In this chapter Chris Meckstroth explains how Immanuel Kant responded to the urgent political question of the 1780s and 1790s, how to understand the collective agency of the people or nation, with a novel conception of history. Kant thought we must believe progress is possible if we are to sustain a commitment to acting justly. To this end he re-worked arguments of Leibniz and Pope, who had tried to show that we live in the best of all possible worlds, thereby absolving God of responsibility for evil and saving the coherence of moral duty from scepticism. Kant, however, did not pitch his argument to the religious conscience of individuals. He aimed at political rulers whose authority derived from representing the general will of an entire people. His political thought focussed on principles a ruler must respect to count as that sort of representative. To these his philosophy of history added a concern for improvement over time, which he made plausible by drawing on a mechanism of unsocial sociability familiar in authors such as Pope. The result was a new, secular theodicy of progress favouring peace and republican politics, and designed to contain conflict in an age of democratic reform.

This chapter examines how American literature has engaged with business corporations in general, and the legal fiction of corporate personhood in particular. There are few major novels about business corporations, because literary fiction has tended to concentrate on the moral dilemmas and social entanglements of individuals, rather than the more impersonal realm of economic activity. Yet the changing legal nature and increasing importance of corporations has forced some writers to rethink what it means to be human, creatively rethinking the relationship between individual and collective agency. The chapter considers three phases in the literary representation of corporations: as monster, as system, and as story. It uses as examples James Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo (1831), Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901), Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Richard Powers’s Gain (1998), and Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (2007).

Chapter Five investigates the idea that while African Americans exhibit an anger gap in politics, they also demonstrate an enthusiasm advantage. With aid of survey data, I demonstrate that across different political eras that carry positive prospects for African Americans—from Clinton to Obama—greater proportions of black individuals exhibit pride relative to comparable whites. Further, these pride exhibits a stronger mobilizing effect on black participation relative to whites. This chapter also highlights the findings from a second original experimental study, in which black subjects exhibit a uniquely motivating effect of hope on their participation in a local issue area. This chapter ultimately illustrates that the boost to black participation accrued from the enthusiasm advantage is generally not sufficient to balance out the disparity caused by the anger gap. Whereas pride exhibits participation-stimulating effects for African Americans that are on par with the effects of anger, the potential mobilizing power of hope on black participation is limited to very specific contexts.

Chapter Four grapples directly with how seeing red over politics differs for the political participation of blacks and whites. From examinations of black discourses debating the proper role of anger in black political strategizing emerge a picture of black anger that directs individuals more toward oppositional actions such as protesting and boycotting rather than electoral actions like voting. Data from both a national survey and the 2018 RAP study show that anger over politics and racial issues more effectively steers African Americans to activist activities than vote-related activities. These data also show how the relationship between black people’s anger and their participation in such activities is shaped by their views on race and their collective agency within politics. African Americans’ senses of racial linked fate with other groups, their desire to stay calm in the face of discrimination, and their perceptions of the stress caused by race all inhibit the capacity of anger to translate to actions to address the issue of race and policing.

Chapter Two examines the psychology of anger, its expected effects on behavior, and the prevalence of anger in political messaging. Drawing on different traditions in social psychology, this chapter breaks down the distinct attitudes underlying the emotion of anger, and I provide a theoretical account of why the emotional sentiment of resignation cultivated among African Americans inhibits the emergence of anger as this group surveys the political environment. I investigate a range of campaign messages and speeches from political elites over the years to highlight the why’s and how’s behind elites’ attempts to activate various emotions within the intended public—specifically anger. I conduct emotion discourse analyses of these messages in order to identify the emotional sentiments that are cultivated and reinforced within primarily white and black audiences. The chapter begins the exploration of the racial divide in the activation of political anger by surveying trends from the open-ended findings from the original survey experiment titled the 2018 Race, Anger and Participation (RAP) Study.