Forthcoming in: Max Lewis, and Antti M. Kauppinen (Eds.). The Moral Psychology of Resentment.

Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. PENULTIMATE DRAFT: PLEASE ONLY CITE FROM THE PUBLISHED VERSION

Two Types of Political Resentment

Mikko Salmela1,2 & Thomas Szanto1

1 Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen

2 Practical Philosophy, University of Helsinki

Abstract

Resentment, a political emotion par excellence, is generally understood as moral anger in response to
political or moral injustices or offences, geared at correcting wrongdoings, thus being an emotional
gatekeeper for equal respect and democratic order. However, we argue that the complexity of
resentment is not sufficiently understood. Not only do targets of resentment vary (e.g., socio-economic
institutions responsible for austerity politics in left populism vs. refugees, minorities or elites in right
populism); we suggest that underlying this variety there are two significantly diverse types of
resentment with dissimilar a) socio-psychological dynamics, b) different intentional structure, c) ways
in which they are epistemically and normatively appropriate, and d) political consequences. We argue,
first, that the underexplored type of resentment emerges through the emotional mechanism of
Ressentiment, which transforms self-targeting negative emotions and their vulnerable self into other-
directed ones such as resentment and hatred with a morally superior self. We then detail how the targets
of such resentment are indeterminate, generic others or scapegoats and how the affective focus of this
type of resentment becomes the antagonistically defined allegedly threatened social identity instead of
particular wrongs. Moreover, we show how the triggering emotions become epistemically opaque and
the outcome emotions normatively inappropriate. Finally, we explore its motivational tendencies,
suggesting that it leads to anomic, anti-solidaric or dormant support for violent political action
associated with right populism or extremism.

1. Introduction

Resentment is a moral and indeed a political emotion par excellence. So much is clear
among philosophers of emotion and political philosophers. However, it is contested
what role resentment can and should play in moral interaction, the public sphere or
the political domain at large (Connolly 1991; Brown 1993; Young 2011; Pettigrove 2012;
Nussbaum 2016). Defenders who believe it has a central normative role conceive
resentment as a form of spontaneous moral anger in response to political or moral
injustices or offences, geared at voicing and alleviating wrongdoings and in fact as an

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emotion that has unique power to motivate individual or collective action to correct or
retribute harms. They thus see resentment as an emotional gatekeeper for equal
respect, a democratic order, and a critical political public (Strawson 1974; Murphy &
Hampton 1988; Solomon 1990; Lorde 1997; Bell 2009; Ure 2015; Aeschbach 2017;
Stockdale 2013; 2021; Schwarze 2020; Cherry 2021; Silva 2021).
Yet empirical research has demonstrated that anger and resentment is equally
to be found among middle- and working-class people, especially white men, who, in
response to structural and economic changes affecting prospects of secure
employment and harmonious family life, increasing cleavages in well-being between
rural and urban areas, as well as challenges to traditional understanding of
masculinity since 1990´s, have become Tea Party activists, Trump supporters, white
supremacists, fathers’ rights activists, Promise Keepers, or similar activists, who either
engage in violent political actions that endanger the democratic order or sympathise
with such action (Cramer 2016; Faludi 2019; Hochschild 2016; Kimmel 2017).
This evidence opens up a paradox: How can resentment associate with both
democratic and constructive as well as anti-democratic and destructive political
action? Our diagnosis is that the defenders of resentment and those who identify it in
the context of anti-democratic political attitudes or action do not talk about the same
emotion. We argue that there are two significantly diverse types of resentment with a)
dissimilar socio-psychological dynamics, b) different intentional structure, c) different
ways in which they are epistemically and normatively appropriate, and d) different
political consequences. We suggest that the key to these differences lies in the
distinction between resentment and Ressentiment. While some extant research treats
these as different emotions (TenHouten 2018; Demertzis 2020; Ure 2015; Reichold 2021)
or explicitly challenges that one can neatly distinguish the two (Brudholm 2008;
MacLachlan 2010; see also Murphy and Hampton 1988) we suggest that Ressentiment
is best understood as an emotional mechanism (henceforth: EM) that produces a
different type of resentment as its outcome. The other, better known type of
resentment emerges either spontaneously or through another emotional mechanism,
namely the EM of Social Sharing.

