feelings. Both authors show that new regimes typically crystallise under conditions of significant reorganisation of power. For Reddy, the emergence of a sentimentalist regime in eighteenth-century France is tied to the spread of new literary forms, sociability, and political ideas that elevated sincerity and pity as civic virtues; this configuration was then tested and partly undone by the Revolution and its aftermath. For Frevert, the formation of modern European states involved the deliberate crafting of "emotional politics" that bound citizens to institutions through cultivated trust, love of the nation, and justified fear of external enemies. Reddy's notion of "emotional suffering" demonstrates how regimes may be destabilised. When the demands of a regime repeatedly force individuals into conflicts between mandated display and felt experience, they may seek alternative scripts and settings – the "emotional refuges" he identifies – in which other ways of feeling become thinkable. In his account, revolutionary crises thus appear as moments when previously dominant regimes of feeling become untenable for large numbers of people. Changes in vocabularies of feeling are another indicator of regime transformation. The collective project Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700–2000 surveys encyclopedias and dictionaries in German, English, and French to show how terms for feelings have been defined, grouped, and revalued over three centuries. Frevert's discussion of this work emphasises that shifts from "passions" and "affections" to "emotions" as central psychological categories, and the emergence or decline of particular feeling-words, track broader changes in how authorities, experts, and lay publics conceptualise inner life. In his synthetic account, Plamper argues that Reddy's French case and the Max Planck group's lexicon studies demonstrate the heuristic value of tracing how prescribed feeling-rules, institutional practices, and vocabularies shift together over time.
Examples beyond France
While Reddy's analysis focuses on France, Frevert's research and the Emotional Lexicons project provide examples of emotion regimes in other European contexts. In her work on honour, Frevert traces how Prussia and other German states cultivated specific ideals of masculine bravery, self-control, and readiness to fight, especially among officers and educated citizens. Military institutions, courts, and codes of etiquette together prescribed when anger, indignation, or shame were appropriate, and when they had to be restrained; breaches could result in legal sanctions and loss of status. Frevert's chapter on "Emotional Politics in Europe's Long Nineteenth Century" offers another set of examples. She shows how constitutional monarchies and later parliamentary regimes developed commemorations, public ceremonies, and visual symbols designed to elicit loyalty and affection from citizens, and how oppositional movements sought in turn to mobilise indignation, resentment, or hope. Across countries, rulers and parties experimented with different combinations of paternal care, patriotic exaltation, and controlled fear of internal and external enemies, contributing to distinct national patterns of political feeling that can be described in terms of differing emotion regimes. The Emotional Lexicons volume extends the geographical range by analysing changes in feeling vocabularies in German, English, and French reference works from 1700 to 2000. By comparing entries on concepts such as anger, fear, sympathy, or stress across languages and periods, the contributors show how some feelings were newly named, subdivided, or linked to medical and psychological expertise, while others receded from authoritative discourse. In her studies of twentieth-century Europe, including her work on postwar Germany, Frevert argues that democratic and authoritarian regimes alike relied on structured appeals to feeling – for example, calls to mourn war dead, to celebrate economic achievements, or to fear ideological enemies – but did so through distinct institutional channels and accepted patterns for how feelings should be expressed.
Institutional and social emotion regimes
Family systems and intimate norms Families constitute some of the most enduring environments in which norms of feeling and expression are learned. Within households, expectations surrounding anger, shame, pride, affection, and restraint form a patterned framework that guides early socialisation. Thomas Scheff's microsociological account describes how the "deference–emotion system" shapes intimate bonds: family members continually monitor signs of acceptance or rejection, and threats to these bonds generate acute responses linked to shame and pride. Scheff emphasises that embarrassment and shame arise whenever legitimacy within the relationship is jeopardised, while the experience of being recognised appropriately fosters pride and solidarity. Describing groups whose members share norms about valued emotions, styles of expression, and interpretive assumptions, Rosenwein introduced the concept of emotional communities to provide a complementary framework for analysing households as carriers of feeling norms. Rosenwein notes that emotional communities are structured by "fundamental assumptions, values, goals, feeling rules, and accepted modes of expression," and they may exist as overlapping circles of more intimate subgroups.
