Ehcs Article p1 - 2

Emotions: History, Culture, Society 4 (2020) 1–34
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What is the History of Anger a History of?

Thomas Dixon
Queen Mary University of London, UK
[email protected]
Abstract
This essay uses the history of emotions to make two arguments – one destructive and
one constructive. It uses examples from intellectual and cultural history to undermine
the idea that the modern English term ‘anger’ refers either to a clearly defined mental
state or to a coherent emotional concept. At the same time, it also questions the diag-
nosis of the present as an ‘age of anger’. Constructively, the essay uses the intellectual
and cultural ancestries of modern ‘anger’ as a case-study in a distinctive approach to
the history of emotions. With reference to works by linguists and anthropologists, to
ancient philosophical and literary texts, and to some of the most influential visual rep-
resentations of the irate body and the furious face, from Hieronymus Bosch to Charles
Darwin, the essay explains and defends a pluralist and interdisciplinary approach, ar-
guing that ‘anger’ is a modern English word without a stable transhistorical referent,
and proposes the method of genealogical anatomy as a way to avoid the twin dangers
of anachronism and essentialism in the history of emotions.
Keywords
anger – rage – ira – revenge – expression – historiography
1 Introduction
The question in the title of this essay seems, on the face of it, ridiculously easy
to answer: ‘anger’ is the name of a human emotion, and the history of anger is
the story of how that emotion has been experienced and expressed in the past.
That might be the end of the matter if we agreed about what an ‘emotion’ was
and about which ‘emotions’ were examples of ‘anger’. Unfortunately, we do not.
Ever since William James asked ‘What is an emotion?’ in 1884, psychologists
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2 Dixon
have been engaged in divisive and inconclusive arguments about the correct
answer.1 Further, as we shall see, there is no agreement about which aspects
of reality the term ‘anger’ properly refers to. Candidates include the desire for
revenge, hardwired homicidal instincts, moral indignation, bodily arousal,
drunken brawling, and various kinds of facial grimacing. Which of these is an
essential part of ‘anger’ and which, therefore, belong in a history of anger?
The first simple, largely destructive aim of this essay is to show how dif-
ficult it is to answer this question. It uses examples from Western cultural and
intellectual history to explode the idea that any of us really knows what ‘anger’
means. The instability and inscrutability of reference of this modern emotion-
al term is of fundamental importance and constitutes a challenge to anyone in
any discipline seeking to make claims about a supposed entity called ‘anger’.
Such a crisis of definition is, of course, a problem encountered in almost any
scholarly endeavour exploring complex concepts. However, the obviousness of
the problem should not lead us to ignore it, nor to proceed as if the meanings
of our key terms are clear and stable when they are not. For those who believe
in anger as a universal ‘basic emotion’, the challenge will be to respond to the
evidence marshalled below of radical discontinuity of experiences, ideas and
expressions across time and cultures. For those of us, perhaps including many
readers of this journal, who already accept that modern emotion words do not
name natural kinds or human universals, we need to articulate what we think
we are doing when we use those terms; to take greater care in explaining when
we are, or are not, engaging in anachronism; and to articulate what, if anything,
in human experience we think is shared across different emotional cultures.2
In a recent book about mental health, Nathan Filer seeks simultaneously to
explore and to question the validity of one modern psychiatric category by re-
ferring throughout to ‘so-called schizophrenia’ rather than to ‘schizophrenia’.3
This acknowledges the power of the category, while keeping it at a distance,
and I want to advocate something similar in the case of ‘anger’ and other emo-
tion words. This is a contribution that the history of emotions can make, as a
1 William James, ‘What is an Emotion?,’ Mind 9 (1884): 188–205; Thomas Dixon, ‘“Emotion”:
The History of a Keyword in Crisis’, Emotion Review 4, no. 4 (October 2012): 338–44.
2 On the philosophical debate about whether either ‘emotion’ or specific emotion words such
as ‘anger,’ ‘fear’ and so on name natural kinds, see Paul E. Griffiths, What Emotions Really
Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997);
Lisa Feldman Barrett, ‘Are Emotions Natural Kinds?,’ Perspectives on Psychological Science 1
(2006): 28–58; Andrea Scarantino, ‘How to Define Emotions Scientifically,’ Emotion Review 4
(2012): 358–68.
3 Nathan Filer, The Heartland: Finding and Losing Schizophrenia (London: Faber, 2019); a new
edition of the book has the title This Book Will Change Your Mind about Mental Health: A
Journey into the Heartland of Psychiatry.
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What is the History of Anger a History of ? 3
discipline, to a process of collective disenchantment, even of liberation. We

all live under the spell of the psychological categories we inherit, and it is of
service, in some cases, to try to loosen their hold over us. For that reason, in this
essay, I do not refer to ‘anger’ in a way that suggests this English word has either
an agreed definition or a coherent referent in the world, nor do I use singular
phrases such as ‘the emotion of anger’, nor do I discuss what ‘it’ is or how ‘it’
has changed or been variously expressed over time. When it comes to ‘anger’,
there is no ‘it’. There is no discrete thing, entity or process in the world, past or
present, to which the English word ‘anger’ invariably refers. It is surprisingly
difficult, but important, to engage in a sustained discussion that remains gram-
matically true to this basic fact.4
The pioneering French historian of affectivity, Lucien Febvre, argued in 1938
that psychological anachronism was harmful and insidious, since each human
group in the past in fact had its own proper mental system, working to produce
experiences in its own way.5 This insight is crucial, and is only rarely acted
upon in a consistent way, even among historians of emotions. However, on its
own, a warning against psychological anachronism is not enough. It leaves us
with a further challenge, namely to articulate how and why the experiences of
past individuals relate to our ambiguous, if enchanting modern categories. If
‘anger’ and ‘emotion’ are, in one sense, only words – modern English-language
constructs from which some of us wish to be liberated – then what are the phe-
nomena that can be properly included in their histories? To put it another way:
what are the criteria of inclusion in histories of time-bound modern emotions?
Answering that question, and explaining how to produce historical work about
the emotions that is rigorously true to their historicity without collapsing into
relativistic nihilism about language and reality, constitutes the second, con-
structive aim of this essay, using modern so-called ‘anger’ as an example.
As I explain further below, my historical method combines anatomy with
genealogy, and is simultaneously historicist and presentist. It is historicist be-
cause the ancestors I find for different aspects of modern emotional life are
reconstructed in the terms of their proper historical contexts. It is presentist
because the phenomena whose histories I seek to cobble together are those
which at least some twenty-first century users of the term ‘anger’ have taken
that word to refer to. Modern uses of ‘anger’ provide the anchor for the whole
4 In using the terms ‘reference’ and ‘referent’ I am alluding to philosophical debates about the
ways that our words succeed or fail in trying to pick out aspects of reality; see A. W. Moore,
ed., Meaning and Reference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
5 Lucien Febvre, A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre, ed. Peter Burke, trans.
K. Folca (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 1–11.

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4 Dixon
enterprise, even though the term has no stable referent. An awareness of our
own historical moment and linguistic usage is, therefore, a crucial first step in
beginning to answer our question: what is the history of anger a history of?
2 Do We Live in an Age of Anger Today?
Since 2016 it has become a journalistic commonplace to say that we live in an

age of anger. In June of that year, the British people voted by 52 per cent to 48
per cent to leave the European Union, and ‘anger’ soon emerged as an explana-
tion. A leading article in the Economist, entitled ‘The Politics of Anger’, suggest-
ed that ‘anger’ at immigration, globalisation, and social liberalism had stirred
up the ‘Leave’ vote in the ‘depressed, down-at-heel, cities of England’.6 Later
that year, the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States was
slotted into the same explanatory frame. During his campaign, Trump had said
he was ‘very, very angry’ and would ‘gladly accept the mantle of anger’.7 On the
morning after the result, the prominent Democrat politician Bernie Sanders
issued a statement. ‘Donald Trump’, Sanders stated, ‘tapped into the anger of
a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, es-
tablishment politics and the establishment media.’8 The Nobel Prize-winning
economist Paul Krugman commented: ‘It turns out that there is a deeper rage
in white, rural America than I knew’.9 The political philosopher Judith Butler
spoke of the ‘vast anger’ Trump voters felt, ‘against migrants, against racial mi-
norities, against Black Lives Matter, against women’.10
Donald Trump’s election came in spite of repeated allegations of sexual mis-
conduct against women, and it was in this context that the #MeToo movement,
sparked by accusations against the film producer Harvey Weinstein published
6 ‘The Politics of Anger,’ The Economist, 2 July 2016, https://www.economist.com/leaders

/2016/07/02/the-politics-of-anger.
7 Vanessa Barford, ‘Why Are Americans so Angry?,’ BBC News Magazine, 4 February 2016,
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35406324; Michelle Hackman, ‘Donald Trump:
“I Will Gladly Accept the Mantle of Anger,”’ Vox, 14 January 2016, https://www.vox.com
/2016/1/14/10773784/trump-debate-anger.
8 ‘Sanders Statement on Trump,’ Sen. Bernie Sanders, 9 November 2016, https://www.sanders
.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sanders-statement-on-trump.
9 Paul Krugman, Tweet, @paulkrugman, 9 November 2016, https://twitter.com/paulkrugman
/status/796170345657069568.
10 Judith Butler interviewed on the ‘Talking Politics’ podcast, 17 November 2016, https://
www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/blog/2016/10-judith-butler.