2. The emotional mechanisms of resentment

2.1 What are emotional mechanisms?

Emotional mechanisms contain a range of emotional experiences at their initiating

stage, which are transformed into different emotions at their end stage, while
transforming the values and the identity of the subject in between (Elster 1999; Salice

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& Salmela 2022). EMs differ from emotion regulation (Gross 1998) because their
transformation of emotions, values and identities are clearly mapped for each EM
rather than being dependent on a regulation strategy selected by the individual.
According to Salice and Salmela (2022), EMs have four components that follow each
other in a temporal order: (1) emotional dissonance, (2) reappraisal, (3) change in the
emotional response, and (4) disposition of the emotional outcome to be collectivised.
The first component of EMs is emotional dissonance by which Salice and
Salmela (2022, 10) mean “a hedonically negative state defined as a sense of inferiority
or impotence/powerlessness, elicited by the subject’s (perceived) inability to (i) act
upon the inherent action tendencies of the emotion, or (ii) express the emotion if this
is socio-culturally stigmatised, or both”. The phenomenology of envy, shame,
humiliation, and inefficacious anger is similar to the extent to which they give rise to
negative feelings and perceptions of this kind. The negative feelings of inferiority
and/or impotence give rise to a negative sense of the self, and together they motivate
a reappraisal.
The second component of EMs is a reappraisal, which is typically not motivated
by new information acquired by the subject before or during the change of emotion,
although EMs differ from each other in this respect and the here relevant EM of Social
Sharing involves an awareness that there are others who feel the same way. We can
detect three kinds of reappraisals. First, the reappraisal can concern the target of
emotion, as when a valued good G is reappraised as unworthy and rotten. Second, it
can focus on the other who possesses the valued good G and whose purchase of G is
reappraised as unethical. And third, the reappraisal can focus on the subject of emotion,
which brings about a change in the intentional structure and type of the original
emotion. An example is a transformation of shame into anger with a reappraisal of the
self from worthless and impotent into authoritative and potent, which allows a
reappraisal of the other from an authoritative critic into a bully blamed for shaming.
Change of emotional response results when emotional dissonance has triggered
a revision of the emotional appraisal. Thus, envy can transmute to either resentment
or commiseration, depending on whether the reappraisal focuses on the rival R or on
the valued good G. Or anger transmutes into hatred with a change in the appraisal of
the other as blameworthy to culpable misdeeds into an appraisal of the other as
immoral, malicious, and incapable of change, which is the characteristic appraisal of
hatred (e.g., Fischer et al. 2018; Szanto 2020). If the subject is successful in reappraising
either the intentional target of the original emotion or her long-term concerns, the
emotional dissonance that triggered the EM dissolves. Even so, it is doubtful whether
such emotional transformation can be entirely successful in fully eliminating

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emotional dissonance especially if there is no change in the conditions that produced
the emotional dissonance.
Collectivisation, i.e., social sharing of the transformed emotion is an important
way of reinforcing the reappraisal as sharing provides a sense of warrant to the shared
emotion.1 “Socially shared group emotions, as compared with individual emotions,
are likely to be seen as true, objective, and externally driven in a type of social
construction of emotional reality that parallels the effects of consensus in the social
construction of beliefs”, as Smith et al. (2007, 442) point out. For sharing to be possible,
the target of the emotion typically has to be generalised. Thus, resentment, anger, or
hatred are targeted at groups whose members are perceived to possess common
negative characteristics, or they are targeted at individuals such as political leaders or
celebrities associated with such groups. Accordingly, social and political movements
are contexts in which the outcome emotions of EMs are reinforced through their
collectivisation, and their leaders are often clever emotional entrepreneurs (Maor 2016)
in providing targets to these emotions. Turner (2007) observes that social sharing of
transmuted emotions in interaction rituals also gives rise to positive emotions such as
joy and pride about social identities of those (“us”) united in their antagonistic
emotions towards others. These positive emotions, similarly to shared other-directed
negative emotions, are empowering and provide remedy to feelings of inferiority and
powerlessness elicited by the driver emotions of EMs.

2.2 The emotional mechanism of Ressentiment versus Social Sharing

In previous work, we have identified two importantly dissimilar EMs: Ressentiment

(EMRes) and Social Sharing (EMSoS; Salmela & von Scheve 2018). Their main
difference lies in the way in which the driving emotions of envy, shame, humiliation,
or inefficacious anger are either repressed or socially shared. This difference gives rise
to further differences. The first concerns reappraisal, which in EMRes is unconscious,
implicit, and individually operated, whereas in EMSoS it typically takes a conscious
form of sharing and discussing similar grievances. Yet another difference concerns
change of emotional response and the collectivisation of the emotional outcome. In the
EMSoS, the reappraisal produced in a collective process gives the reappraisal more
warrant and makes collectivisation address not only the outcome emotions but also

1 The notion of “sharing an emotion” is ambiguous. On the one hand, sharing refers to a phenomenon in
which one person expresses her emotion to another person (e.g., Michael 2011; Rimé 2007). On the other hand,
sharing refers to several individuals experiencing an emotion of the same type and content together, with
mutual awareness of their feeling the same (e.g., Salmela 2012; León et al. 2019). We assume that when
individuals socially share the outcome emotions of emotional mechanisms to peer others, those emotions are
shared in the first sense, but not necessarily in the latter. However, when these emotions are reciprocated by
others who express their similar emotions, the emotions become shared in the second sense of being felt
together with others with mutual awareness of their feeling the same.

