Negative emotions, including anger, fear and shame, have been at the heart of recent political events, such as the protests against COVID-19 restrictions. These negative emotions can be politically destructive, leading people to act rashly without due concern for democratic principles. However, they can also accurately signal wrongdoing and motivate acts to redress the situation, as displayed in the Black Lives Matter and climate change movements. This volume brings together perspectives from political science and philosophy to shed new light on the political faces of negative emotions. Engaging with real-world political events from Europe, the US and Africa, contributors critically evaluate much-discussed emotions, such as anger and fear, but also less prominent ones, such as frustration and discomfort.

This book explores negative emotions like anger, fear and grief as important drivers of political action. It examines how treating these feelings as medical problems affects society. Drawing on the political thought of Hannah Arendt, the book develops an original understanding of political emotions as fragile and vulnerable to attacks disputing their relevance to public life. It presents and analyses four case studies of emotional politics in the UK, ranging from assertions that UKIP supporters were emotionally primitive to diagnoses of anxiety disorder in the Brexit referendum's aftermath. It demonstrates how ideas of emotion and mental disorder might be used to both empower and disempower people politically.