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in the New York Times in October 2017, took off.11 Observers have explored the
#MeToo movement as an embodiment of ‘women’s anger’.12 In articulating
this view, contemporary writers have drawn on the legacy of the pioneering
second-wave feminist Audre Lorde, the black lesbian poet, essayist and activ-
ist who wrote with such intensity about anger and rage in the 1970s and 1980s.
‘My Black woman’s anger’, Lorde wrote in 1983, ‘is a molten pond at the core of
me, my most fiercely guarded secret. I know how much of my life as a powerful
feeling woman is laced through with this net of rage’. ‘How to train that anger
with accuracy rather than deny it’, she stated, had been one of the major tasks
of her life.13
It is not surprising, in this context, that many have concluded that we live
in an ‘age of anger’.14 Rarely is any evidence offered, however, to support the
assertion that people are in fact acting in anger. Why do commentators believe
that people are ‘angry’ as opposed to, say, ‘despairing’, ‘disappointed’, or ‘dis-
pleased’? Even when people do state that ‘anger’ or ‘rage’ is their main motiva-
tion, we rarely know what they mean by those emotion words, and whether
they think of their emotions as motives, explanations, justifications or some-
thing else. Explaining political protest in terms of ‘anger’ becomes viciously
circular if the term ‘anger’ is used simply to mean ‘the emotional response that
leads to political protest’ or ‘the emotion produced by deprivation’. Different
individuals react with different emotions to injury and injustice. They may
be sad or despairing, resentful or resigned, driven or determined. Political
11 Nadia Khomami, ‘#MeToo: How a Hashtag Became a Rallying Cry against Sexual
Harassment,’ The Guardian, 20 October 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world
/2017/oct/20/women-worldwide-use-hashtag-metoo-against-sexual-harassment; Clark
Mindock, ‘The Full List of Women Who Have Accused Donald Trump of Sexual Assault,’
The Independent, 25 February 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/ameri
cas/us-politics/trump-sexual-assault-allegation-alva-johnson-claims-women-how-many
-accused-kiss-a8796851.html; Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, ‘Harvey Weinstein
Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades,’ The New York Times, 20 April 2018,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/harvey-weinstein-harassment-allegations.html.
12 Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (London: Simon &
Schuster, 2018), 189–206; Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of
Women’s Anger (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 157–205; Lilly Dancyger, ed., Burn
It Down: Women Writing about Anger (New York: Seal Press, 2019); Megan Garber, ‘All
the Angry Ladies,’ The Atlantic, 6 November 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/enter-
tainment/archive/2017/11/all-the-angry-ladies/545042/; R. O. Kwon, ‘Finding Solace
in the Words of Furious Women,’ Literary Hub, 2 August 2017, https://lithub.com
/finding-solace-in-the-words-of-furious-women.
13 Audre Lorde, ‘Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger (1983),’ in The Audre Lorde
Compendium: Essays, Speeches and Journals (London: Pandora, 1996), 191–219 (191).
14 Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (London: Allen Lane, 2017).

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6 Dixon
activism may be brought about by emotions other than so-called ‘anger’, while
those who do identify with ‘anger’ may fail to take any effective political ac-
tion, yet neither of those possibilities has received much consideration in
recent commentary.15
Of the cases I have mentioned so far, it is the election of Donald Trump in
2016 for which we have the best evidence of voters’ emotional states. In recent
years, pollsters have increasingly asked people about their emotions as well as
their opinions. The results, as ever, depend on how the question is put. Some
polls require voters to state how angry they are on a range from ‘very angry’,
through ‘somewhat angry’, to ‘not at all angry’. A question offering several pos-
sible answers, all but one of which report some level of anger, gives, unsurpris-
ingly, results suggesting high percentages of voter anger.16 A voter faced with
such a question, feeling any kind of displeasure at all, is compelled to report it
as ‘anger’. Even within this limited scheme, however, it seems to have been vot-
ers who considered themselves ‘dissatisfied but not angry’ who were most im-
portant in securing Trump’s victory.17 Furthermore, when given the chance to
choose from a wider range of emotions, rather than placing themselves some-
where on a sliding ‘anger’ scale, in September 2016, 81 per cent of American
voters described themselves as happy, and 79 per cent as optimistic, compared
with 37 per cent as worried and, lowest of all, 14 per cent as angry.18
The available evidence does not suggest that we live in an age of anger, if by
that we mean that people are reporting feeling more ‘anger’ than they used to,
either relative to other emotion words, or in an absolute sense. However, we do
live in an age of anger in another sense: political discourse, including written
15 This and other issues concerning the meanings of ‘anger’ past and present are explored
in a podcast series of features, interviews and historical dramas, produced by the Queen
Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions in 2019: ‘The Sound of Anger’, Soundcloud,
https://soundcloud.com/user-357683788/sets/the-sound-of-anger.
16 C NN/ORC Poll on Views of Government, accessed 13 April 2019, https://www.cnn
.com/2015/12/29/politics/cnn-orc-poll-full-results-obama-approval/index.html;
‘Most Voters Are Still Angry – Rasmussen Reports,’ accessed 13 April 2019, http://
www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/january_2016
/most_voters_are_still_angry.
17 William Saletan, ‘Trump’s Voters Don’t Support Deportation, and Other Surprises from
the 2016 Exit Polls,’ Slate Magazine, 9 November 2016, https://slate.com/news-and
-politics/2016/11/debunking-myths-about-trump-voters-with-exit-polls.html.
18 ‘Anger’ was the least frequently chosen emotion for all groups, although the percentage
varied, with white college-educated voters the least likely to profess anger (10%), followed
by Hispanic working-class voters (11%), white working-class voters (18%) and then black
working-class voters (24%). ‘Topline. Kaiser Family Foundation/CNN Working-Class
Whites Report’, 20 September 2016, 2, http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2016/images/09/20
/kff_cnn_wcw_topline_final.-.day2._9_20.pdf.

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and broadcast journalism, and commentary on social media, is fascinated and

preoccupied with ‘anger’. This is one of the reasons why it is important to think
further about what this preoccupation means, and especially what this ‘anger’
is with which we wrestle today. What does this modern English term mean,
and what is the nature of its fascination for us?
3 Words for Feelings
The question of what the contemporary English word ‘anger’ actually means
is rarely addressed in popular discussions, and the term remains ambiguous.19
Does the term ‘anger’ refer to a mental feeling of frustration? To a hardwired
instinct for aggression against enemies? To a desire for revenge? To an out-
ward behaviour like scolding or shouting? To a whole family of feelings and
behaviours, perhaps including all of the above? Problems of multivalence and
misunderstanding arise even before we confront issues of translation from and
into other languages, past and present.
Two competing commentaries by scientists, published within days of the
election of Donald Trump in 2016, offer a useful way into contemporary dis-
agreements about the meaning of ‘anger’. The neuroscientist R. Douglas Fields
wrote a piece for the Scientific American blog explaining Trump’s victory with
reference to ‘the emotion of anger’. This supposed entity, for Fields, had a
singular evolutionary purpose, as ‘the brain’s threat detection mechanism’,
namely to put people into an inherited emotional state that helps ‘protect our
own tribe, and slaughter another tribe if necessary for our self-preservation’.20
Fields did not offer any evidence that voters were, in fact, in the grip of this
state, nor did he explain why an ancestral capacity for tribal slaughter resulted
in voting Republican for some people (under half of those who voted), but not
for the majority, in whom murderous rage apparently did not hold sway.
19 For some useful texts illustrating the wealth of ideas, and disagreements, that abound
in modern psychological attempts to define and explain anger and aggression, see
James R. Averill, Anger and Aggression: An Essay on Emotion (New York: Springer, 1982);
Carol Tavris, Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982);
Michael Potegal, Gerhard Stemmler, and Charles Spielberger, eds., International Handbook
of Anger: Constituent and Concomitant Biological, Psychological, and Social Processes (New
York: Springer, 2010).
20 R. Douglas Fields, ‘Trump’s Victory and the Neuroscience of Rage,’ Scientific American
Blog Network, 10 November 2016, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog
/trump-s-victory-and-the-neuroscience-of-rage/.

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Two days after the blog post by Fields promoting this stark view that ‘anger’
is the name of an irresistible evolved ‘fight’ mechanism, an op-ed for the
New York Times by the psychologist of emotion Lisa Feldman Barrett offered a
different view. For her, the term ‘anger’ was the name not of a single hard-wired
instinct, but rather of a ‘diverse population of experiences and behaviors’ in-
cluding bitterness, hostility, and rage, as well as wrath, grumpiness and scorn.
‘The varieties of anger’, wrote Feldman Barrett, ‘are endless’.21 This theoretical
approach to emotions as psychological constructions, in which language, edu-
cation and situated personal experience shape ‘core affect’ into many cultur-
ally specific forms, is one that has been championed for decades by Feldman
Barrett, James A. Russell and others.22 This approach is relatively genial to his-
torians of emotions – probably more so than versions of the theory of ‘basic
emotions’ championed by Paul Ekman and those with a similar outlook.23
Feldman Barrett’s reference to ‘angers’ in the plural is a useful corrective to
the idea that ‘anger’ names a single transhistorical emotion, as is another
recent scientific study arguing that ‘anger’ names a feeling state that should
be distinguished more carefully from related emotions such as ‘indignation’
and ‘resentment’.24
Studies in historical linguistics also support pluralism. Daria Izdebska has
explored the words for anger-like emotions in Old English and Middle English,
tracing the semantic histories of terms including yrre, gram, wod, wroth and
torn. Following Cliff Goddard, Izdebska criticises the attempt to capture the
mental lives of other cultures in modern English terms as a form of ‘termino-
logical ethnocentrism’.25 Anna Wierzbicka has also written prolifically about
21 Lisa Feldman Barrett, ‘The Varieties of Anger,’ The New York Times, 12 November 2016,
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/opinion/sunday/the-varieties-of-anger.html.
22 Agnes Moors, ‘Integration of Two Skeptical Emotion Theories: Dimensional Appraisal
Theory and Russell’s Psychological Construction Theory,’ Psychological Inquiry 28,
no. 1 (2017): 1–19; James A. Russell, ‘Core Affect and the Psychological Construction of
Emotion,’ Psychological Review 110, no. 1 (2003): 145–72; Carlos Crivelli et al., ‘The Fear
Gasping Face as a Threat Display in a Melanesian Society,’ Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences 113 (1 November 2016): 12403–07.
23 Ruth Leys, ‘How Did Fear Become a Scientific Object and What Kind of Object Is It?,’
Representations 110, no. 1 (2010): 66–104; Ruth Leys, The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and
Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
24 M. Miceli and C. Castelfranchi, ‘Anger and its Cousins,’ Emotion Review 11, no. 1 (2019):
1–26.
25 Daria Izdebska, ‘The Curious Case of TORN: The Importance of Lexical-Semantic
Approaches to the Study of Emotions in Old English,’ in Anglo-Saxon Emotions:
Reading the Heart in Old English Language, Literature and Culture, ed. Alice Jorgensen,
Frances McCormack, and Jonathan Wilcox (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 53–74 (58). See
also Caroline Gevaert, ‘The Anger is Heat Question: Detecting Cultural Influence on