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the conditions that produced the driving emotions through the participants´ collective
efforts.
To elaborate these differences, the function of Ressentiment is to manage
frustration and threat to self-worth and social recognition through two parallel
transvaluation processes: first, what was desired or valued, yet unattainable, is
reassessed as undesirable and worthless and new values are adopted instead; and
second, the self-identity of the individual as failure or inferior transforms into a new
identity of being noble and superior. These parallel transvaluations are implicated in
the affective reactions associated with Ressentiment. It typically emerges from other
negative emotions, such as envy, shame, humiliation, or anger—either individual or
group-based—in situations where the subject feels impotent to act on or even express
these emotions. Those emotions, marked by feelings of powerlessness and inferiority,
are then transformed by psychic defences such as repression, dissociation, splitting,
and projection, with the influence of discourses and narratives in media, culture, and
politics, into passive resentment, hostility, or hatred toward others, who are perceived
as enemies (Scheler 1912/1919; Nietzsche 1887; Aeschbach 2017; Demertzis 2020;
Salmela & Capelos 2021; Fleury 2023; Vendrell Ferran 2023). Since the new emotions,
values and identities are based on a reappraisal of the original situation that has not
changed, there is a need to reinforce these emotions, values, and identities by sharing
them with peers. Even so, the emerging attachment to those ingroup others remains
shallow and marked by suspicion and insecurity (Salmela & Capelos 2021) and does
not motivate constructive political action.
The EMSoS is triggered in similar conditions as EMRes but it produces different
outcomes by virtue of the social sharing of both its eliciting and outcome emotions.
The eliciting emotions of envy, shame, humiliation, or inefficacious anger—either
individual or group-based—are transformed through their social sharing and
reappraisal with others who feel the same into collective democratic resentment
(Engels 2015) and indignation towards those blamed for the relevant wrong;
moreover, the process also generates hope associated with the individuals´ increased
efficacy. The self-identity of the subject as inferior experienced in the triggering
emotions transforms into emancipated and optimistic without a change in its contents.
The value of what was desired and unattainable individually is reinforced and
transforms into a collective goal to be pursued in collective action with peer others, to
whom strong bonds of solidarity are formed both before and during collective action
(Britt & Heise 2000; Gould 2009; Salmela & von Scheve 2018).
Finally, it is important to observe that the EMs of Ressentiment and Social
Sharing do not operate in a social vacuum, but are influenced by the given social
structure, which involves both dominant ideologies, values, and norms—including

5
emotion norms (Hochschild 1983)—and factual conditions such as economic crises,
mass unemployment, pandemics, number of incoming refugees and asylum seekers,
contradictions between ideational values and actual practices of a society, etc.
Structural and cultural conditions of this kind relate to emotional opportunity
structures (EOS) that are macrosocial eliciting conditions for the emergence of certain
emotions and at the same time may hinder the generation of other emotions (Ruiz-
Junco 2013). Insecurity and anxiety in a society plagued by economic downturn and
unemployment are obvious examples, as would be envy and shame in a society that
promotes interpersonal competition and places responsibility for success and failure
on the individual (Sandel 2020). By contrast, secure employment and future prospects
in a society are supposed to hinder resentment against immigrants. EOSs are also
constituted and maintained by social and cultural processes that render certain
emotions more visible, desirable, and acceptable than others. Fear in a “culture of fear”
(Furedi 2007) or happiness in a culture that relentlessly emphasises the need to express
positive emotions (Ahmed 2010) are good examples of emotions that are enabled by
specific emotional opportunities and also reflect a dominant emotional culture and
norms.
Social sharing of self-targeting negative emotions is more likely to happen in
conditions where people are affected similarly by an economic crisis or austerity cuts
implemented by neoliberal governments. In such conditions, individual citizens are
less likely to blame themselves for losing their jobs, homes, or prospects of a secure life
in consequence of cuts to salaries, pensions, and public services. Instead, they are more
likely to self-identify as aggrieved by neoliberal policies and to blame politics,
politicians, and institutions perceived to be responsible for their precarious situation
(Simiti 2016; Salmela & von Scheve 2018). This was the situation in Greece and Spain
where more radical and noticeable austerity cuts were implemented during the
economic crisis of early 2010s than in Western and Northern European countries that
contributed to the bailout loans while struggling with the downturn themselves.
Citizens in the latter countries faced the consequences of neoliberal austerity politics
and their own vulnerability in more individualised terms, which may have
contributed to each individual accepting more responsibility for his or her actual or
anticipated losses and precarious situation. These conditions are more conducive to
EMRes (Salmela & von Scheve 2018).

