Since the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum, political scientists, historians, and other commentators have tried to understand what happened. In the many explanations, references to “resentment” have appeared repeatedly. The term has been employed to describe the shared emotion of followers of populist politicians and as a kind of politics. However, oftentimes it has not been sufficiently clear what resentment is and which role it plays in politics. To answer these questions, Robert A. Schneider provides an impressive historical survey of the ebbs and rises in both the intellectual history of the concept and of the actual emotion in politics.
Schneider is concerned that the use of “resentment” in contemporary academic and public discourse is vague and merely negative. To give the term a definite meaning, it is important to distinguish it from related emotions such as anger, rage, and fear. To go beyond its negative connotations, Schneider argues that we should note that resentment is not independent of reflection and people’s experiences. Moreover, it is a central argument of the book that “resentment is a condition of modernity” (p. 15). The modern principle of equality provides a promise to people and when reality fails to meet their normative expectations, resentment follows.
The motivation for The Return of Resentment is contemporary American politics and the book provides “a history of the present” (p. 16). By providing a historical perspective on resentment, the book’s hope is to lift readers out of their current ideological assumptions and biases. By reviewing the ideas of eighteenth-century thinkers like Joseph Butler and Adam Smith, Schneider shows that resentment has not always been seen as a pathology but can have a positive side as a sentiment that responds to moral injury and protects people against injustice.
The book alternates between chapters on changes in the intellectual uses of the concept and examples of historical events, upheavals, and movements characterized by resentment. The intellectual history begins with Butler, Smith, and David Hume and ends with a discussion of contemporary analyses of the populist politics of resentment. In between there is a review of Nietzsche, who is depicted as the philosopher who raised resentment (or ressentiment) “to a foundational feature of a whole swath of human history” (p. 80). “After him, resentment could never be looked upon as it had been before” (p. 61).
Schneider’s intellectual history includes an exciting discussion of what he calls “the resentment paradigm,” which is the mid-twentieth century approach to rightwing movements of figures such as Daniel Bell, Richard Hofstadter, and Seymour Martin Lipset. The paradigm had a psychological approach to politics and saw the resentment of rightwing and populist movements as entirely irrational. In the 1970s this paradigm was subjected to strong criticisms and intellectual analysis saw a decline in the use of resentment as an explanatory factor. In recent years, however, we have seen a return of the use of “resentment” to explain rightwing populism. Schneider notes—and applauds—the fact that contemporary commentators, in contrast to the earlier resentment paradigm, do not simply write off the resentment of rightwing groups as irrational but rather take their grievances seriously. Thus, we are to some extent back to the Butler/Smith view according to which resentment can be a response to moral injury, which should not be ignored. At this point in the book, Schneider even suggests that resentment can be one of the “weapons of the weak” (p. 112).
Interwoven with the intellectual history of the concept, the book includes a history of actual cases of resentment. Schneider is not concerned with individual experiences of resentment but with its collective and political manifestations. We learn, for example, about resentment as the background for witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and Luddism at the dawn of the industrial age in England. There is a fascinating discussion of the connection between resentment and revolution, including a fine analysis of Albert Camus on rebellion. The historical examples of resentment end with (all too brief) discussions of Islamic fundamentalism and Vladimir Putin’s nationalism. However, the historical epoch that is closest to the heart of the author is clearly the 1960s. Schneider argues that there are two sixties, one without and one with resentment. The leftwing countercultural movements of the sixties were certainly full of emotions but “resentment [was] not one of them,” he argues (p. 137). But “the other sixties,” that of Richard Nixon and “the silent majority” certainly was resentful.
At this point, the book runs into conceptual difficulties. For in which sense were Nixon and his followers resentful and the countercultural movement not so? And doesn’t Schneider commit the error that he warns against, that is, using resentment as a label for others and exempting oneself? (Schneider took part in the countercultural movement of the sixties and writes about it as a participant observer, p. 139). It is as if Schneider cannot quite decide on how to define resentment. Indeed, in the Conclusion, he acknowledges that the book has taken two paths and operates with two models of resentment: the “Left Behind/Threatened Model” and the “Comparison/Discrepancy Model.” In the first model, resentment involves bitterness and a reactionary desire to turn back to a better time. In the second model, resentment “serves as an alert to injustice or inequity that can and should be rectified,” which shows that resentment “can be aspirational” (p. 219).
The reason why Schneider does not see the countercultural sixties as in the grip of resentment is that it was “underwritten by a strong measure of hopefulness, utopian aspirations, and often wildly radical expectations” (p. 139). Why does this not fit with the second model of resentment, which exactly explains resentment with the comparison of ideal and reality and finding a discrepancy—and which we just saw “can be aspirational”? Moreover, insofar as the book understands resentment on the first model—“as a sense of being disposed, left behind, or demoted” (p. 138), which it does in the analysis of Nixon and contemporary populism—the connection to the democratic culture of equality becomes less clear. Schneider argues that both of his models of resentment are reactions to moral wrongs and “assume a level of equality” (p. 219). However, we should be careful not to assume that just because people are concerned with their status and not being wronged, they are concerned with equality. Resentment can also be directed against equality.
Schneider has done a superb job of discovering sources dealing with resentment, and The Return of Resentment covers an extraordinary amount of historical, philosophical, literary, and sociological material. However, while the research and learnedness of the author is a true strength of the book, parts of it read too much as a survey. Nevertheless, this is a much-needed book, which provides us with a nuanced and historically informed understanding of resentment, from which we can learn a great deal about contemporary politics.
