Book Review

Methods/Theory

In this ambitious, brave, and important book, William M. Reddy addresses three disciplines: psychology, anthropology, and history. He is kindest to the psychologists, one strand of whose recent work on the cognitive nature of emotions he incorporates into his own theory of feeling. The anthropologists come in for some affectionate reprimands: their social constructionist stance does not allow them to account for change, while their relativism prevents them from judging societies and advocating political goals. As for the historians, Reddy reproaches them for an ingrained Cartesian dualism that pits reason against feelings, allowing "reason" to win. Reddy's book shows how this very stance of modern historians is itself historically determined, part of the French postrevolutionary "erasure" of a theory of the emotions ("sentimentalism") that saw reason and emotion working together, but in such a way as to lead to deleterious consequences and thus to emotion's rejection.

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Reddy begins with a dense introduction to some of the recent issues and trends of cognitive psychology. He is particularly influenced by a 1989 article by psychologists Alice Isen and Gregory Diamond that concluded that "[affect] can be understood as a deeply ingrained, overlearned habit" (quoted on p. 16). (In Reddy's hands, affect, feeling, and emotion are interchangeable terms.) The emphasis here is on "learned": for Reddy, emotions are not just cognitive "appraisals" leading to "action readiness" (a simplified version of the definition adopted in the most recent Handbook of Emotions, ed. Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, 2d ed. [2000], pp. 62–64) but rather are "goal-relevant activations of thought material that exceed the translating capacity of attention within a short time horizon" (p. 128). Reddy thus emphasizes emotions' relationship to individual (and collective) goals as well as their capaciousness. No one can ever at any one time fully know the content of an emotion, because emotions are always protean and in the process of formation.

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