3. Differences between the two types of resentment

With this understanding of two dissimilar EMs we can begin analysing the key
differences between the two types of resentment, focusing on four sets of differences,
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namely regarding their dissimilar socio-psychological dynamics, affective-intentional
structure, epistemic and normative appropriateness, and finally their political
consequences.

3.1 Social-psychological dynamics

The first difference between spontaneous resentment, or resentment emerging

through EMSoS, on the one hand, and resentment mediated by EMRes, on the other,
relates to the sharing of the self-targeting negative emotions that drive these EMs.
While both types of resentment as outcome emotions of these EMs are shared with
peers, the driving self-targeting negative emotions of envy, shame, humiliation, or
inefficacious anger are shared in EMSoS but not in EMRes.
Repression of these negative emotions in EMRes leaves the grievances to which
these emotions relate unrecognised and unresolved, leaving the subject vulnerable to
those emotions and the associated emotional dissonance also in the future, irrespective
of the reappraisal by which the subject seeks to turn the tables, and the collectivisation
of the outcome emotions facilitated by the reappraisal. The same emotions are felt at
the outset of the EMSoS, but their sharing with others who feel the same allows a
reappraisal of blame ascription from the self to a particular other or others identified
as responsible for creating and/or maintaining the conditions in which those self-
targeting negative emotions are felt. This reappraisal is rational: the understanding
that those self-targeting emotions are prevalent among other peers undermines self-
ascription of blame to individuals. This reappraisal that allows seeing one’s emotions
in a wider social and societal perspective is crucial to the emotional change from envy,
shame, or humiliation into resentment towards others. With inefficacious anger, no
reappraisal of blame is needed because the emotion already involves other-blame.
However, what sharing this emotion amounts to is a change in the perceived efficacy
of the subjects, who realise that what they could not reach alone, and which made
them feel inefficacious anger, can perhaps be reached together with others.
There is thus a greater need for the reinforcement of the reappraisal and the
outcome emotions, identity, and values in EMRes compared to EMSoS, where these
processes follow after recognition and sharing of the participants´ underlying
grievances and the related emotions. By virtue of these social processes, there is no
need for a change of identity and value in the EMSoS; the outcome emotion of
resentment is felt from the perspective of the same identity as the driving emotions. In
contrast, in EMRes the identity and values of the subjects undergo a change and
therefore need to be reinforced in interactions with peers as well as by selective
attention to public discourses, media, and narratives. The latter process will typically
result in a socio-psychological dynamics that might be characterised as a

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“collaborative spiralling” (Szanto 2017): from a bottom-up perspective, the repression
and transvaluation of the initial emotions in EMRes by individuals will mutually
reinforce each other, leading to corresponding group-level dispositions, while the
group-based EMRes-resentment will, top-down, corroborate or even habitualize
individuals’ reappraisal patterns and repression tendencies.

3.2 Affective intentionality

These socio-psychological differences mirror differences in the affective-intentional

structure of the two types, specifically, with regard to their formal objects, intentional
targets and their focus. The formal object of resentment, or the evaluative property
attributed to its target, is a moral wrong or, more specifically, the harm or injustice that
a wrong is not righted. Resentment as a spontaneous reaction to such a wrong or
injustice has clear-cut intentional targets: particular persons or groups issuing or
responsible for those harms. Importantly, the same holds for resentment that emerges
through EMSoS: the targets don’t shift here and remain the same as in the triggering
emotion (in inefficacious anger) or are rationally related to those targets (in envy,
shame, or humiliation). Correspondingly, these emotions have a clear focus, where
focus is understood as the background concern that reveals why and how the targets
affectively matter to the emoters (Helm 2001). What those feeling resentment and
sharing it with others are concerned with is voicing grievances or rectifying and
alleviating the harms and injustices. Moreover, like all emotions, resentment involves
an explicit commitment to their focus, a so-called “focal commitment” (ibid.), which
has normative and political implications. If you are resentful in the face of serious
injustice, you ought to feel and act in ways that benefit the focus, or what matters to
you: voice your resentment towards third-parties in the hope of public
acknowledgment, share your emotions with your peers in order to reinforce political
support or solidarity for the shared cause, and feel indignation if others just downplay
the harm.
The affective-intentional structure of EMRes-resentment is markedly different:
its target is indeterminate, its focus inverted, and both its formal object and the focal
commitment of its subjects starkly differ from those of spontaneous or EMSoS-
mediated resentment. Let’s start with the formal object: The formal object of EMRes-
resentment is not moral harms or injustices vis-à-vis oneself or others but, rather, one’s
threatened sense of self or hurt self-esteem. The targets of EMRes-resentment are not
only typically scapegoats (foreigners allegedly ‘flooding’ ‘our’ job market, etc.), they
are indeterminate, shifting between individuals as proxies of certain groups perceived
to be threats to one’s social identity or as enemies to one’s ingroup (a person belonging

