“Emotions as Reason”

I was lucky enough to teach Eric Reiter’s Wounded Feelings to graduate students. Many were instantly won over by it, but others struggled to understand how to read this first “legal history of emotions” (as the awarding citation by the Canadian Historical Association described it), stymied by the technical language and by how emotions relate to other constituents of history. I could share the uncertainty about the field: my books don’t say much about emotion. It appears briefly as a causal factor in my monographs concerned with medical and commercial reasoning, and it doesn’t appear in my book on the state, which ignores nationalism, at all. So, I was happy to say: “Lean into that perplexity; it’s a good question. Let me know what you come up with.” But my other response was to blurt out: “But it has the holy grail of a history monograph,” the three things that, together, make for excellence. Firstly, it has a granular account of people saying, in their own words, who they think they are and what they think they deserve. Secondly, it is an account of the mechanisms and institutions that negotiate between individual yearnings, social norms, and the state. Thirdly, it makes an argument about large-scale changes over time, as the common sense of one age cedes to something different. Let me speak to those three constituents — the sense of self, of the social/state relationship, and of history — before jousting a little with the findings. Eric Reiter gives us the deep legal backstory of moral injury and then shows a fabulous parade of people coming into the courts to say what made them feel hurt, affronted, insulted, mortified, or disgraced. We also get to see how their neighbours did or didn’t agree with their claims of mortification as well as the courts’. There were many elite complainants, whom the judges tended to uphold, but also non-elite people making their own claims to emotional integrity and respectability: the Polish family who won their case against the police that disrupted their drink-fuelled baptism party, for example, or the man made the target of a charivari for stealing his neighbour’s potatoes, who also won his case. Still, respectability was “not symmetrical”: a maid who, after working for eight months, was asked to open her purse as she left the house, and who sued for insult, lost her case on grounds that the master had spoken civilly and a servant must bear a certain amount of “sensibilité froissée” or “bruised feeling” (69). Readers who, like Jack Granatstein, don’t want to hear about “the history of housemaid’s knee in Belleville,” won’t want to hear the history of housemaid’s affront in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu. But as a onetime housemaid myself, I loved hearing her story and all the others. For all the legalese and sometimes obvious insincerity, it is impossible not to see, in many of these stories, something springing from the heart and its need for balm. Secondly, we see how emotions, which we understand as highly subjective and individualized, acquired social and institutional currency across social, institutional, and state forms. The state has to judge who is rightly hurt when interest, propriety, or deference have been breached. In the case of the charivari, for example, we see a known “bad apple,” not just a potato thief but someone considered violent and litigious, being disciplined by his neighbours with a half-hour hullaballoo; that case becomes a confrontation between the judiciary and local opinion, both jealous of their punitive powers. The extent to which a given injury was public or private mattered enormously. But we …