For Adam Smith, resentment is the natural passion we feel at experiencing or witnessing injustice and the basis for our natural sense of justice. Why does Smith restrict justifiable resentment to injustice given his seeming admission that we do naturally feel resentment beyond the case of injury? Smith never directly addresses why such resentments are inappropriate in The Theory of Moral Sentiments; we reconstruct a response drawn from his moral psychology. First, we explain the origins of Smith’s narrow view of justice. We then turn to Smith’s account of resentment, explaining its purpose as the natural motive for narrow justice, questioning the split between descriptive and normative resentment. We ultimately argue that resentment’s logical tie to punishment for Smith is necessary but insufficient, and that injury and resentment are separate conditions required to justify punishment. Finally, we reconstruct Smith’s normative justifications for severing the tie between improper resentments and punishment, driven by his claims about equal status and about sociability.

The concept of justice that A Theory of Justice theorizes is, as Rawls puts it early on, “the proper distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation.” Shortly thereafter, he comments, “Now this approach may not seem to tally with tradition.” The topic of this essay is the difference between Rawls’s concept of justice and the traditional one. My main observation is that the significance of injustice in Rawls’s sense is very different from the significance of injustice in the traditional sense. Traditional injustice entails that someone has been wronged in a way that warrants resentment, guilt, and indignation. Injustice in Rawls’s sense does not entail this.

Chapter 6 focuses on special treatment stigma—the stigma that accompanies the need for any modifications in the workplace. First, I present evidence that employers are reluctant to accommodate workers regardless of whether the accommodation is needed because of a disability, pregnancy, or caregiving responsibilities. Second, I describe what happens when employers do accommodate workers—both in terms of what workplace consequences flow from those accommodations, and how those accommodations affect the accommodated employees’ relationships with their coworkers.

The Introduction presents the main idea of the book, namely that populism should be understood and assessed in terms of the kind of recognition for the people that it demands. The debate over the meaning and value of populism is fundamentally a debate over how democracy should recognize the people. Many people in contemporary societies feel disrespected and populism provides the recognition that they feel they have lost or never attained. The populist politics of resentment should not be understood as blindly emotional but as a struggle for recognition based on moral experiences that can be explained by people’s beliefs and principles. However, not all struggles for recognition contribute to the deepening of democracy, and we must distinguish between different kinds of recognition in order to understand why populism is often a threat to democratic principles and practices. The Introduction explains that the book is a study of the reasons people may have for supporting populism rather than the causes of populism. As a corollary of studying reasons rather than causes, populism is defined as a set of claims that can be assessed for their validity. The last part of the Introduction provides an overview of the book.

Studies show that feelings of misrecognition can explain much of the support for populism. The chapter draws on this insight but takes issue with the literature suggesting that feelings of misrecognition and resentment are blind emotions unconnected to facts and principles. Drawing on Axel Honneth’s recognition theory, Peter Strawson’s discussion of resentment, and John Rawls’s idea of principle-dependent-feelings, it argues that we should interpret the populist politics of resentment as a struggle for recognition based on moral experiences that are intimately connected to factual and normative beliefs. Resentment is based on the feeling that one is regarded and treated wrongly, and it is an incipient demand to be regarded and treated differently. Thus, the chapter provides an approach to populism and the politics of resentment that does not reduce them to ordinary citizens’ unthinking or automatic emotional reactions or political entrepreneurs’ manipulations of people. The proposed approach entails that we adopt a participant attitude and take people’s demands for recognition seriously. Democratic respect requires that we assess the validity of the claims people make, rather than regarding them with an observer attitude as pathological cases in need of treatment.

Siddiqui explains how British multiculturalism has ceded to a politics of resentment, fuelled by anti-immigrant and often anti-Muslim sentiment. Siddiqui draws on the writings of Georg Simmel for whom gratitude fosters emotional and social bonds, countering a narrative of resentment with one of recognition. Rather than seeking an answer in abstract theories of multiculturalism, Siddiqui argues for a refocusing on emotional well-being through gratitude rooted in empathy.

According to the argument from gratuitous evil, if God were to exist, then gratuitous evil wouldn’t; but gratuitous evil does exist, so God doesn’t. We can evaluate different views of divine providence with respect to the resources they are able to bring to bear when encountering this argument. By these lights, theological determinism is often seen as especially problematic: the determinist is seen as having an impoverished set of resources to draw from in her attempts to respond to the argument from gratuitous evil. In particular, there is an important resource – an appeal to free will – that many have claimed is unavailable to the determinist. I argue that the determinist does not in fact suffer from this particular resource deficit. I do so by examining some recent work on determinist responses to the problem of evil, analyzing some of the ways in which they fall short, and proposing a new response that is informed by those shortcomings. This new response is built on an appeal to the reactive attitudes.

The literature on moral responsibility is ripe with accounts of what it takes for an agent to become blameworthy. By contrast, very little has been written about what it takes for an agent’s blameworthiness to cease or diminish. It seems that there are certain things a wrongdoer can feel or do that might make her less blameworthy than she would otherwise have been. She might experience guilt, atone, apologize, and make reparations. In this chapter, I will argue that prominent accounts of blameworthiness are unable to explain how such actions and emotions can influence one’s blameworthiness. I will then present an alternative account. If we understand blameworthiness in terms of deserved guilt rather than fitting resentment, we can give a plausible account of how blameworthiness can change over time. The fact that a wrongdoer has already experienced guilt, atoned, or apologized will make her less deserving of guilt, and therefore less blameworthy.