8
to ‘the elite’, etc.). As such, it is typical for EMRes-resentment to overgeneralize or
essentialize its targets (‘all liberals’, ‘the rich’).2
Regarding the focus, consider that what matters to the subjects of EMRes-
resentment post EM is not the same as what mattered to them pre EM: EMRes inverts
all initial positively and negatively valenced background concerns (others’ success,
one’s sense of inferiority, powerlessness, etc.), and the new values emerging from
EMRes are the ground on which the moral superiority of the individuals and the
ingroup is claimed. But the focal concerns are not just inverted. What eventually
matters most to the subjects of this type of resentment is their antagonistically defined
social identity, which thus becomes their new central focus.
As we have seen, there is a key difference in the collective dynamics of the two
types and this also plays out in the difference in how the respective subjects are
committed to the focus of their emotions. EMSoS-resentment aims to reinforce not just
existing social identities but by doing so essentially also the initial values among
members (e.g., a shared commitment to eliminate injustice). In contrast, in EMRes-
resentment, the commitment ‘spins’ centrally around the ingroup-sharing as such,
aiming only to reinforce and maintain the superiority of one’s social identity against
others.
In these respects, EMRes-resentment closely resembles hatred. Hatred targets
not some specific properties or actions of others (as resentment) but a person or a
group ‘globally’, appraising them as evil (Szanto 2020, 2021). Paradigm forms of
collective or political hatred are xenophobia, antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia, or
forms of racism, many of which are also the playground of EMRes. Salice and Montes
Sánchez (2023) recently argued that racial hatred in particular shares the key
mechanism with EMRes in that it is grounded in repressed envy, which masks itself as
resentment or hatred. The rival is no longer experienced as superior but as inferior,
blameworthy, or evil, while the self is no longer experienced inferior but as morally
superior. What initially mattered to the envier (power, recognition, etc.) fades into the
background; the others are hated simply for who they are.
Moreover, there are similarities between the collective dynamics and the focal
commitment in hatred and EMRes-resentment, which help us bringing these aspects
to sharper relief regarding the latter. It is characteristic of hatred that haters become
affectively invested into their hatred. This is particularly salient in collective forms,
where haters’ collective identity becomes dialectically interwoven with their target.
On the one hand, haters aim to eliminate their targets, on the other, they need them to
uphold their sense of identity. Indeed, it is this “negative solidarity” with one’s own

2Scheler aptly recognized this when he describes the ‘unfocused’ intentionality of Ressentiment as one that
“‘radiates’ in all directions” (1912/ 1919, 50).

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hate community that lends affective weight to the emotion, rather than determinate
affective concerns (as, e.g., alleviating specific wrongs in non-EMRes-resentment)
(Szanto 2020).
Given these close parallels, it is no coincidence that hatred figures prominently
among the outcomes of EMRes. Indeed, there is a further mechanism of transformation
here: Whenever the devaluation of others fails or the need to consider others as evil
and the positive re-evaluation of oneself in EMRes-resentment is unsuccessful and
subjects then realise that their moral superiority is not genuine or it is not recognized
as such, hatred appears as the last resort and affectively most favourable option for
ridding oneself of the perceived threat. To be sure, hatred does not necessarily arise
here or only through a malfunctioning of the EMRes but also when other antagonistic
attitudes fail to fulfil their function of ostracism or exclusion, for example, when online
public shaming comes to nothing and gradually turns into hate speech.