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emotions from a linguistic point of view, making similar arguments, which are
captured in the title of her book, Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English
as a Default Language. In a chapter on ‘anger’, ‘disgust’ and Ekman’s theory of
basic emotions, Wierzbicka mentions several languages which lack any direct
equivalent to the English term ‘anger’, looking especially at Wut and Zorn in
German (which, incidentally, are both related to early English terms studied
by Izdebska).26
Further evidence of the instability of ‘anger’ can be found in anthropology.
One of the classic ethnographic studies of emotion in the twentieth century
was an account by Jean L. Briggs of the emotional dynamics of an Inuit settle-
ment in a remote arctic region. Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family
documented not only the prevailing emotional regime among the Utku people
but also Briggs’s attempts, and repeated failures, to conform to it.27 Briggs took
an interest in the emotional terminology of the Utku. For the sake of conve-
nience, she generally referred in her book to people displaying ‘anger’ or ‘bad
temper’. However, these English labels did not have direct equivalents in the
Utku dialect. Never In Anger was a book not only about a culture with a strong
apparent aversion to what Briggs and her American contemporaries in the
1960s called ‘anger’ but also about one with no equivalent concept of ‘anger’.
In a linguistic appendix to her study, Briggs suggested nine broad emotional
‘syndromes’, and arranged Utku terms under those headings. One of these
was ‘Ill Temper and Jealousy’, which encompassed eight different Utku terms,
five of which related to aggression and hostility, and three to possessiveness
the Conceptualization of Anger through Diachronic Corpus Analysis,’ in Perspectives

on Variation: Sociolinguistic, Historical, Comparative, ed. Nicole Delbecque, Johan van
der Auwera, and Dirk Geeraerts (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005), 195–208; Caroline
Gevaert, ‘The Evolution of the Lexical and Conceptual Field of ANGER in Old and
Middle English,’ in A Changing World of Words: Studies in English Historical Lexicography,
Lexicology and Semantics, ed. Javier E. Diaz Vera (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 275–99; Dirk
Geeraerts, Caroline Gevaert, and Dirk Speelman, ‘How Anger Rose: Hypothesis Testing in
Diachronic Semantics,’ in Current Methods in Historical Semantics, ed. Kathryn Allan and
Justyna A. Robinson (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 73–109.
26 Anna Wierzbicka, Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English as a Default Language
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), ch. 7; see also Anna Wierzbicka, ‘“Sadness” and
“Anger” in Russian: The Non-Universality of the So-Called “Basic Human Emotions,”’ in
Speaking of Emotions: Conceptualisation and Expression, ed. Angeliki Athanasiadou and
Elżbieta Tabakowska (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter 1998), 3–28; Anna Wierzbicka, Emotions
Across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
27 Jean L. Briggs, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1970), 74, 329.

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10 Dixon
or unhappiness of other kinds.28 The terms were largely to do with outward

behaviours, and Inuit languages seem not to have an equivalent category to
the modern English concept of ‘emotions’ at all, and hence their moral and
psychological beliefs about shouting, attacking, and hostility were not based
on the same model of the mind used in modern Anglophone psychology.29
It is also important to remember that modern English, just as much as
Old English, German, Utku and other languages, has more than one word
for anger-related emotions. In addition to ‘anger’, there are ‘ire’, ‘wrath’, ‘fury’,
‘vengeance’, ‘hatred’, ‘frustration’, ‘resentment’, ‘rage’, ‘bile’, ‘irritation’ and many
more. Samuel Johnson’s foundational 1755 dictionary sketched an intercon-
nected web of definitions. ‘Fury’ was, first, ‘madness’, and secondly ‘Rage;
passion of anger; tumult of mind approaching to madness’. In its turn ‘rage’
meant ‘violent anger, vehement fury’, while ‘anger’ was defined with a quota-
tion from John Locke, as ‘uneasiness or discomposure of the mind, upon the
receipt of any injury, with a present purpose of revenge’.30 Some authors in the
eighteenth century, including the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, used ‘re-
sentment’ rather than ‘anger’ as their favoured term for a strong and vengeful
frame of mind.31
We can form a further impression of the histories of these terms from the
millions of pages of historical English-language texts accessible via the Google
Books Ngram Viewer. A search for some of the more common English words
in this semantic network – ‘anger’, ‘rage’, ‘wrath’, ‘resentment’, and ‘fury’ – from
1750 to 2008 produces a graph showing three stages of linguistic usage (figure 1).
In the first stage, from around 1750 to 1850, ‘resentment’ is the most com-
monly used of the terms, with ‘anger’ and ‘wrath’ the least common.32 Between
the 1760s and the 1780s, ‘resentment’ is used well over twice as frequently as
‘anger’. Then, from 1850 to about 1965, ‘anger’ emerges as, and remains, the
28 Briggs, Never in Anger, 328–37.

29 Michael Fortescue, ‘The Semantic Domain of Emotion in Eskimo and Neighbouring
Languages,’ in The Lexical Typology of Semantic Shifts, ed. Päivi Juvonen and Maria
Koptjevskaja-Tamm (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 285–333.
30 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (London: Printed by
W. Strahan, for J. and P. Knapton; T. and T. Longman; C. Hitch and L. Hawes; A. Millar; and
R. and J. Dodsley, 1755), s.vv. ‘fury’, ‘rage’, ‘anger’.
31 Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Man (Edinburgh and London: John Bell and
G. G. J. & J. Robinson, 1788).
32 For a valuable article which pays attention to a range of terms used for sinful states of
passion, ire and resentment in early modern English letters, while giving interpretive
prominence to a somewhat reductive concept of ‘anger’, see Linda A. Pollock, ‘Anger and
the Negotiation of Relationships in Early Modern England,’ The Historical Journal 47,
no. 3 (September 2004): 567–90.

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figure 1 Graph generated by Google Books Ngram Viewer showing relative frequency of
‘anger’, ‘rage’, ‘wrath’, ‘fury’ and ‘resentment’ in English-language texts, 1750–2008.
most frequently used of the five terms, the rest of which gradually dwindle
in popularity. By 1965, ‘anger’ was used twice as often as the most popular of
the other words. Then, in the third and final stage, from the 1960s onwards,
‘anger’ rises steeply in frequency until it is about three times as frequent in
usage as the next most common term, ‘rage’.33 Although such evidence on its
own is suggestive rather than definitive, this picture is consistent with one in
which ‘anger’ emerged as a newly dominant psychological category in the late
nineteenth century, and then, from the 1960s until today, came to dominate
still further, in a way that has led to a relative impoverishment of the affective
vocabulary for feelings in the furious family in modern English usage.
So, historians of emotions can join forces with psychologists, linguists, and
anthropologists in arguing against the essentialism, ethnocentrism and anach-
ronism that is embodied in the assumption that the modern English word
‘anger’ names an unchanging, universal emotion. The cumulative destructive
case seems very strong. But how can we begin to make a more constructive
argument about how a history of this problematic and multivalent term could
be undertaken?
The method that I suggest is a kind of anatomical genealogy. It is anatomi-
cal in that it looks at the range of loosely connected phenomena that modern
users of the term ‘anger’ variously believe it refers to, and seeks to prise them
apart from each other. So, for instance, one component of the reality we need
to understand as historians of ‘anger’ is made up of the words, in English and
other languages, that ‘anger’ is supposed to be related to – whether as a syn-
onym, near-synonym, or translation. Then there are philosophical, religious
33 Google Ngram Viewer, accessed May 11, 2019, ‘anger, wrath, rage, resentment, fury’, case-
insensitive, 1750–2008, from corpus ‘English’, with smoothing of 3, https://books.google
.com/ngrams/.

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12 Dixon
and scientific concepts, such as the desire for revenge, or the evolution of ani-
mal instincts, or beliefs about morality and sinfulness, that have been used in
spelling out the meanings of the terms in the semantic network around ‘anger’.
Looking beyond the world of verbal reference, modern uses of ‘anger’ have
also had a visual component, in which the word is connected with images,
including representations of particular human facial expressions and bodily
gestures. Having used this anatomical approach to tease apart different com-
ponents, the method is genealogical in that it traces back, from the present,
the ancestry of each of these components. The main criterion for inclusion in
this suggested genealogy of ‘anger’ is demonstrable cultural ancestry, through
processes of transmission, translation and descent to modern referents of that
term. Anatomically separating these components from each other allows us to
look at their distinct histories, including considerable discontinuities, without
losing the focus which our interest in modern uses of ‘anger’ affords.
4 Ancient Ancestors: Revenge, Bloodlust, Pleasure, and Passion
Martha C. Nussbaum’s account of ‘anger’, in Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment,

Generosity, Justice, forms one recent link in a chain of philosophical thought
about revenge that we can trace back to the ancient world. Nussbaum’s defini-
tion of ‘anger’ is similar to John Locke’s, cited by Johnson in 1755, and both are
descended from ancient philosophical sources. Nevertheless, we should not
overstate the continuities, for reasons that will become clear when we look
in more detail at the key ancient texts themselves, including works by Homer,
Aristotle and Seneca.34 These ancient accounts focused on vengeful violence,
sometimes as something virtuous and pleasurable, sometimes as the result of
errors and diseases of the mind. In either case, the translation of certain an-
cient Greek and Latin terms as ‘anger’ in modern English has simultaneously
secured a superficial chain of genealogical descent, while repeatedly obscuring
deeper differences of meaning, connotation, experience, and worldview.
Nussbaum’s account of what ‘anger’ means today is built upon Aristotle’s
account of a passion he called orgē. The key components of orgē-like ‘anger’
for Nussbaum are not bodily arousal or facial expressions but thoughts, espe-
cially the belief that I or someone I care about has been wronged or injured,
combined with a crucial desire for ‘payback’ or revenge. For Nussbaum, the
34 In developing the analysis in this section, I have been helped especially by William V.
Harris, Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

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presence of ‘anger’ is something to be determined primarily by conceptual

analysis. If the mental state has the stipulated logical structure – perceived
injury, pain, and a desire for revenge – then it is a state of ‘anger’, and other-
wise not, regardless of whether the person looks angry, thinks they are angry or
behaves angrily.35
In wider contemporary discussions of ‘anger’ in politics and psychology, un-
like many philosophical discussions of the term, ‘revenge’ is rarely mentioned.
The idea of a hard-wired animal ‘fight’ response, although it can be linked to
ideas of revenge, need not be; at its heart is a more raw and unfocused aggres-
sion. The idea of revenge did not feature in the meanings of the anger-related
terms explored by Jean Briggs in her study of the Utku, nor is it prominent
in modern discussions of the power of political anger as a motor for protest
and activism. In the classical sources from which modern theorists of ‘anger’
most often claim descent, however, narratives of revenge, and related notions
of honour, were central. For those of us, myself included, who do not consider
the desire for revenge to be a major part – or frequently any part at all – of the
states we experience as ‘anger’ today, this is a major difference of meaning,
and a reason to resist Nussbaum’s idea that orgē and ‘anger’ name the same,
single state.
A further kind of discontinuity emerges when we turn to Homer. Although
modern commentators have sometimes suggested that the Iliad was a tale of
two episodes of ‘anger’, the first directed by Achilles at Agamemnon and the
second by Achilles at Hector, in fact neither element of the story is well un-
derstood in this way.36 At the opening of the Iliad, Achilles believes his honour
has been insulted by Agamemnon and, in retaliation, refuses to fight against
the Trojans. It was that insulted refusal and withdrawal that was called mênis
in the opening word of the poem. Mênis was an unusual term, used only twelve
times in the Iliad, eight to refer to one of the gods, and four to refer to Achilles’
antagonism towards Agamemnon.37 Mênis was a long-lasting cosmic enmity
35 M artha C. Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, and Justice (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 14–56. See also Thomas Dixon, ‘What Is Anger?
1. Martha Nussbaum,’ The History of Emotions Blog, 22 July 2016, https://emotionsblog
.history.qmul.ac.uk/2016/07/what-is-anger-1-martha-nussbaum/.
36 For a discussion of this interpretation, see Glenn W. Most, ‘Anger and Pity in Homer’s
Iliad,’ in Ancient Anger: Perspectives from Homer to Galen, ed. Susanna Braund and
Glenn W. Most (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 50–75.
37 It is possible to search and analyse the Greek terms used in the text via The Chicago
Homer, ‘a multilingual database that uses the search and display capabilities of electronic
texts to make the distinctive features of Early Greek epic accessible to readers with and
without Greek’, ed. Ahuvia Kahane, Martin Mueller, Craig Berry, and Bill Parod, accessed
12 May 2019, http://homer.library.northwestern.edu.

