Look Back? In Anger. The Working Classes in the 20th Century: Compassion, Resentment, Indignation (2011)

A close look at post 19
th
century uses of resentment places us in front of a series of difficult paradoxes that any 
representation of this emotional experience poses from a political point of view. Following Nietzsche and 
Scheler, ressentiment refers to bitter feelings of anger and hatred that are nevertheless repressed. This emotion 
emerges in a power relationship in which those below feel totally impotent and overwhelmed by their situation. 
Being unable to act, they repress those bitter feelings. Nietzsche and Scheler's definitions of ressentiment are 
anti-social - situation of those below is due to their own (in)abilities and not to dynamics of social 
structure. Nevertheless, they touch on important questions that traverse social research and its understanding of 
resentment these days. 
Central to their definition is idea of suppression. Theirs is therefore a post 19
th
psychological understanding 
of a subject that it is divided between what (s)he feels, expresses and does. In contrast to passive character of 
ressentiment, many sociologists of collective mobilisations and other actions like vandalism have presumed 
resentment as bases of these. On other hand, resentment is often presented as a latent feeling that under 
certain circumstances can be given form in political actions of denunciation, or in more violent expressions of 
anger.
The question of giving voice to this feeling entails a political dimension. If in hands of Nitzsche and Scheler, 
ressentiment becomes a degrading emotion that betrays unworthiness of those who embody it, Hume and 
Smith had considered a condition of justice that those who had suffered offence experienced resentment and 
made us feel it. Throughout 20
th
century resentment has been associated to question of how to make 
visible this suffering - whether it was associated to a past humiliation and hidden in form of trauma, or an 
injury present in daily life but hidden from political representation (Sennet and Cobb, 1972). 
When humiliation is not atrocious (as in historical cases of slavery, shoa, or brutal repression of 
those defeated in Spanish Civil War), then experience of suffering is relative to a culture that presents as 
legitimate a series of aspirations, whereas dynamics of society do not allow certain groups to achieve them. 
Robert Merton (1938) and Walter Runciman (1966) used term relative deprivation to refer to this distressful 
feeling. Many cases of 20
th
century resentment as lived by inhabitants of western democracies in periods of 
peace involve a feeling of relative deprivation accompanied with actual experiences of mistreatment. Resentment 
is here related not as much to a past offence, as to a present and a future of unfulfilled expectations. How to deal 
with this suffering and what expression is most suitable for it has been a common concern around situation of 
the working classes at least throughout two thirds of century.
Following Boltanski's (1999) analytic distinction between denunciation and compassion, I focus on two different 
representations of working class in 20
th
century: workers photographic movement of 1920s and 
1930s and a series of sociological works of 1960s and 1970s that emphasised suffering of working 
classes in daily life. The first put accent on physical suffering, connected to a situation of exhausting work 
and a life of economic privation. Many of these photographs also create comparisons showing other social 
groups that, living in same town, enjoy a world of richness. The sociological works of 1960s and 1970s 
shift to a narration in which unpleasant and painful inner visceral sensations, as Scheler put it, are 
verbalised. These two forms of representation, which try to create a link between individual bodies and 
social states (Kleinman and Kleinman, 1994) show how fragile line between denunciation and tenderheartedness compassion can be. When suffering of a group is emphasised, there is an inflation of sentiments 
that can lead to immobilise both victims (Antze and Lambeck, 1996) and observers. On other hand, a 
narrative of suffering and resentment can play a fundamental role in constitution of a collective identity, as it 
has been common ground for ethnic minorities (Eyerman, 2004). This latter option, however, is hardly available 
to the working class, as it lacks a founding narration, a mythical past associated to persecution of a particular cultural group. The transformation of their suffering in indignation depends necessarily on 
investigation that can identify persecutor - in other words, active cause of their situation.