Organizations and professional expectations Organisational settings impose distinctive expectations regarding comportment and feeling. Arlie Hochschild's analysis of service work introduces the idea of feeling rules, which are shared standards used to determine what is "rightly owed" in contexts of interaction, and shows how workers engage in "emotion management" to meet these expectations. Hochschild's ethnography of flight attendants documents techniques intended to align inner states with organisational demands, including reframing passengers as "personal guests" and using memory-based strategies akin to method acting. Organisations prescribe desirable feelings such as warmth or calmness and enforce constraints against irritation, fear, or aggression. Hochschild argues that the costs of such management include the risk of alienation from one's own affective life when professional expectations conflict with spontaneous responses. Professional fields also vary: service work typically requires sustained positive display, while roles involving enforcement or collection encourage the cultivation of more confrontational repertoires. Erving Goffman's account of ritual interaction further clarifies how institutional order is sustained. His analysis highlights the centrality of "face," the ongoing mutual effort to maintain legitimacy within encounters, and shows that anticipating embarrassment is a key motivator shaping conduct.
Identity-based social emotion regimes Whether structured around gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or shared cultural practices, identity groups develop distinctive patterns of feeling that differentiate them from surrounding contexts. R. W. Connell's framework of multiple masculinities demonstrates how emotional expectations vary within gender orders: hegemonic masculinities emphasise control, toughness, and the management of vulnerability; subordinated and marginalised masculinities organise feeling through alternative repertoires shaped by power relations and embodied practice. Rosenwein's analysis of emotional communities also extends to identity-based groups. Because each community is characterised by a constellation of valued feelings and interpretive norms, identity groups can be viewed as overlapping emotional communities whose members share repertoires of pride, vigilance, restraint, solidarity, or dignity.
Jeff Goodwin, James Jasper, and Francesca Polletta's work on social movements shows how identity groups mobilise distinctive patterns of feeling they call repertoires such as anger, fear, outrage, or hope to reinforce boundaries and sustain collective engagement. The term "repertoires of contention" is used by writers such as Charles Tilly while others describe it as movement "dramaturgy" which typically refers to distinctive forms of emotion management to maintain group cohesion and interpret threats.
Religious and secular emotion regimes Religious settings have extensively structured shared patterns of feeling shaped through ritual, doctrine, and communal practice. Rosenwein's framework shows how monastic, ecclesiastical, and lay communities cultivated constellations of valued feelings and modes of expression, forming distinctive emotional communities grounded in shared theological and moral understandings. Monique Scheer's work demonstrates that secular institutions generate institutionally-shaped patterns of feeling analogous in analytic form to those found in religious groups. In her account of "secular embodiments," Scheer argues that norms governing affective comportment are embedded in embodied practices, spaces, and classificatory schemes that guide how people feel and perceive in secular contexts. These expectations operate through techniques of bodily discipline, sensory ordering, and ritualised routines that normalise particular affective orientations. Scheer's practice-theoretical approach emphasises that religious and secular feeling norms should not be understood as static; they are continually produced and sustained through embodied actions.
Subcultural and associational emotion regimes Subcultures, clubs, activist groups, and other voluntary associations often maintain distinctive repertoires of feeling that sustain group identity and solidarity. Rosenwein's model suggests that such formations can be conceptualised as emotional communities whose boundaries are defined by shared assumptions, valued emotions, and norms of expression. Academic studies of social movements by Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta demonstrate how associational groups develop emotion norms that reinforce commitment and collective orientation. Their analysis also demonstrates that "emotion management" occurs at the collective level: groups promote shared feeling rules, deploy dramaturgical practices, and structure interactions in ways that heighten solidarity and shape responses to risk or conflict.