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14 Dixon
unavailable to normal mortals. One senses it could have gone on for the rest of
Achilles’ life if he had not had a change of heart. In that respect, mênis is not
well captured by ‘anger’, nor even by ‘wrath’ which suggests a more temporary
state. The mênis of Achilles seems more like a kind of cold hatred, or even
a cosmic, heroic sulk. Scholars including Leonard Muellner, have argued that
mênis differed from modern psychological ‘anger’ by referring to something
grander and, to us, weirder – a cosmic sanction for taboo behaviour. It is a
shame, given Muellner’s arguments to this effect, that his book on the subject
is titled The Anger of Achilles: Mênis in Greek Epic.38 An understandable de-
sire to engage modern readers by using emotional terms they recognise has
resulted in a title being chosen that contradicts the argument of the book and
collapses the considerable distance between our world and Homer’s.
Turning to the second half of the Iliad, Achilles is gripped by sorrow and
grief after the death of his beloved friend Patroclus at the hands of Hector.
Achilles’ grief drives him back to war, where he ultimately meets and kills
Hector. Achilles, sorrowing madly for Patroclus, tells Agamemnon to ‘call up
the wild joy of war’, vowing not to eat or drink until he has avenged the death
of his friend. ‘You talk of food? I have no taste for food – what I really crave is
slaughter and blood and the choking groans of men!’ Achilles is described as
‘yearning now to glut with Hector’s blood’ and he fights ‘like a frenzied god,
his heart racing with slaughter’. After capturing twelve young Trojans, whom
he will later burn alive as sacrifices on the funeral pyre of Patroclus, Achilles
returns eagerly to the fray, ‘insane to hack more flesh’. When Hector is defeated
and begs for his life, Achilles responds, ‘Would to god my rage, my fury would
drive me now to hack your flesh away and eat you raw – such agonies you have
caused me!’39
If ‘anger’ fails to capture the long-lasting, godlike hatred of mênis, it also
misses the mark here. ‘Anger’, or even ‘rage’, sound too tame, too normal, to de-
scribe the frenzied bloodlust of the grief-stricken Achilles. In fact, the mental
state of the grieving Achilles seems to me less like ‘anger’ and more like some-
thing observed by the anthropologists Michelle and Renato Rosaldo among
the head-hunting Ilongot tribe of the Philippines in the 1960s. The Ilongot used
38 Leonard Muellner, The Anger of Achilles: Mênis in Greek Epic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2004); see also Thomas R. Walsh, Fighting Words and Feuding Words:
Anger and the Homeric Poems (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005).
39 Homer, The Iliad, ed. Bernard Knox, trans. Robert Fagles (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1990), 493, 495, 506, 521, 553. Quotations from Book 19, ll. 179, 254–56; Book 20, ll. 92–93;
Book 21, ll. 21–22, 37; Book 22, ll. 408–09; Greek terms compared via The Chicago Homer
online and the Loeb Classical Library edition: Homer, The Iliad, ed. and trans. A. T. Murray,
rev. William F. Wyatt, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

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the term ‘liget’ to describe a painful, intense energy experienced in bereave-

ment which finds its catharsis in extreme, homicidal vengeance, in their case
‘taking the head’ of a man in another tribe.40 Among the ancient Greek terms
used in Homer’s epic to describe the sorrowful fighting fury of Achilles, the
terms menos, thumos and huperthumos referred to an energetic force, spirited
ferocity, or hyper-fury. The blood-thirsty Achilles who slaughters the Trojans
is driven by an unbearable, frenzied, grief which is not well captured by the
relatively tame modern psychological term ‘anger’.
We should give up on the quest for an ‘anger’-shaped key to the Iliad. Doing
so allows us to offer more historically sensitive readings of that text.41 We find,
in the character of Achilles, powerful mental states, a desire to avenge wrongs,
an ability for strong hatred, deep grief and frenzied violence. The mental states
of Achilles as imagined by Greek performers and their audiences almost three
thousand years ago, and the terms used to name them, are the distant ances-
tors of our modern emotional words and feelings, but we should beware of the
distortions produced by translating the text into modern psychological terms.
It is often better to use unfamiliar or even archaic terms, or to leave the key
terms in their original language, in order to demonstrate that discontinuity.42
So far, I have noted that modern notions about ‘anger’ do not tend to give
great prominence to revenge, while vengeance is the central focus of orgē, and
also that the passions of Achilles, sometimes described as ‘anger’, are better
described as a cosmic sulk followed by a grief-stricken bloodlust. A further dis-
continuity arises when we think about pleasure and pain. In Aristotle and the
Stoics, orgē was normally defined not, as one might expect, as a negative feel-
ing directed towards a past wrong, but rather as a state that looked forward to
a future good, namely the pleasure that would arise from the taking of revenge
on the perpetrator of the injury.43 It was not only that the revenge would be en-
joyable, but that even thinking about it in advance was a thrill. In his Rhetoric,
Aristotle looked back to the world of the Iliad, quoting from a speech in which
Achilles mourned the prevalence of strife in the world, referring to the ‘bitter
40 M ichelle Z. Rosaldo, Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The
Remaking of Social Analysis (London: Routledge, 1993), 1–21.
41 For a recent, complementary analysis of the emotional dynamics of the Iliad, see Rob
Boddice, A History of Feelings (London: Reaktion, 2019), 20–35.
42 Rob Boddice has made similar points, suggesting that sometimes emotion terms in other
languages are better left untranslated, and noting that modern English translations of
classical, and other, terms can be highly misleading, arguing that through such transla-
tions, ‘ancient historical writing has been made to serve presentist preoccupations’;
Boddice, History of Feelings, 35, 44–45.
43 Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness, 21.

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16 Dixon
gall [cholos], sweeter than dripping streams of honey, that swarms in people’s
chests and blinds like smoke’.44 Both Aristotle and Homer may have been using
poetic licence, but there is good reason to think they were describing some-
thing different from what people think of as ‘anger’ today, when they wrote of
the sweet sensual pleasures of cholos and orgē.
The longest and most influential ancient text in the genealogy of ideas
about vengeance, produced in the centuries after Aristotle, was De ira by the
Roman statesman and Stoic philosopher Seneca.45 The treatise was composed
in the first century ce, more than seven hundred years after the Iliad was writ-
ten down, four centuries after the works of Aristotle, and in Latin rather than
Greek. Nonetheless De ira was in the same cultural lineage as those earlier
works. Seneca quoted from both Homer and Aristotle, the latter repeatedly, and
his definition of ira had a certain amount in common with Aristotle’s orgē. For
Seneca, ira was ‘the desire to punish the person by whom you reckon you were
unjustly harmed’.46 The examples Seneca chose showed that ira, like orgē, was
focused primarily on revenge, and was an intense and powerful passion experi-
enced within the framework of an honour culture. Robert A. Kaster states that
Seneca’s ira may resemble ‘rage’ more than ‘anger’ in modern English usage,
while being synonymous with neither. I would add that ‘vengeance’ or ‘wrath’
might be closer. Again, however, differences between modern so-called ‘anger’
and ancient passions are collapsed by the decision made by modern transla-
tors, including Kaster himself, to render ira as ‘anger’ in their English versions
of Seneca’s text.47
Seneca’s treatise was uncompromising in its opposition to ira, in all its
forms, as a deranged and dangerous passion. Having listed some of its various
incarnations, Seneca concluded of ira that there were ‘a thousand other variet-
ies of this polymorphous evil’.48 For Seneca, as for the other Stoics, passions
were described as moral errors, cognitive mistakes and sicknesses of the soul,
44 Homer, The Iliad, ed. Knox, trans. Fagles, 471, Book 18, l. 128; Harris, Restraining Rage,
55–65.
45 On Seneca’s philosophy and its place alongside other ancient proponents of Stoic
ideas about the passions, see Lucius Anneaus Seneca, Anger, Mercy, Revenge, trans.
Robert A Kaster and Martha C. Nussbaum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010);
Harris, Restraining Rage, ch. 15; Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan
Disputations 3 and 4, ed. Margaret Graver (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002);
Margaret R. Graver, Stoicism and Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007);
Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
46 Seneca, Anger, Mercy, Revenge, 16, 1.2.3b.
47 Seneca, Anger, Mercy, Revenge, 99, n. 14.
48 Seneca, Anger, Mercy, Revenge, 18, 1.4.2–3.

