In this chapter and the next, I set out the theoretical framework of the book, a framework grounded in the political thought of Hannah Arendt. The present chapter focuses on the relationship between political agency and negative emotions. After outlining an Arendt-inspired definition of political agency and identifying it as a non-sovereign understanding of agency, I show that negative emotions have four benefits that can support political agency. They can motivate us to reflect on the causes of our experiences, drive us to act to address them, communicate our authentic concern with a particular issue, and help to constitute and sustain social cohesion between political actors. But this does not mean that negative emotions are inherently politically empowering, and Arendt can help us to see why. On standard interpretations, Arendt denounces negative emotions as apolitical or even anti-political. I challenge these interpretations, beginning with the idea that Arendt is committed to a reason–emotion dichotomy that idealises the human capacity for reason. In fact, she warns against efforts to use either reason or emotion as a basis for political participation. Still, Arendt is troubled by what she perceives as the potentially harmful effects of emotions in politics. To explore whether her concerns are warranted, I proceed to unpack her understanding of emotions. Though this understanding is flawed, it contains two crucial insights. The first is that negative emotions must be transformed into public issues to support political agency. The second, which I consider in the next chapter, is that the product of such transformations is fragile.

A Definition of Political Agency

Political agency is a concept frequently invoked but seldom defined. There might be good reasons for this. For one, any effort to separate political agency from other types of agency risks ignoring the political significance of some actions while overemphasising that of others. Yet if we provisionally take agency to refer to an individual's capacity to influence some matter or category of matters, it seems worth distinguishing between the capacity to influence matters that seemingly concern only me as an individual – like what I have for dinner or whether I sleep in tomorrow – from the capacity to influence matters that concern some public – like the threatened closure of a local factory or the election of a political representative