Dissertation Research

My research proposes a political theory of resentment. In recent years, resentment seems to be everywhere. From debates around inequality, race, and the far right, the term has become a shorthand for diagnosing an ‘unhealthy’ form of politics. While social scientists invoke the term widely, few have sought to understand it. Most existing scholarship assumes that resentment is corrosive. The politics of resentment, therefore, remains under-examined. In my dissertation, “The Unhappy Poor: A Political Theory of Resentment,” I offer a history of the idea of resentment, engaging with a wide range of thinkers from Aristotle to Frantz Fanon. Exploring this emotion through three popular movements – democracy, socialism, and anticolonialism – I argue that resentment has a strong ethical, conceptual, and political valence. It allows us to perceive something that otherwise goes unnoticed: politics happens when we feel that something is wrong.

This intervention is especially urgent in our contemporary moment, when populist movements have learned how to mobilize negative emotions with remarkable effect. A political theory of resentment allows us to rethink how politics works in fragmented societies marked by highly visible forms of wealth and power. It tells us that politics does not begin from a place of rational understanding, but from everyday experiences of oppression. If we misunderstand resentment – that is, if we remain committed to pathologizing it – we surrender its potential to transform the world around it, a capacity that Friedrich Nietzsche recognized even if he rendered it suspect. My work, therefore, challenges approaches to political science that marginalize the role of emotions, particularly those feelings that Sianne Ngai has described as “ugly.” By bringing affect theory into conversation with the history of political thought, as well as contemporary debates on populism, I develop a distinctly emotional vocabulary for political renewal. I contend that we must learn to speak the language of resentment – a language that may not always be refined or strategic, but that can nonetheless articulate a demand for freedom.