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to be contrasted with reason and virtue, which were the only real goods. The
two main cognitive mistakes involved for Seneca in ira were, first, the belief
that a person had genuinely been harmed (that is their virtue or reason had
been diminished), and secondly the belief that revenge would make things
better. The first was almost always false, the latter absolutely always false,
Seneca believed.49 Another distinctive aspect of Seneca’s theory was that he
thought of ira not as a single experience but as an unfolding process, during
which a person’s conscious rational mind assented, in a blameworthy way, to
the impression that they had been harmed and should take revenge. This as-
sent allowed the fully fledged madness of ira to take over, and then all was lost,
from a Stoical point of view.50
We can be confident that ancient Greeks and Romans did not experience
the modern emotion of ‘anger’, partly because the overarching mental and
moral frameworks within which they lived, felt and were moved differed so
fundamentally from ours. Writers such as Homer and Euripides composed
their songs and dramas in an era before there was any generalised category in
which rage, wrath, grief and other movements of soul and body were grouped
together. From around the fourth century bce onwards that changed, and phi-
losophers began to group those movements together under the category of
pathē, or the ‘passions’ of the soul.51 This was an important milestone in the
history of Western thinking about passions, as was the emergence of a new
theoretical category of ‘the emotions’, over two millennia later, within which
theories of ‘anger’ have developed since the nineteenth century.52 Seneca’s
moral-philosophical understanding of ira as a passion, a mistake and a disease
makes it distinct from dominant modern understandings of ‘anger’ as a human
emotion, which tend to use the term as part of a psychological or medical rath-
er than moral or ethical framework, and if anything tend to see it positively as
natural and healthy. So, while in one sense Seneca’s De ira marked the begin-
ning of the prehistory of modern ‘anger’, and belongs in its ancestry, it is clear
that both in its understanding of the mind, and in the concepts it deploys of
49 Seneca, Anger, Mercy, Revenge, 14–34, Book 1 as a whole represents a statement of the
Stoic view, which contradicts the Aristotelian view that the desire for revenge, in modera-
tion, can be rational and virtuous.
50 Seneca, Anger, Mercy, Revenge, 34–37, 2.1–2.4.
51 Harris, Restraining Rage, 84–87, 401–02.
52 On the long history of the meanings of ‘passions’ in comparison with other terms, in-
cluding ‘affections’ and ‘emotions’, see Juanita Feros Ruys, Michael W. Champion, and
Kirk Essary, eds, Before Emotion: The Language of Feeling, 400–1800 (New York: Routledge,
2019); Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological
Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Dixon, ‘“Emotion”: The History
of a Keyword in Crisis.’.

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18 Dixon
honour, status, vengeance, madness and reason, it offers a map of minds that
were different from our own.
5 Visualising Rage: Scenarios, Bodies, Faces
In the history of emotions, the history of ideas meets the history of the body.
As we continue to pull apart the components of modern ‘anger’, the history of
visibly enraged human forms, from the Middle Ages to the present, reinforces
the sense of discontinuity that has already emerged from examining the ances-
tries of words and ideas. The physical performances and gestures that have ac-
companied, embodied and made visible irate passions and angry emotions are
not best thought of either as secondary expressions of something autonomous
and mental, nor as simple physical reflexes. As Monique Scheer has put it, such
bodily movements ‘are more fruitfully thought of as habits emerging where
bodily capacities and cultural requirements meet’. Emotions change over time,
Scheer points out, not only because the expectations, words, and concepts –
verbal and intellectual machinery of the kind that I have been surveying so
far in this essay – evolve, but also because ‘the practices in which they are em-
bodied, and bodies themselves, undergo transformation’.53 The genealogy of
bodily and visible aspects of ire, wrath, rage and anger bear out these observa-
tions. The enraged body is as historically constituted as the irate mind.
Those of us living in the age of modern psychology are habituated to the
idea, forcefully made by both Charles Darwin and William James in the late
Victorian period, that our emotions, in some sense, are identical with their
embodiments. Indeed, it may be our immersion in that thought-world that
makes it hard for some of us to accept a conceptual definition of ‘anger’ like
Nussbaum’s, which practically ignores bodily dimensions. Darwin wrote, in his
1872 book about expression, that ‘Most of our emotions are so closely connect-
ed with their expression, that they hardly exist if the body remains passive’.
‘So a man may intensely hate another’, Darwin went on, ‘but until his bodily
frame is affected, he cannot be said to be enraged’.54 Similarly, William James
53 Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have
a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion,’ History and Theory 51,
no. 2 (2012): 193–220 (202, 220); see also Dolores Martin-Moruno and Beatriz Pichel, eds.,
Emotional Bodies: The Historical Performativity of Emotions (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press 2019).
54 Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: Murray,
1872), 239; see also Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 159–79; Thomas Dixon, Weeping
Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 185–98.

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insisted in 1884 that the bodily changes that occur do not express an emo-
tion, but are the emotion. Without a flushed face, dilated nostrils, clenched
teeth and a vigorous impulse to action, James reasoned, there can be no rage,
merely some pallid and purely intellectual state which could not be considered
an emotion.55
Through the work of Paul Ekman and his colleagues in the later twentieth
century, a new, distinct theory of ‘basic emotions’ became widely known, ac-
cording to which each of a small number of supposedly universal emotions, in-
cluding one called ‘anger’, was an affect programme with its own physiological
fingerprint and facial expression.56 For modern basic emotions theorists, each
episode of ‘anger’ is a fleeting phenomenon combining a state of physiological
arousal, interpreted as an evolved ‘fight’ response, with a characteristic facial
expression. This is a key tenet of the basic emotions faith: each true emotion
has a distinctive and universal facial expression. However, even basic emotion
theorists use at least two different ‘anger’ faces in their experiments: a wide-
eyed, pursed-lipped one and also a squinty-eyed, teeth-baring one (figure 2).
Other studies use so-called ‘anger’ faces that are different from either of these,
for instance combining pursed lips with squinting eyes or bared teeth with
wide eyes.57 This fact already undermines the strongest form of the claim that
‘anger’ is the name of a single basic emotion. The theory is further undermined
figure 2
Two anger faces from the ‘NimStim’ set of facial
expressions, posed by actors and photographed for
use in psychology experiments. Image cropped from
FSTC: Face Stimulus and Tool Collection, accessed
April 15, 2019, https://rystoli.github.io/FSTC.html.
55 William James, ‘What is an Emotion?,’ Mind 9 (1884), 188–205 (194); see also Dixon, From
Passions to Emotions, 204–30.
56 Paul Ekman and Daniel Cordaro, ‘What is Meant by Calling Emotions Basic,’ Emotion
Review 3, no. 4 (2011): 364–70; Crivelli et al., ‘The Fear Gasping Face’; Potegal, Stemmler,
and Spielberger, eds, International Handbook of Anger; Leys, Ascent of Affect.
57 F STC: Face Stimulus and Tool Collection, accessed 15 April 2019, https://rystoli.github.
io/FSTC.html; Nim Tottenham et al., ‘The NimStim Set of Facial Expressions: Judgments
from Untrained Research Participants,’ Psychiatry Research 168, no. 3 (2009): 242–49;
José-Miguel Fernández-Dols and James A. Russell, eds, The Science of Facial Expression
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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20 Dixon
by empirical studies that have found that the production and recognition of a
supposedly universal ‘anger’ face is not, in fact, universal.58
Our faces and bodies undoubtedly have a role not only in communicating
but also in creating and maintaining our feelings, but it is not a simple role,
and history can be used to contextualise and critique any reductive physicalist
approach to emotions and their expression. An arrangement of the face, like
a word in a language, takes its meaning from both its cultural history and its
immediate context. In real life, we encounter a facial expression not in posed,
immobile isolation, but as attached to a particular body, of a particular person,
who is doing and saying particular things, some of whose recent life story we
typically know. The face is rarely the dominant factor in these complex situa-
tions, and historically the focus on the individual face as the key to emotional
legibility is a recent, Western development. The fact that each historical era, up
to and including our own, has produced and codified its own different bodily
language of expression, substantially different from what went before, backed
up with the latest theories, and communicated in different visual media, is an
argument against the universality of any of them. Here again history can col-
laborate with the sciences in crafting a more realistic theory of emotions.59
We can trace a rich strand of the visual prehistory of anger-related states
starting with medieval Christian visions of ira as one of the deadly sins.60 The
Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch depicted ira within a cycle of the seven dead-
ly sins, and the four last things – death, judgement, heaven and hell. His table-
top painting, produced around 1500, portrayed passions not primarily through
58 For informed empirical and theoretical perspectives on the psychology of facial ex-
pression, see Sherri C. Widen, ‘Children’s Interpretation of Facial Expressions: The
Long Path from Valence-Based to Specific Discrete Categories,’ Emotion Review 5, no. 1
(2013): 72–77; Potegal, Stemmler, and Spielberger, eds, International Handbook of Anger,
Part III; Fernández-Dols and Russell, Science of Facial Expression; James M. Carroll and
James A. Russell, ‘Do Facial Expressions Signal Specific Emotions? Judging Emotion from
the Face in Context,’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70, no. 2 (1996): 205–18.
59 On the further potential for such collaborations, see a forthcoming special section
of Emotion Review on the history of emotions, to be published in 2020, edited by Rob
Boddice.
60 On the history of the idea of bad thoughts and deadly sins as developed in early Christian
thought, see Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian
Temptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. chs 22 and 23; for a wider discus-
sion of anger as a ‘deadly sin,’ including Christian, philosophical and Buddhist perspec-
tives, see Robert A. F. Thurman, Anger: The Seven Deadly Sins (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2004). For a substantial and wide-ranging discussion of anger-like states in con-
nection with medieval and early modern humours, passions, bodies and faces, see Elena
Carrera, ‘Anger and the Mind-Body Connection in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine,’
in Emotions and Health, 1200–1700, ed. Elena Carrera (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 95–146.