3.3 Appropriateness conditions

Like all emotions, resentment too can get things right or wrong, or as it has become
customary in philosophy of emotions to say, it can be ‘appropriate’ or ‘fitting’, or not.
To take a little controversial case: Resenting somebody for having insulted your friend
gets it wrong when your friend well understood the obviously joking nature of the
harmless remark. However, if your friend isn’t familiar with the given cultural context
and thus didn’t grasp the sexist nature of the joke, your resentment might not only be
appropriate but also help her navigate the new social context. But things are less
straightforward when it comes to EMSoS-resentment, especially in political contexts,
such as shared moral outrage towards racial injustice or resentment in the face of
humiliation of one’s ingroup by political opponents; and they get even messier when
we consider EMRes-resentment.
Here, we aim to untangle the maze surrounding the issue of appropriateness of
resentment, by, first, differentiating between various standards of assessment that we
can apply here, and, secondly, by showing why the first type of resentment very
often—though, as we shall see certainly not always—is appropriate (according to all
standards), while EMRes-resentment never, or only contingently, is.
The literature on emotional appropriateness distinguishes three ways in which
emotions can or fail to be appropriate: (a) epistemically, (b) morally, or (c) prudentially
(D’Arms and Jacobson 2001; see also Srinivasan 2018; Cherry 2021; Stockdale 2021; cf.
Szanto & Tietjen in review). First, we can ask whether resentment correctly or
accurately appraises its target, or is epistemically ‘fitting’: Does the target object in fact
has the evaluative qualities ascribed to it (has a harm, moral wrong or injustice been
actually committed?), and if so, whether the affective reaction is proportionate

10
(whether, say, mild indignation instead of everlasting, raging anger would be more
appropriate to a given offence)? Secondly, is an emotional reaction morally right (e.g.,
is it virtuous to be amused by a racist joke or rather not precisely to feel resentment
towards the person telling it)? Finally, we can ask whether it is instrumentally good,
or prudent, to express or maintain resentment with a view to a certain goal (say
alleviating oppression) or rather counterproductive to political negotiations and
resolution? Notice that, according to the standard account at least, it would amount to
a “moralistic fallacy” to infer that because an emotion is morally or instrumentally
inappropriate, it is also unfitting in the epistemic sense (cf., however, e.g., An & Chen
2021, and the literature on “affective injustice”, Srinivasan 2018). More to the point,
notice also that all examples above are referring to the first type of resentment. This is
deliberate: Due to its very nature and structure, we argue that this type (incl. the
socially shared one) can be appropriate or inappropriate, depending on the political
sophistication of the agents, the sociopolitical context, and the moral or political aims.
Having said this, there are various cases where the subjects are sufficiently well
informed regarding an injustice, have the right moral or political aims to correct them,
and yet their resentment wittingly or unwittingly misfires or otherwise constitutes an
inappropriate reaction. We now briefly discuss such cases as they are illuminative of
the collective and moral-psychological dynamics in EMSoS.3
To begin with, EMSoS-resentment can misfire when individuals (unwittingly)
misidentify a purportedly shared concern. For instance, I might properly conceive of
myself as a member of a political community (e.g., Black Lives Matter), but falsely
identify the emotional and/or political import of a given event triggering my
resentment for our community. The event was of negligible impact and deemed
widely by BLM-members to better be ignored so as not to arouse negative
repercussions for the movement. If such cases occur repeatedly, I might eventually feel
little belonging to the group, and if I give public expression to the emotion ‘in the name
of the group’ in such cases I might even be excluded for prudential reasons.
Next, we have cases that cut deeper into the moral psychology of the individual
emoters. Notice that the individuals in these cases do not genuinely share the
resentment with their peers and, if EMSoS is at work here at all, it is only to reinforce
the morality or social standing of the individuals (similarly to EMRes).
Consider what might be characterised a ‘narcissistic misidentification’ of the
scope of the victims. Here, an individual conceives of the harm that triggered his

3There is a growing literature on the appropriateness of resentment; however, most focus on interpersonal
cases, e.g., Wallace 2019, Reis-Dennis 2022; for a recent notable exception, see Emerick and Yap 2023. See also
again the respective discussions in Murphy & Hampton 1998; MacLachlan 2010; Stockdale 2013 and 2021;
Srinivasan 2018; Cherry 2021; Silva 2021. The cases we present here differ from these latter discussions,
though some take inspiration from Cherry 2021.

