From the ashes, a fertile opportunity for historicism – Review Symposium on Leys’s The ascent of affect

Abstract

Ruth Leys’s book is a thorough survey of the unmanaged forest and scrubland of emotion research: a hodgepodge of paradigmatic ideas that amounts to so much kindling. To most of this, Leys holds a match and allows us to stand in awe at the conflagration. In an ideal world, the psychologists would be watching too. Emotion research in psychological bowers is the heir to an epistemological inertia born of force of personality. Leys’s book is a genealogy of ideas, yes, but it is also, and principally, a genealogy of academic clientelism, and of men (mostly) whose convictions, assumptions, arrogance, politics, and outright scientism have permitted, imposed, and policed two generations of faulty thinking. The jig is up.