Political emotion regimes
National emotion regimes Writers in the field who analyse nation-states through the lens of emotion regimes emphasise how political communities organise attachments, loyalties and anxieties around the category of national belonging. Sociologist Mabel Berezin argues that modern nation-states act as "vehicles of political emotion", transforming citizenship from a formal status into a "felt identity" through practices that cultivate patriotism and nationalism, define friends and enemies, and generate "love for the nation" and a sense of fraternity among citizens. Berezin situates national identification within a "hierarchy of felt identity", in which some collective affiliations acquire the status of "hypergoods" that command especially intense attachment. Nation-states work to secure such a privileged position for national belonging by constructing national cultures against local or regional ones and by building a material and institutional infrastructure using schools, standardized languages, rituals, and monuments to guide citizens towards experiencing themselves as members of a national community. Wars of unification and state-building in the nineteenth century, for example, helped to make national identity salient among competing loyalties. Historical work on what Ute Frevert calls "emotional politics" in Europe's "long nineteenth century" shows how such national emotion regimes were stabilised through appeals to love, honour and fraternity. Frevert describes how revolutionary and post-revolutionary actors in France mobilised fraternity as a political bond, imagining the nation as a "band of brothers" and enacting this kinship through embodied practices such as walking arm-in-arm and public embraces. These practices aimed to remake citizens' sentiments so that political judgement became guided by a rapid, quasi-instinctive sense of what was "morally" or politically right, with emotions doing the work of directing opinions and sustaining democratic commitments. Taken together, such analyses portray national emotion regimes as historically contingent arrangements in which states and political elites cultivate specific repertoires of pride, love, honour and solidarity in order to secure legitimacy and organise the boundaries of national membership.
Populist emotion regimes Populist movements rely on distinctive repertoires of feeling that define "the people" and their antagonists through patterned expectations of resentment, betrayal, righteous anger, and solidarity. Analysts of social movements highlight how political action is sustained by affective orientations that circulate among participants and are reinforced through collective practices. Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta note that emotional responses such as anger, fear, and a sense of betrayal play a decisive role in mobilization, shaping whether individuals join movements and how they interpret political opportunities. Populist organizing often depends on intensifying these feelings of threat and grievance. Goodwin and colleagues describe how narratives of injustice, loss, or danger can galvanize potential supporters and cause their actions to appear more meaningful, especially when paired with affective affiliation to symbols, leaders, and imagined communities. Movements also draw upon what the authors call "emotion cultures". Historical cases show how earlier mobilizations, including Black nationalist movements in the United States, left a legacy of "politics of rage" that later movements could adopt or adapt. At the same time, the internal dynamics of populist groups require forms of affective regulation. Goodwin and Pfaff observe that maintaining loyalty and dedication often involves the emotion management of cultivating pride and enthusiasm while managing fear or ambivalence. Lauren Berlant's analysis of contemporary politics shows how populist formations emerge from conditions of affective impasse in situations in which established norms and expectations no longer provide orientation. Berlant describes the contemporary present as structured by crisis and uncertainty, producing a search for clarity and attachment amid the "waning of genre" and the destabilization of established ways of making sense of the world. In such conditions, populist actors can articulate compelling narratives that convert diffuse anxieties into political resentment and promise a restoration of agency or belonging. Berlant's account helps explain why contradictory attachments that she terms "cruel optimism" can flourish in populist settings, as supporters cling to political promises that cannot be fulfilled yet remain affectively compelling. Taken together, these analyses show that populist emotion regimes organize political life through patterned expressions of grievance and hope. They mobilize supporters by cultivating indignation toward perceived enemies, forging solidarity within "the people," and sustaining engagement through narratives that resonate with widespread feelings of insecurity and loss.