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(spontaneous) resentment as exclusively issued towards himself. Hooks and Cherry
discuss “narcissistic rage” at racial injustice in this context (hooks 1995, 27–29; Cherry
2021, 20–23). To take a garish example, imagine the African American football-star O.
J. Simpson complaining to police officers who are brutalising him at a traffic control
(‘How dare you treat me like this?!’). There is more involved here than just a wrong
sense of entitlement. The subject narcissistically ignores the structural injustices vis-à-
vis all other oppressed ingroup members and wrongly conceives of it as merely
personal harm. Moreover, based on an internalised “ideology of hierarchical
privilege” (hooks 1995, 28), he establishes hierarchies within his own ingroup (‘They
might deserve that treatment, but not me/us achievers’).
Another set of cases of inappropriate ways of emotional sharing might be
characterised as ‘perversions’ of so-called “sympathetic resentment,” a notion
introduced by Schwarze (2020) for the solidaric recognition of the resentment of actual
victims of injustice.4 Let’s look at two instances. First, there is the danger of “false
allyship” (Cherry 2021), when a member of a dominant, non-victimized group allies
his emotional experience of resentment with the experience of members of a
minoritarian group, upon whose behalf his resentment is realised or expressed. For
instance, a member of the white middle-class who feels (epistemically, morally, or
prudentially) appropriate resentment at racial oppression commits an epistemic
fallacy if he assumes that he knows what it feels like to be racially oppressed by virtue of
feeling resentment. Moreover, this would add insult to injury and hence be morally
inappropriate, insofar as the ‘ally’ would reduce the experience of oppression—which
results from a complex of such experiences as vulnerability, despair, pain, or shame—
to a mere feeling of anger (Cherry 2021, 122–123). Secondly, consider the most clearly
deliberate misalignment of one’s personal concern and that of a group: virtue
signalling or “grandstanding” (Tosi & Warmke 2020), as when one publicly expresses
anger over something concerning one’s own community or another group that one
doesn’t really care about, just to align oneself with a supposedly virtuous ingroup
and/or to appear superior to some outgroups. Here one refocuses the attention to one’s
own morality or the morality of one’s ingroup. One identifies with a political or moral
cause that one is in fact less (if at all) concerned with compared to one’s concern with
one’s moral standing. It is easy to see how EMSoS might reinforce the (alleged) need
to signal one’s moral higher ground and eventually also reinforce the sense of one’s
moral standing, processes that are arguably facilitated on social media platforms.

4 Cf. also Margalit’s relevant notion of “kitsch solidarity,” a false fraternal love, where the real concern is not

the well-being of others but one’s own “phony” feelings (for others) (Margalit 2011, 174). Importantly, kitsch
solidarity is not only sentimentally narcissistic but also morally problematic (“moral kitsch”, as Margalit calls
it), since it distorts social facts, glossing over social asymmetries; see on sentimentally narcissistic emotions
Pugmire 2005 (Chap. 5).

12
 Yet, however important it is to point out such misidentifications, we must be
wary of all-too readily denouncing somebody’s moral outrage as based on phoney or
self-indulgent allyship only in the business of reinforcing one’s own or one’s ingroup’s
moral higher ground. More often than not it is rather the lack of sympathetic or
solidaric recognition of the (justified) resentment of third-party victims that is the real
issue (see also Szanto forthcoming).
As we have just seen, there are several ways in which resentment and,
specifically, EMSoS-resentment can be inappropriate. However, this is restricted to
quite specific cases. In stark contrast, if our account of the transformative mechanism
in EMRes and the affective intentionality of EMRes-resentment is on the right track,
this type of resentment is typically, for structural reasons, inappropriate on all counts:
First, EMRes-resentment remains epistemically opaque and cannot ever be
epistemically fitting: The initial grievances to which the emotion relates are
unrecognised, the targets shifting and indeterminate, and its focus, short of what really
matters to the emoters, just negatively defined against generalised others. Secondly,
form a prudential point of view, EMRes is not only unproductive on a personal level,
leaving individuals with repressed emotions and eventually emotional dissonance;
notwithstanding its seemingly reinforced efficacy to restore self-worth and recognition
by collectivising the reappraisals, EMRes can only constitute a social identity that
remains threatened and is thus ultimately unstable, in permanent need of conflictual,
intra- and intergroup negotiation. Finally, in terms of its moral, and in particular its
political appropriateness or legitimacy, EMRes-resentment is a purely antagonistic,
anti-social, anti-solidaric, genuinely anti-democratic, indeed “anti-political” sentiment
(Vargas Gonzalez forthcoming; Capelos & Katsanidou 2018), a point to which we now
turn.

3.4 Political consequences

The differences between the two types of resentment outlined so far are not just socio-
psychologically, affectively, epistemically, and normatively significant but also
politically. Indeed, we argue that the distinctions plays out in their diverging political
consequences and explain the opposing views on resentment as a motivator of political
action from which we started out this paper. While the public expressions of both types
of resentment may look similar—angry—and the underlying narratives often blend
elements of both (Reichold 2021), there are important differences in their intentional
structure and action tendencies. Whereas spontaneous and EMSoS-resentment
address felt social injustices, seeking to reveal and overcome them through collective
action, EMRes-resentment, while often fueled by economic or social injustice, as
Scheler (1912/1919) already pointed out, is decoupled from social structures that are