Some 100,000 people were said to have watched Thistlewood, Brunt, Ings, Tidd, and Davidson die. Soldiers controlled them. It’s an open question which of the spectators were the more ‘barbaric’ – the plebeian crowd, the aristocrats attending the condemned with the sheriffs, or the gentlefolk who rented windows overlooking the scaffold. It was the plebeian crowd, not the polite, that shouted in protest as the five were hanged and decapitated. The men’s behaviour was closely watched and reported. The era’s alleged capacity for a refined sensibility was not widely evident among the polite people. Only radical London seethed with anger and resentment, until the Queen Caroline affair provided it with a new target.

While very few businesses blatantly refused to apply the Lactation at Work Law, a substantial minority of organizations developed only symbolic structures that produced insufficient accommodations. In these workplaces, managerialization of the law shifted the compliance motivation from the law’s goals of access and equality to concerns of management, such as reducing turnover and absenteeism. Sometimes organizations’ accommodations were somewhat successful, creating adequate accommodations for some, but not all, lactating employees; they provided accessible lactation space only part of the time, or allowed sufficient break time for milk expression only intermittently. When their requests for adequate accommodations were met with resistance, resentment, and retrenchment of managerial control over workers’ bodies, the lactating employees in this chapter either quit breastfeeding or devised their own solutions for successful workplace lactation, such as sneaking away to pump or reducing their take-home pay in exchange for longer break time.

This chapter elaborates on the definition of Erdoğanism from the perspective of this book. To define Erdoğanism for the purposes of this book, the chapter first discusses the insecurities, anxieties, and fears of Erdoğanism. After this it analyses the Islamist populism dimension of Erdoğanism and how its narrative divides the nation into real citizens and their enemy the 'evil' Kemalist elite and the Homo LASTus grassroots and also all secular Turks who are dubbed as the 'White Turks'. In this imagination, the out-group is not only comprised of the citizen-enemies, there are also international groups, entities, institutions, lobbying groups and states that collaborate with both the evil White Turk elite. The chapter calls this populism ‘Islamist Civilizationism’. This discussion is followed by an analysis of Erdoğanist victimhood and resentment vis-à-vis the secular sections of society as well as the West. Finally, the chapter attempts to define Erdoğanism.

This chapter returns to white workers’ voices. Drawing on interviews with men who entered blue-collar work and joined the MWU before or during the Wiehahn reforms, it demonstrates the persistence of proud working-class identification, the presence of deep ambivalence around race and whiteness, and working-class resentment towards wealthy Afrikaners. This contradicts the simplistic racial tropes, naturalisation of ethnic identity, and denial of class in the Solidarity Movement’s official framing. At the same time, the union veterans display deep commitment to the Movement and its ideals in the face of the loss of past certainties, perceptions of social decline, personal vulnerability, and anxiety about the future they perceive. This sees them subjected to pressure from the leadership to manage Solidarity’s race- and culture-based membership on the ground. Together, the men’s counternarratives, ambivalences, and vulnerabilities demonstrate the specificity of blue-collar subjectivities and workplace experiences. In this way, the testimonies presented in this chapter expose the persistent reality of class otherwise not readily visible within the white, Afrikaner population, and provide striking insight into how white workers experienced and sought to negotiate the demise of the racial state.

This chapter focuses on the emotional virtue of gratitude in society and education. First, it explores major understandings of gratitude prevalent in philosophy and psychology that elaborate what gratitude is, and why it is called for. The practices encouraged for cultivating feelings of gratitude by psychologists and educators will also be discussed. Then the chapter will turn to critical views of gratitude that question its moral value, its psychological utility, and its place in education. While teaching feelings of gratitude in the classroom may not necessarily be harmful, there are risks and challenges that should not be overlooked by educators interested in the moral and social development of their students.

In the first chapter of Recognizing Resentment, I historically situate the debate about the passions and their role in sociability to which Joseph Butler responded at the outset of the eighteenth century. I correct the mischaracterization of the seventeenth cenutry as the age reason reigned supreme, highlighting instead how a host of philosophers in the rationalist tradition began to pay particular attention to the importance of passion in moral and political motivation and obligation. For rationalists and psychological egoists like Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and John Locke, passions were influential but socially destabiizing and “vicious.” The same was true of the philosophy of the father of the natural law tradition, Hugo Grotius. However, Grotius's disciple, Samuel von Pufendorf, and the heir to the egoist tradition in the eighteenth century, Bernard Mandeville, began to view the passions in a new light. However vicious they might be, Pufendorf and Mandeville believed passions positively contibuted to our ability to live together in large, diverse societies.

Political theorists and social scientists alike agree that passions matter for politics, but disagree about which passions matter most and how they contribute to political flourishing. I make the case that resentment, contrary to its traditional associations with violence and injustice, in fact makes us alive to the suffering of others and leads us to aid them in seeking restitution. When we adopt the resentments of others by sympathizing with them, we implicitly recognize their equal moral and political status, too, key commitments of liberalism. I argue that liberals of all stripes should embrace sympathetic resentment as a proper moral motive for justice.

The third chapter introduces the “Muslim American Resentment” scale, which captures specific attitudes toward Muslim Americans. The chapter demonstrates how these attitudes matter in terms of shaping public preferences toward policies such as patrolling Muslim neighborhoods and limiting their immigration. It also demonstrates that these attitudes matter in terms of the political representatives we elect.