Authoritarian and fascist affective orders
Authoritarian and fascist systems exemplify political orders in which regimes attempt to structure patterns of obedience, loyalty, and hostility through sustained affective practices. Berezin's study of interwar Italy demonstrates how fascist authorities sought to reshape public life by embedding political meaning in ritual action. Fascist public spectacle, which she describes as the "expressive crucible" of identity, was designed to produce a community of feeling in which Italians would experience themselves as fascists through repeated participation in schools, party organizations, and mass events. These rituals aimed to fuse individual and collective identities by generating familiarity with fascist symbols, synchronizing participants' gestures, and creating shared memories of collective presence. According to Berezin, fascist parades and commemorations functioned as arenas of identity formation, where repeated actions elicited sensations of "we are all here together" sentiments of solidarity and produced a sense of belonging that transcended everyday social divisions. At the same time, the regime presented fascist "heroes" as constructed exemplary figures whose obituary biographies modelled virtues of bravery, stoicism, discipline, and obedience. Berezin also notes that the identities fostered by fascist cultural policy were fragile. Decades of schooling and spectacle did not produce a deeply rooted fascist self, and these identities collapsed rapidly when the regime fell. Aho's analysis of enemy construction complements this account by identifying how authoritarian movements rely on hostility to unify supporters. He argues that societies create enemies as objects onto which fears and grievances are projected, and that this process serves to bind groups together by providing a shared target for aggression. The construction of the enemy generates a sense of threat, justifies coercion, and channels collective anger toward outsiders or internal opponents. Appadurai's analysis of "predatory identities" shows how movements such as Nazism defined national belonging by constructing minorities as dangers to the wholeness of the nation. This dynamic is intensified through what he calls the "narcissism of minor differences," where small cultural distinctions can provoke disproportionate hostility and lead to violent purification projects. Taken together, these academics reveal how authoritarian and fascist affective orders operate through coercion and sustained efforts to instill feelings such as obedience and pride, staging rituals that model ideal forms of belonging, and constructing enemies whose perceived threat legitimizes the regime's power.
Political backlash and counter-regimes Periods of political transition often produce competing structures of feeling as groups respond to perceived losses of status, security, or moral orientation. Appadurai argues that modern nation-states are marked by an "anxiety of incompleteness," a pervasive sense that national identity is fragile and vulnerable to internal or external threats. This anxiety can intensify during social or political change, generating backlash movements that reinterpret uncertainty as evidence of minority danger or elite betrayal. When boundaries between "us" and "them" blur, small cultural distinctions can be magnified into sources of rage that Appadurai terms the "narcissism of minor differences." Aho shows that groups often construct enemies as repositories for diffuse anxieties and grievances. These dynamics can crystallize counter-regimes: collective efforts to reassert threatened hierarchies of belonging through hostility, exclusion, or violence. Counter-regimes emerge when groups collectively reinterpret insecurity as injustice, identify enemies who threaten the imagined community, and articulate alternative structures of feeling meant to restore order or hierarchy. Backlash movements also mobilize highly patterned repertoires of feeling. Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta show that indignation, moral outrage, and fear are central to how groups interpret political developments and decide whether to engage in collective action. In her account of contemporary political life, Berlant describes the present as structured by affective "impasse," a condition in which established norms no longer guide action or aspiration. In these moments, contradictory attachments and frustrated expectations can become politically volatile. Backlash movements harness these uncertainties by offering simplified narratives that promise moral clarity, restored agency, or renewed belonging. Berlant explains how these narratives maintain their appeal even when their solutions prove unattainable through his concept of the "cruel optimism" of attachments to promises that cannot be fulfilled yet remain affectively compelling.
Techniques of affective governance Political institutions actively organise public feeling and direct it through patterned techniques of governance. Berezin's account of the "secure state" highlights how modern governments rely on affective strategies to cultivate legitimacy, manage uncertainty, and bind citizens to national projects. She shows that states facing crises of geopolitical, economic, or cultural security seek to generate public confidence and loyalty by embedding political messages in symbols, rituals, and communicative practices that make the state appear protective and cohesive. A central mechanism of affective governance involves public ritual and commemoration. Berezin's earlier research on fascist Italy demonstrates how authoritarian governments used repeated public events to reshape hierarchies of identity and produce a felt sense of unity. Ritual action synchronised bodies, generated familiarity with political symbols, and produced collective memories that naturalised state authority. Affective governance also operates through the management of fear and insecurity. Appadurai suggests that nation-states and political actors can mobilise anxieties about incompleteness, cultural threat, or minority danger to consolidate authority. He argues that feelings of uncertainty, particularly