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facial expressions, nor even bodily gestures, but instead through everyday
scenes. The scenario for ira shows two drunken men brawling outside a tavern.
A woman is trying keep them apart. The man on the left is wearing a piece of
furniture, presumably thrown at him by his antagonist, who is carrying a drink,
and brandishing his sword. This is was a recognisable image of ira in medieval
Europe, and was part of a warning against sinful behaviour that could lead to
hell. Bosch’s painting was, then, a work of religious instruction and social com-
mentary.61 In the following centuries, many European artists followed Bosch’s
example, depicting ira as a propensity to hot-headed, often drunken violence.
In the 1620s the Flemish painter Adriaen Brouwer represented ira in the figure
of a man drawing his sword, at the same time as disturbing a table and jug in
what appears to be the interior of a tavern. It is the scenario as a whole rather
than the face that tells the story.62
Leonardo da Vinci developed his thoughts about painting the passions
in the notebooks he kept in the 1530s and 1540s, which were published as a
Treatise on Painting the following century. In the section on how to depict una
figura irata – an irate figure – Leonardo followed in the moralistic tradition
of depicting ira as a situation rather than a feeling. The irate man should be
shown, he wrote, holding another man down on the ground, ‘by the hair of his
twisted head, his knees on the other’s ribs, and his right arm raising his fist on
high’. Leonardo specified further that the irate man’s hair should stand on end,
his teeth be clenched, and his neck swollen.63 It was as if Seneca’s raging mad-
man were taking part in Bosch’s drunken brawl.
There is, then, some continuity between ancient, medieval and Renaissance
depictions of the visible varieties of ira. They focus on a violent situation and a
moral narrative of sin, vice and punishment. The key moment of discontinuity
in this story arrives in the seventeenth century in the work of Charles Le Brun,
a prominent figure in the court of Louis XIV. As director of artistic education,
61 For a fuller discussion of the image and its meanings, see Laura D. Gelfand, ‘Social Status
and Sin: Reading Bosch’s Prado Seven Deadly Sins and Four Last Things Painting,’ in The
Seven Deadly Sins: From Communities to Individuals, ed. Richard Newhauser (Leiden: Brill,
2007), 229–56; Henry Luttikhuizen, ‘Through Boschian Eyes: An Interpretation of the
Prado Tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins,’ in Sin in Medieval and Early Modern Culture:
The Tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins, ed. Richard Newhauser (York: York Medieval Press,
2012), 261–81; Larry Silver, Hieronymus Bosch (New York: Abbeville Press, 2006), 305–18.
62 Jane Kromm, ‘Anger’s Marks: Expressions of Sin, Temperament and Passion,’ Netherlands
Yearbook for History of Art / Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 60, no. 1 (2010): 35–51
(discussion of Brouwer at 45–47).
63 Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting: Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270, trans.
A. Philip McMahon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), 150–51, 156; Leonardo
da Vinci, A Treatise on Painting, trans. John Francis Rigauld (London: Nichols, 1835), 94.

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22 Dixon
Le Brun gave lectures, one of which was about the way that the philosophical
painter should go about representing the passions of the soul. The lecture was
delivered at the Royal Academy of Painting in 1668 and, in its published from,
became the bible of expression for artists in Europe. Like Leonardo, Le Brun
wanted to apply scientific principles – in his case borrowed from the philoso-
pher René Descartes’s theory of the passions – to the art of painting. It is to
Charles Le Brun that we can trace back the modern project of matching indi-
vidual emotion words to discrete, static, detached faces.64
For Le Brun, the aim of the painter was to show the ‘movements of the heart’
and the ‘passions of the soul’ through the faces of their figures. The eyebrows
were all-important. In mild and gentle passions like wonder and love, the eye-
brows moved upwards. In the wild and cruel passions, the eyebrows sloped
downwards, towards the beating heart. Colère, the French term usually used for
the sin of ira, and often translated as ‘anger’ today, came into the wild and cruel
category. Le Brun gave a description both of the passion and its expression.
He described colère as a mixture of pain and courage in which an injured soul
withdraws into itself but also rouses itself to vengeance. This all showed in the
face in an appropriately complicated way. There were enflamed eyes, grinding
teeth, and hair standing on end, along with foaming at the mouth and the alter-
nate raising and lowering of the contracted eyebrows. Also original to Le Brun,
as far as I can discover, is the idea that in colère the mouth should be closed in
the middle while the lips part in both corners, to reveal a ‘cruel and disdain-
ful grin’ (figure 3 shows an eighteenth-century rendition of this). Le Brun, of
course, produced visual images too, showing how to produce his renditions
of the facial geometry of the passions, including not only ‘la Colère’ but also
stronger, distinct feelings, including hatred, jealousy, despair and madness.65
There are three points to note about Le Brun’s lecture and the associated
faces of ire, rage and resentment it promoted. First, as I have already suggest-
ed, this was an innovation that marks the beginning of a tradition seeking to
match faces with emotion words. Secondly, however, this is a far cry from the
basic emotion of ‘anger’ of Ekman and his colleagues in the twentieth and
64 Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions: The Origin and Influence of Charles Le
Brun’s Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1994); Colin Jones, The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014); Lucy Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in
Nineteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Stephanie
Ross, ‘Painting the Passions: Charles LeBrun’s Conférence sur l’expression,’ Journal of the
History of Ideas 45, no. 1 (1984): 25–47.
65 Quotations are taken from the translations of the text included in Montagu, The
Expression of the Passions, 126–28.

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figure 3
The face of a bearded man
expressing anger. Etching in the
crayon manner by W. Hebert,
c.1770, after Charles Le Brun. Credit:
Wellcome Collection. CC BY
twenty-first centuries. For Le Brun there are several distinct ire-like passions,
all of which differ in definition, intensity and expression from modern ‘anger’.
Thirdly, from the point of view of the history of the body and its representa-
tions, it is crucial to note that, for all its philosophical precision at the time,
from a later historical perspective, Le Brun’s face of colère seems a physical
impossibility. The lips need to meet firmly in the middle but open at both the
lower corners, which are turned down in a kind of scowl, while the eyebrows
should be knitted in a frown while also somehow lifting to show wide-open,
bulbous eyes. Le Brun seems to have allowed his devotion to his theory to over-
ride his commitment to naturalism, which may also be true when it comes to
the strangely unnatural facial poses struck by actors that are the stock-in-trade
of modern-day basic emotion experiments. Nonetheless the Le Brun colère
face had a long and influential history and the Scottish neurologist and theo-
rist of expression, Charles Bell, produced a very similar configuration in his
depiction of ‘rage’ two centuries later, even though the theory behind the face
was different, with an emphasis on animal behaviour, respiration and the flar-
ing of the nostrils.66
66 For Bell’s accounts of anger and rage, see Charles Bell, The Anatomy and Philosophy of
Expression as Connected with the Fine Arts, 3rd ed. (London: Murray, 1844), 94–95, 120–22,
175–77, 188–89; for wider discussions of Bell’s contributions to the history of expression,

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24 Dixon
Bell’s writings were a key reference point for Charles Darwin during the de-
cades of gestation of his pioneering 1872 book on The Expression of the Emotions
in Man and Animals. Darwin took from Bell the idea that actions such as baring
the teeth or flaring the nostrils came to be associated with animal passions by
their usefulness in carrying out related actions such as charging at, or biting,
an enemy.67 This idea of ancestral animal rage was at the heart of Darwin’s
account of human hatred and indignation. As he put it in the introduction to
his book:
With mankind some expressions, such as the bristling of the hair under
the influence of extreme terror, or the uncovering of the teeth under that
of furious rage, can hardly be understood, except on the belief that man
once existed in a much lower and animal-like condition.68
Darwin took a particular interest in the ability, which he interpreted as an ex-

pression of defiance, to raise the lip on just one side to reveal a canine tooth.
Darwin thought that this curious lip curl (of the kind that later became Elvis
Presley’s trademark) revealed humanity’s animal ancestry. Additionally,
Darwin, who believed there was a hierarchy of human races, with white
Europeans at the top, speculated that ‘this animal-like expression may be more
common with savages than with civilized races’, although he had no evidence
that it was.69
The only illustration in Darwin’s chapter on hatred and anger (figure 4)
shows a woman (not identified in the text, but in fact Mary Rejlander, wife of
the photographer Oscar Rejlander, who provided many of the ground-breaking
see Hartley, Physiognomy, ch. 2; Philip Shaw, Suffering and Sentiment in Romantic Military
Art (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 184–207; Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘The Art and Science
of Seeing in Medicine: Physiognomy 1780–1820,’ in Medicine and the Five Senses, ed.
William Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 122–33;
L. S. Jacyna, ‘Bell, Sir Charles (1774–1842),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online
edition, 3 January 2008; Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 168–75, 180–85; Dixon, Weeping
Britannia, 130–33.
67 For a fuller discussion of Darwin’s theory of expression and its sources in earlier theo-
ries, see Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 159–79; Dixon, Weeping Britannia, 185–98; Paul
White, ‘Darwin Wept: Science and the Sentimental Subject,’ Journal of Victorian Culture
16, no. 2 (2011): 195–213; Paul White, ‘Darwin’s Emotions: The Scientific Self and the
Sentiment of Objectivity,’ Isis 100, no. 4 (2009): 811–26; Gregory Radick, ‘Darwin’s Puzzling
Expression,’ Comptes rendus biologies 333, no. 2 (2010): 181–87; Tiffany Watt Smith, On
Flinching: Theatricality and Scientific Looking from Darwin to Shell Shock (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014).
68 Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 12.
69 Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 239, 249–53.

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figure 4
Plate IV from Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man
and Animals, 250.
photographic illustrations for the book) allegedly, but not very convincingly,
performing the one-sided canine sneer of indignation, along with another
photograph, of a young child crying and frowning at the same time, to illus-
trate the combination of anger or rage with ‘misery’.70 Darwin used no image
resembling either the Le Brun or Bell ‘rage’ face or the various different modern
posed ‘anger’ faces used in experiments in recent decades. The body was more
important than the face for Darwin, in his attempts to understand hatred and
rage. He believed that the hair could stand on end in states of extreme rage,
and terror, and that this human expression was a bit like a porcupine who will
erect its spines and charge backwards into an enemy, or a gorilla with its erect
crest of hair, its dilated nostrils, and its ‘terrific yells’.71
Such embodied relics of ancestral rage, Darwin thought, became especially
visible in those with weaker powers of inhibition, including children and the
insane, whose animal selves were closer to the surface. As a parent, Darwin had
observed how naturally children took to biting when ‘in a passion’: ‘It seems as
instinctive in them as in young crocodiles, who snap their little jaws as soon
as they emerge from the egg’.72 In the notes he kept about the development of
his first son, Darwin observed that at the age of two years and three months,
the child ‘became a great adept at throwing books or sticks, &c., at anyone who
70 Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 231, 250; on the identification of the sneering woman
as Mary Rejlander see Phillip Prodger, Darwin’s Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory
of Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 191–93.
71 Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 69, 93–97, 143.
72 Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 243.