13
re-evaluated in terms of inverted power relations that allow ressentimentful subjects
to feel moral superiority over others against whom they hold powerless grudge.
Instead of collective action, this type of resentment motivates collective fission of
people into antagonistic groups that fight one another on symbolic and institutional
levels (Reichold 2021).
Those who defend resentment as an emotional gatekeeper for democratic order,
equal respect, and a critical political public are then talking about the first type of
resentment that motivates democratic political action, marked by ingroup solidarity,
outgroup tolerance, empathy, cooperative and deliberative decision making,
purposive and peaceful collective action. Examples of this kind of political action can
be seen in traditional and modern social and civil rights movements (Honneth 1995;
Britt & Heise 2000; Gould 2009), as well as left-wing populism (Salmela & von Scheve
2018), such as in the Indignados movement in Spain and Greece during the financial
crisis, and similar protests of the Occupy movement around the world (della Porta
2015; Gerbaudo 2017; Simiti, 2016; Salmela & von Scheve 2018).
In contrast, those who associate resentment with anti-democratic politics,
marked by outgroup hatred and contempt, a cynical stance towards deliberation,
uncompromising self-righteousness, and uncivil, disruptive collective action, are
talking about the second type of resentment. It has been identified in reactionary
politics of the political right and left (Capelos & Demertzis 2018; Capelos &
Katsanidou, 2018; Sullivan 2021), right-wing populism and authoritarianism (Betz
2005; Celis et al. 2021; Ferrari 2021; Illouz 2023; Kiss 2021; Mishra 2017; Salmela & von
Scheve 2017; Sharafutdinova 2020), as well as Islamic and other forms of
fundamentalism, fanaticism, extremism, and radicalism (Griffin 2012; Katsafanas 2022;
Kaya 2021; Langman & Morris 2003; Mishra 2017; Posłuszna & Posłuszny 2015).
Examples here include The Capitol Hill Riots on Jan 6, 2021, the top-down ethno-
nationalistic rallies of Orbán or Putin supporters in Hungary and Russia, or the
ritualistic PEGIDA protest marches in Germany (Kiss 2021; Kydd 2021; Medvedev
2023; Volk 2023).

4. Conclusions and future research

We have argued that there are two significantly different types of resentment with
dissimilar a) socio-psychological dynamics, b) affective-intentional structure, c)
epistemic and normative appropriateness, and d) political consequences. We have
traced these differences to the emergence of resentment as a spontaneous response to
an injustice or wrong, or its being elicited through the emotional mechanism of Social
Sharing on the one hand, and its being mediated by the emotional mechanism of

14
Ressentiment on the other. The proposed account can resolve the paradox of how
resentment empirically associates with democratic and constructive as well as with
anti-democratic and destructive political action.
Let us close with pointing to two avenues for future conceptual and empirical
research that can draw on our proposed distinction. First, there seems to be some
conceptual and empirical evidence that the distinction between two types of
resentment may also associate with different types of victimhood identities.
Resentment is felt from the position of being a victim of a moral wrong or injustice, so
victimhood and resentment are analytically connected. However, insofar as the two
types of resentment are significantly dissimilar, so can be the associated victimhood
identities. There is some evidence that victimhood identities in EMRes-resentment are
characterised by lack of empathy, moral elitism, victimhood competition or exclusive
victimhood, and rumination of victimhood that perpetuates powerlessness, self-pity,
and moral hypermnesia (Demertzis 2020; Gabay et al. 2020; Hoggett 2018; Salmela &
Capelos 2021; Young & Sullivan 2016; cf. also Brown 1995), as well as dependence
upon benefits that accrue to victim status (Jacoby 2015). In contrast, resentment
mediated by EMSoS seems to associate with a victimhood profile characterised by
empathy towards other victims or inclusive victimhood (Vollhardt 2015), an ability to
overcome victimhood by integrating into a democratic society through political
recognition of victimhood and restorative justice (Jacoby 2015), as well as an ability to
forgive and avoid rumination through reconciliation with perpetrators and mourning
the losses (Alexander et al. 2004; Demertzis 2020). The latter strategy that seeks to
transform victimhood into survivorhood is conducive to democratic order and civic
engagement, whereas the former strategy of nursing victimhood contributes to
intergroup conflicts and affective polarisation.
Finally, as the distinction between two types of resentment has crucial
importance for studying political actors and movements as well as their
communication strategies, there is a clear need in future research to develop ways of
operationalizing their differences in collaboration with empirical scientists.

Acknowledgements

We have presented earlier versions of this chapter at the Center for Subjectivity Research,
University of Copenhagen, and at the conference, “Emotions, Narratives, and Identities in
Politics, Populism, and Democracy”, University of Coimbra. We are thankful to the audiences
of both events for their valuable feedback. Salmela´s work is supported by funding from the
European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and
innovation program (grant agreement no. 832940). Szanto´s work is supported by the
Carlsberg Foundation (grant Id. CF18-1107).

15
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