Political and Antipolitical Anger

The analysis of anger’s role in politics needs to overcome the oversimplified views of anger as positive or negative. Instead, a more useful normative question is one that asks how we should distinguish between forms of anger that are appropriate or properly political, and those that are dangerous and impermissible, or antipolitical. By drawing on a conflict-theory framework that makes a normative distinction between agonistic and antagonistic conflicts, I argue that properly political anger should meet two criteria: fittingness and boundedness. Anger can sometimes be a fitting response to our unjust world. However, fittingness is not enough; it also matters how anger is channeled or acted upon in the public realm. Moreover, this paper contends that anger at structural injustice may relatively easily go wrong, as mistargeted or boundless anger. In light of these challenges, I argue that introducing a goal-frustration type of anger (as distinct from blaming anger) can prevent construing anger too narrowly, as always involving moral blame, and that one can learn (to some extent) to regulate one’s anger. At the same time, I acknowledge that the uptake that anger receives plays an essential role in creating an environment that favors (or disfavors) that anger at structural injustice remains bounded.