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26 Dixon
offended him; and so it was with some of my other sons. On the other hand, I
could never see a trace of such aptitude in my infant daughters; and this makes
me think that a tendency to throw objects is inherited by boys’.73 Such emo-
tional habits were, for Darwin, of no use in the modern world, but they made
humanity’s animal ancestry visible. In this way Darwin connected anecdotal
and culturally specific ideas about emotions and gender in nineteenth-century
rural Kent with his natural-historical speculations about their deep evolution-
ary past.
Darwin differed from modern basic emotion theorists of ‘anger’ in several
ways. The passions and feelings Darwin described in the chapter of his book
on hatred and rage did not correspond to a single emotion. The emotions there
fell into at least four categories – long-standing hatred; animal rage; indigna-
tion, or ‘anger’; and what Darwin called sneering or defiance. Darwin made
closer comparisons with the bodily and facial configurations of other species
than is usually attempted by basic emotion theorists today – the dog’s snarl,
the porcupine’s charge, the gorilla’s yell – and at the same time put less ex-
clusive emphasis on the face. He certainly did not believe there was just one
facial expression that universally conveyed a single emotion called ‘anger’, nor
for that matter did he think that ‘expressions’ had evolved for the purpose of
expressing emotions.74 In theory, Darwin did hope to show that forms of rage,
anger and indignation were exhibited in similar ways throughout the world.
However, his own commitment to accurate observation and his sense of the
immense variety of the natural and human worlds meant that he was forever
undermining his own attempts at universalism. The outward signs were varied
and did not amount to a single manner of exhibiting anything. Under the in-
fluence of rage, defiance or indignation, a person, on Darwin’s account, might
go red – even purple – in the face – or conversely they might become deadly
pale. Their heart might be accelerated, or disturbed, in its beating. And other
aspects, such as bodily trembling, grinding of teeth, quivering nostrils, foam-
ing at the mouth, erect hair, frantic muscular action or the revealing of a single
canine tooth, happened sometimes in bouts of rage, but not always, and not
for everyone.
In fact, in some respects, reading Darwin on rage is more like reading Seneca
on ira than it is like reading either Le Brun on the passions or Ekman on anger.
Darwin is part of a parallel but distinct line of descent of Western ideas about
the body. Darwin’s description of the enraged man has some striking similari-
ties with Seneca’s description of the man afflicted by ira. Darwin, as we have
73 Charles Darwin, ‘A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,’ Mind 2, no. 7 (1877), 285–94: 287–88.
74 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 159–79.

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seen, refers to human hair standing on end in rage and terror, to foaming at
the mouth – especially among the insane in cases of extreme rage – and also
to grinding the teeth, stamping on the ground, and even rolling around on the
floor and biting, the latter among children and young apes.75 Similarly, Seneca’s
irate man, having lost his reason, will display a flushed red face, quivering lips,
grinding teeth, hair standing on end, cracking of joints and the tendency to
clap his hands and stamp on the ground.76 There is perhaps more continuity
here, in the teeth, hair, feet and mouth of the enraged body, across almost two
millennia of Western thought, than there is between Darwin’s theory of ex-
pression and the ideas of modern basic emotion theorists, less than a century
later, with their belief in a small number of evolved universal emotions with
discrete and fixed singular facial expressions. And as someone whose emotions
were formed in the late twentieth century, I cannot recognise my own anger in
the mouth-foaming, hair-raising, knuckle-cracking, teeth-grinding passions of
either Seneca or Darwin. My body has never expressed an emotion in those
ways. The question then, to which I now return in the conclusion, is how best
to understand both the continuities and the discontinuities in the ancestry of
the components of modern ‘anger’.
6 Conclusion: The Genealogical Anatomy of ‘Anger’
Writing in 2001, the American psychologist of emotion Robert Plutchik noted

that ‘anger’, along with ‘fear’ and ‘sadness’, was one of only three emotion
words to appear on every major list of purportedly basic emotions.77 As one of
the most popular candidates for ‘basic’ status, ‘anger’ represents a challenging
category to approach from a pluralist, constructivist standpoint. This essay has
done so by marshalling historical evidence against the idea that ‘anger’ names
any singular or universal emotion, while also arguing, constructively, that we
can nonetheless shed light on the topic by excavating the separate but related
histories of the words, thoughts, behaviours, feelings and bodily states which
are among the leading components of modern ‘anger’.
This argument – that the reification of ‘anger’ as a singular transhistori-
cal emotion should be avoided – is accepted in theory by most historians of
75 Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 241, 244–45.

76 Seneca, Anger, Mercy, Revenge, 14, 1.1.
77 Robert Plutchik, ‘The Nature of Emotions: Human Emotions Have Deep Evolutionary
Roots, a Fact That May Explain their Complexity and Provide Tools for Clinical Practice,’
American Scientist 89, no. 4 (2001), 344–50 (349).

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28 Dixon
emotions. In practice, however, its implications are rarely followed through.

So, for instance, in their pioneering study of the history of anger in America,
Carol Z. Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, while refusing to offer a definition of
‘anger’, and warning against reification, nonetheless described the term’s
meaning in singular and biologically grounded terms as ‘an emotion’ related
to the ‘fight’ response. They disown the view that ‘it has existed, unchang-
ing, throughout human history’, yet they set out to show how ‘its meaning’,
in the singular, ‘has evolved’. This notion that anger constitutes an ‘it’ already
undermines the professed denial that ‘it’ is a singular entity.78 Similarly, the
title and subtitle of a valuable collection of historical studies edited by Barbara
Rosenwein in 1998 – Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of An Emotion in the Middle
Ages – reinforce the idea that ‘anger’ is the name of ‘an emotion’, singular, while
a new book by Rosenwein, due for publication in 2020 – Anger: The Conflicted
History of an Emotion – seems to risk reification in the same way.79
This essay has urged, instead, a more scrupulous avoidance of reification,
pointing to the distortions involved in projecting a supposedly singular entity
onto past sources. There have been multiple languages of furious feeling, con-
cepts of vengeance and passion, and conventions of enraged facial and bodily
performance, all of which form part of a complex and plural ancestry for our
modern emotional lives. It is just as important when dealing with sources writ-
ten in modern English as it is when interpreting texts written in other lan-
guages and periods to avoid distorting the meanings of pre-twentieth-century
historical actors by interpreting their references to ‘fury’, ‘resentment’, ‘dis-
appointment’, ‘warmth’, ‘heat’, ‘passion’ or even ‘anger’, as statements about
‘anger’, as understood in a post-1960 psychological sense.80
78 Carol Zisowitz Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in
America’s History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 15–16.
79 Barbara H. Rosenwein, ed., Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Barbara H. Rosenwein, Anger: The Conflicted
History of an Emotion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020); advance publicity on the
Yale University Press website implies that the book will treat ‘anger’ as the name of a sin-
gular emotion whose story can be told from Buddha to the present.
80 There are, as I read them, tendencies towards such distortion in two excellent scholarly
works about anger-like emotions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, name-
ly Nicole Eustace, Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American
Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American
History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia by University of North Carolina Press, 2008),
esp. ch. 4; and Linda M. Grasso, The Artistry of Anger : Black and White Women’s Literature
in America, 1820–1860 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 10,
which refers to a singular ‘anger paradigm’ as the interpretive key to the various texts
under consideration. A similar comment is made above about Pollock, ‘Anger and the
Negotiation of Relationships.’

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Because language helps to constitute, and does not merely stick labels onto,
emotional experiences, changes in the words and concepts used across time
and space for emotional states represent more than mere lexical plurality.
Such changes reveal experiential plurality. There are multiple discontinuities
that hold apart the experience of, for instance, committing the sin of ira and
fearing for the eternal consequences of doing so in fifteenth-century Europe,
and expressing the modern emotion of ‘anger’ in a way that resembles the car-
toon character of that name inside the brain of the fictional Riley in the 2015
Disney Pixar movie Inside Out. The Ekman-Pixar world has no place for sins
and punishments, nor for reason, virtue or conscience.81 To experience and
express modern ‘anger’, in the absence of those concepts, is to have a differ-
ent experience from those who were gripped by ira in an earlier age and who
saw it in moral scenarios rather than isolated faces. It is not to experience the
same emotion but in a different, more ‘modern’ way. That was also the point
of my analyses above setting out the differences between modern ideas of
‘anger’ and the ancient passions and pleasures conjured up by Homer, Aristotle
and Seneca.
This pluralist position invites two potential objections. Critics of the ap-
proach advocated here might reasonably point towards continuities that do
exist, for instance between Seneca and Darwin or even between Homer’s nar-
rative and some emotions in the present, and challenge the pluralist to accept
that there must be shared emotional capacities underlying those continuities
which mean that modern individuals, including historians of emotions, can
have some insight into the emotional lives of others who lived in the past, by
virtue of a shared humanity. Different scholars will have different views on
this, but my own response is to agree with this imagined critic. I believe there
is a shared humanity that means I can try to empathise with and understand
the emotional experiences of others, even those in distant cultures and eras.
It may be that there are biological and neurological affinities shared among all
humans that mean they can expect to have a comparable, while by no means
identical, range of emotional experiences. However, this general and some-
what undefined belief in a shared human capacity for feelings is a long way
from a commitment to the idea that ancient and modern experiences are ex-
pressions of a single set of ‘emotions’, defined and theorised in modern terms.
Even if there are some physiologically grounded dimensions to anger-like,
emotion-like experiences in all cultures, that is very different from the claim
81 Thomas Dixon, ‘Inside Out and the Democracy of the Modern Mind,’ The Conversation
(UK edition), 28 July 2015, https://theconversation.com/inside-out-and-the-democracy
-of-the-modern-mind-45202.

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30 Dixon
that there is a universal emotion that exists across all historical periods and
which is picked out successfully by the contemporary English-language psy-
chological construct ‘anger’. I can believe in a set of constraints on the range
of emotional experiences available to homo sapiens by virtue of their evolved
bodies, without believing in the truth of some particular theory of emotions as
set out in late-twentieth-century Anglophone psychology. Additionally, there
may be cultural universals that can be identified independently of questions
of hard-wired physiology. For instance, it is clear that many cultures make use
of images of heat, fire, eruption, boiling and explosion when describing certain
hot and displeasing states. To recognise a commonality of such metaphors is
not to subscribe to a theory of basic emotions.82
The second, harder, challenge to the pluralist historian of emotion is to ex-
plain how, if ‘anger’ does not refer to a real and discrete human emotion that
has existed in all societies, historians are to select the materials for inclusion
in their histories of ‘anger’. This is the real import of the question posed by the
title of this essay. One possible solution, and the one that has been implicitly
or explicitly adopted by almost all historians of ‘anger’ previously, is to stipu-
late a definition of ‘anger’ in the present (even a vague one like that offered by
Stearns and Stearns, who say it is related to a biological ‘fight’ response) and
then to look for anything in past cultures and other languages that seems to
resemble that definition closely enough. William V. Harris attempts something
like this in his book Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical
Antiquity. On the one hand, Harris argues strongly for linguistic, conceptual
and experiential plurality, and tries to keep this plurality in readers’ minds by
referring to ‘anger-like emotions’ and ‘angry passions’ rather than to ‘anger’
in the singular. On the other hand, however, to justify his inclusion of a wide
range of different states with various Greek and Latin names within his remit,
Harris offers a stipulative definition of the core phenomenon he is interested
in: ‘a vigorous, temporary, emotional condition in which the subject desires the
object’s harm, and/or desires to attack the object with words, because of some
perceived failing’.83
82 Zoltán Kövecses, ‘Anger: Its Language, Conceptualization, and Physiology in the Light
of Cross-Cultural Evidence,’ in Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World, ed.
John R. Taylor and Robert E. MacLaury (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995), 181–196; Zoltán Kövecses,
‘Cross-Cultural Experience of Anger: A Psycholinguistic Analysis,’ in International
Handbook of Anger, ed. Potegal, Stemmler, and Spielberger, 157–74; Gevaert, ‘The Anger Is
Heat Question’.
83 Harris, Restraining Rage, 40. A valuable recent article about Thomas Aquinas’s views
on ira and ‘payback’ follows a similar pattern – offering a persuasive statement of the
plurality of meanings of the term ‘anger’ and the non-existence of any objective reality

