Resumen de Resentment / Ressentiment
This paper addresses the question: "What role, if any, should resentment play in contemporary democracies?" In recent moral and political philosophy several important attempts have been made to justify or rehabilitate resentment as an emotion that can and ought to play an important role in sustaining democratic norms. On this view, resentment should be given a voice in democratic deliberations and public law. Jeffrie Murphy argues that resentment is an emotion through which individuals legitimately assert their dignity and self-respect in the face of criminal offences (Murphy 1998, 2003). Resentment, he claims, is a crucial instrument of retributive justice.
In their analysis of transitional democracies, Margaret Walker, Thomas Brudholm and Mihaela Mihai, share the view that it is morally reprehensible and politically counter-productive to disparage or devalue victim resentment about past injustices (Walker 2006; Brudholm 2008; Mihai 2010). They argue that the transition to democracy in the aftermath of conflict requires public institutions, legal procedures and rituals that duly recognise and facilitate the expression of resentment. Resentment, they argue, is a crucial instrument of restorative justice.
They maintain that resentment should be a fundamental emotion in consolidated and transitional democracies because it constitutes a normative marker of unjust violations and a demand for the restoration of equal respect.
Resentment is an emotional guardian of fundamental democratic norms.
Yet, modern political and moral thought does not give us a univocal account of resentment. In contemporary debates regarding resentment we can discern the legacy of at least two quite different theories or concepts of reactive emotions. On the one hand, those who defend resentment's moral and political credentials often draw on eighteenth century Scottish moral sentiment theory to defend their account and evaluation of this emotion. On the other, Friedrich Nietzsche, deploying the French term ressentiment, argues that far from being a part of the natural, indispensable equipment of moral life, ressentiment is a pathological disorder that disrupts and poisons all social and political relations. Ressentiment, he argues, generates excessive and endless reactions that aim not at achieving or restoring moral parity, but at injuring and spoiling others. Put simply, then, regarding resentment/ressentiment the eighteenth century Scottish tradition is sanguine, the nineteenth century Germanic tradition sanguinary. These two traditions confront us with an either/or: either resentment/ressentiment is a guardian of justice or it should be excluded from the political and legal domains as a pathological threat to any sense of measure or order.
This paper will address the question of the role of resentment/ressentiment in democracies through a comparative assessment of these two theories. First, it will clarify their competing interpretations of resentment/ressentiment.
Second, it will identify and unpack the different philosophies of the emotions and moral and political perspectives that underpin their conceptualisation of resentment/ressentiment. Finally, it will draw on this comparative analysis to assess whether from the point of view of sustaining democratic norms resentment/ressentiment is fatally flawed or its excesses are simply aberrations that are amenable to political regulation.