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Like all attempts to define ‘anger’ in a way that can be historically gener-
alised, Harris’s quickly falls apart. Let me mention three problems. First,
people – as Harris himself repeatedly points out – in both the ancient world
and the present can be gripped by slow-burning anger-like states over long pe-
riods of time, such as mênis or hatred. Such passions are not necessarily either
‘vigorous’ or ‘temporary’. Secondly, Harris’s inclusion of a desire for revenge
(whether physical or verbal), like Nussbaum’s similar insistence, discussed
above, excludes many ideas and experiences categorised as anger, fury and ire,
ancient and modern, which do not include such a desire. Thirdly and finally,
both Harris and Nussbaum offer definitions which fail to mention the bodily
and behavioural elements – the red face, the clenched jaw, the flared nostrils,
the raised voice – that many of us in a post-Darwinian and post-Jamesian world
might consider pretty central to any experience we would want to label ‘anger’.
So, if we cannot assume that ira, or orgē, or yrre, or Zorn are the same thing
as ‘anger’, and if we are unable to define ‘anger’ in a satisfactorily generalisable
way, then what is left as a criterion for inclusion in our history of anger? The
present essay has suggested the answer to that question by thinking of mod-
ern emotional states as complex, emergent, multi-component realities that
can be subjected to an analysis combining techniques of anatomy and geneal-
ogy. In Rembrandt’s painting of an anatomy lesson, the students look on as
their teacher demonstrates the structure of the human body by pulling apart
its bones, nerves, organs and sinews.84 I think of historians of emotions doing
something similar, treating emotional states not as self-evident unities but as
composites made up in intricate ways from words, categories, narratives, meta-
phors, images, moral beliefs, religious attitudes, visual representations, bodily
responses, behaviours, public performances, subjective experiences, feelings
and testimonies. Each of these separate components itself has a history. And
those components can come together in different formations at different times
to constitute different affective categories, types and patterns.
A striking example of this phenomenon – the coming together of separate
historical lineages of words, faces and ideas to form a temporary, distinctive
corresponding to the term, before succumbing nonetheless to the temptation to stipulate

a definition of a common core of characteristics shared by all states that can rightly be
referred to as ‘anger’: ‘a basic, common feature of such experiences is a felt impulse, in
the wake of a perceived wrongful injury, to rise up against the source of the injury or an
obstacle that it has created, and compel it to behave in a way that strikes the person as
desirable’: Jan Rippentrop Schnell and Diana Fritz Cates, ‘Rethinking Anger as a Desire for
Payback: A Modified Thomistic View,’ Religions 10, no. 11 (2019), 1–31 (1, 9).
84 Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632), oil painting on canvas,
Mauritshuis Museum, The Hague, the Netherlands.

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32 Dixon
emotional constellation – can be found in Imke Rajamani’s research. She shows

how popular Indian movies of the 1970s created a new virtuous and vengeful
role for male leads, labelled by Indian journalists with the English-language
phrase ‘angry young man’, and identified by their red eyes and beads of sweat,
set against a backdrop of fiery volcanoes, weapons and violence.85 The English
phrase ‘angry young man’ was imported into the Hindi language alongside con-
ventions from the ancient rasa theory to create a novel emotional type – some-
thing that was distinct from but related to emotional states available either to
Anglophone Westerners or to Indians of earlier centuries. The rasa tradition
offers a distinctively Indian theory of art, feeling, and expression. The rasa is
the emotional tone, flavour or essence that is created by a work of art.86 The
raudra rasa is an atmosphere of demonic fury and violence, and is generally
considered the closest rasa to the emotional world of ‘anger’. The bodily and
facial states that are used to perform in the mood of raudra include shouting,
sweating, cracking your knuckles, biting your lips, shedding tears and having
red eyes. Judging by modern Western conventions, however, the raudra face
does not look like an ‘anger’ face, but more closely resembles that associated
by Western psychologists with surprise or disgust.87 In the ‘angry young man’,
then, English words with a particular history combined with ancient visual tra-
ditions of performance quite separate from the categories of modern psychol-
ogy, all within the particular cultural politics of India in the 1970s and 1980s.
The result was an emotional type, with a partially shared cultural and bodily
history to Western ‘anger’, but one with its own distinctive coherence.
Whether in the ancient state of mênis, the medieval sin of ira, the ‘angry
young man’ of Indian cinema or the basic emotions of Inside Out, we can recog-
nise cultural formations that have resemblances to each other, partially share
their ancestries, and are connected by demonstrable links of cultural trans-
mission and translation, without resorting to invoking the existence of some
single thing called ‘anger’. The history of ‘anger’, understood in this anatomical
85 Imke Rajamani, ‘Pictures, Emotions, Conceptual Change: Anger in Popular Hindi Cinema,’
Contributions to the History of Concepts 7, no. 2 (2012): 52–77.
86 Sheldon Pollock, ed., A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2016), Preface, esp. xvi on the relationship between rasa theory and
Western ‘emotions’.
87 Michelle Voss Roberts, Tastes of the Divine: Hindu and Christian Theologies of Emotion
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 138–40; Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions:
An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 109–13; Pollock, A Rasa Reader,
333n12; Susan L. Schwartz, Rasa: Performing the Divine in India (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2004), 66.

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and genealogical way, is, as I intimated at the outset, both presentist and his-
toricist. The criterion for inclusion is ancestral connection with our present-
day discourses, definitions and experiences of ‘anger’, and so to that extent this
is a history of the present, but one undertaken on the most historicist possible
principles.88 Once identified as cultural ancestors, the ideas and images, moral
attitudes and theological questions, forms of arousal and facial contortions,
can be reconstructed on the kind of richly contextualised basis proposed by
exponents of anthropologically inflected forms of historical scholarship such
as microhistory.89
The history of emotions gives us access to alternative ways of naming and
framing human feelings and so can liberate us from the hold of dominant psy-
chological and psychiatric categories in the present. This realisation equips us
to interrogate prophets of ‘anger’ today. It allows as to ask them which aspects
of the ancestry of modern ‘anger’ they wish to revive, whether that might be
the desire for revenge on the one hand, or a moral rejection of the irate on
the other. The modern theory of basic emotions can make it seem as though
the ‘anger’ which commentators would have us believe is all around us, and
which some say is an inherited desire to slaughter our enemies, is a universal
bequest from our evolutionary ancestry, singular, natural and inevitable. It is
none of these things, because there is no ‘it’. However, it is possible to make this
plea for pluralism without drowning in relativism, and to be entirely historicist
about the ancestry of ‘anger’ while still living critically and constructively in
the present.
Acknowledgements
The research for this essay was made possible through Wellcome Trust
Collaborative Award no. 108727/Z/15/Z, ‘Living with Feeling: Emotional Health
in History, Philosophy, and Experience’. I am grateful to colleagues too numer-
ous to list, over several years, who have commented on research papers and
88 I discussed this with Rob Boddice, who has written widely about these issues, in ‘Rob
Boddice, A History of Feelings, Q&A,’ The History of Emotions Blog, 1 October 2019, https://
emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac.uk/2019/10/rob-boddice-a-history-of-feelings-qa.
89 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History
(New York: Basic Books, 1999); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos
of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, paperback ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1992); Carlo Ginzburg, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi, ‘Microhistory: Two or
Three Things That I Know about It,’ Critical Inquiry 20, no. 1 (1993): 10–35.

via free access
34 Dixon
talks I have given on this subject in Britain, Europe, and Australia, for their per-
ceptive feedback, questions, and suggestions. I have benefited from a dynamic
and collegial institutional context at Queen Mary thanks to my colleagues on
the ‘Living with Feeling’ project and in the School of History. I am especially
grateful to Sarah Chaney, Tiffany Watt Smith, and Emily Butterworth who read
and commented on earlier drafts of this essay, and to the anonymous reviewers
for EHCS and the journal’s editors for their guidance and suggestions in clarify-
ing the ideas in this essay.

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Emotions: History, Culture, Society 4 (2020) 1–34

What is the History of Anger a History of?

anger – rage – ira – revenge – expression – historiography

© Thomas Dixon, 2020 | doi:10.1163/2208522X-02010074Downloaded from Brill.com04/03/2023 07:37:39PM

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discipline, to a process of collective disenchantment, even of liberation. We

Emotions: History, Culture, Society 4 (2020) 1–34

2 Do We Live in an Age of Anger Today?

Since 2016 it has become a journalistic commonplace to say that we live in an

6 ‘The Politics of Anger,’ The Economist, 2 July 2016, https://www.economist.com/leaders

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and broadcast journalism, and commentary on social media, is fascinated and

3 Words for Feelings

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the Conceptualization of Anger through Diachronic Corpus Analysis,’ in Perspectives

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or unhappiness of other kinds.28 The terms were largely to do with outward

28 Briggs, Never in Anger, 328–37.

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4 Ancient Ancestors: Revenge, Bloodlust, Pleasure, and Passion

Martha C. Nussbaum’s account of ‘anger’, in Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment,

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presence of ‘anger’ is something to be determined primarily by conceptual

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the term ‘liget’ to describe a painful, intense energy experienced in bereave-

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5 Visualising Rage: Scenarios, Bodies, Faces

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Darwin took a particular interest in the ability, which he interpreted as an ex-

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6 Conclusion: The Genealogical Anatomy of ‘Anger’

Writing in 2001, the American psychologist of emotion Robert Plutchik noted

75 Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 241, 244–45.

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emotions. In practice, however, its implications are rarely followed through.

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corresponding to the term, before succumbing nonetheless to the temptation to stipulate

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emotional constellation – can be found in Imke Rajamani’s research. She shows

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6 ‘The Politics of Anger,’ The Economist, 2 July 2016, https://www.economist.com/leaders

28 Briggs, Never in Anger, 328–37.

75 Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 241, 244–45.