Policy Futures in Education

Volume 10 Number 5 2012

www.wwwords.co.uk/PFIE

Anger and Political Culture:

a time for outrage!

MICHAEL A. PETERS
Policy, Cultural and Social Studies in Education,
University of Waikato, New Zealand

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of political anger in democracy. It reviews the work of
Stéphane Hessel before examining the role and reception of anger in classical and modern thought.
The author identifies two main traditions within which the concept of political anger can be located:
revolutionary violence of the Marxist tradition and the peaceful, nonviolent tradition of civil
disobedience initiated by Gandhi. The culture of anger going back to the ancients is examined,
followed by a review of the ‘angry young men’ culture of a group of authors around John Osborne and
his famous play Look Back in Anger. The author insists that the culture of political anger is an essential
set of readings, techniques and skills that are indispensable in the neoliberal age.

At a time when austerity measures across the world punish taxpayers after national banking
systems have been bailed out with hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars, when youth from all
levels of society suffer historically high levels of unemployment, when the people of Cairos’s Tahrir
Square continue to demonstrate peacefully for basic democratic values against corrupt officials and
their military, when ever-larger numbers of children around the world are born into poverty, and
when the inequalities of Western societies have reached their highest post-war levels, it is
remarkable that a 94-year-old veteran resistance fighter should become an icon of resistance and an
advocate of peaceful protest.[1]
Stéphane Hessel (b.1917), the French diplomat, ambassador, writer, resistance fighter and
human rights advocate, wrote a 32-page essay published as a polemic that recalled the values he
had fought for during the Resistance as a basis for democratic protest today. The essay, originally
published as Indignez-vous! (2010), sold more the 3.5 million copies worldwide and has been
translated into 15 different languages. The Nation published the essay in English in 2011 and it now
appears as Time for Outrage! (Charles Glass Books).[2] As a young resistance fighter Hessel struggled
against the Vichy government and the Nazi regime. He was a Buchenwald concentration camp
survivor and after the war was involved in helping to draft the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. He has since been a founding member of many human rights organizations and a staunch
advocate of human rights, signing the petition ‘For a Treaty of a Social Europe’ and criticizing
Israeli air-strikes in Lebanon. He has been a spokesman for the homeless and a critic of Israeli
military attacks against the Palestinians. He has been awarded many honors, including the French
Order of Merit and Legion of Honor. He was awarded the UNESCO prize for promoting a culture
of human rights in 2008 and various peace prizes. Foreign Policy named him as one of the top global
thinkers in keeping alive the spirit of the French Resistance. Indeed, Hessel’s Indignez-vous! (2010),
an ally of the Spanish M-15 Indignants movement [3], tells the young of today that their lives and
liberties are worth fighting for.
His polemic raises general issues about anger in politics: whether it is acceptable at all and in
what forms; how should we deal with anger in civic education; should we follow Seneca or
Gandhi? How should we explain the complex link between political anger and violence? Indeed, is

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Michael A. Peters

violence in a democracy ever justified? There are some like Fanon, Trotsky, Orwell and Malcolm X
that would argue that it is. These critics see the philosophy of nonviolence as an attempt to foist
bourgeois morality on the working class. They argue that anger is required for revolutionary
change and that the link to violence is also acceptable, especially when it accompanies the right to
self-defense. To them the ideal of nonviolence is false because it presupposes both compassion and
a sense of justice on behalf of one’s adversary even in circumstances where the adversary has
nothing to lose. These thinkers believe not only that political anger has a positive role to play but
that the link to political violence is not only acceptable but required and that militant activism is
strategically superior to nonviolence.
The value and place of political anger depends upon the theory of politics one holds and the
sort of political change one expects. It also depends upon its place in a theory of emotions. I want
to entertain the relationship between anger and the legitimate expression of anger, especially its
expression in forms of discourse and forms of political action. I also want to explore the link between
political anger and forms of political action that derive from a philosophy of nonviolence. Both of
these issues are fundamental to political education. There are other issues that lie near the border
of these issues but that I do not have the time to explore: what is the relationship between political
anger and the State’s exercise of power against its own people and against other States and other
peoples? What of war as the supreme act of violence and what is its relation to political anger?
Seneca’s famous essay ‘On Anger’ views it as a kind of madness, rejecting all forms of
spontaneous and uncontrolled forms of rage. In war as in sport, Seneca counsels, it is a mistake to
become angry and he talks of mastering anger and how to deal with anger in others: avoid being
too busy; do not deal with anger-provoking people; avoid unnecessary hunger or thirst; listen to
soothing music; check one’s impulses; become aware of personal irritations; do not be too
inquisitive of others; do not be too quick to believe that someone has slighted you; put yourself in
the place of the other person.[4]
Seneca’s techniques would not be too out of place in a modern anger management course:
shades of the 2003 slapstick comedy with Adam Sandler and Jack Nicolson called Anger Management,
with the subtitle ‘Feel the Love’. Sandler plays a mild-mannered Dave Buznik and Nicholson plays
an aggressive instructor called Dr Buddy Rydell, a psychopathic character who steals his girlfriend
and nearly ruins his life. One of the tag lines is ‘Let the healing begin’. Seneca seems to me like a
modern Rydell or anger management therapist. Seneca’s techniques are the direct forerunner to a
system of therapeutic techniques and exercises by which someone with excessive or uncontrollable
anger can be taught ways to control or at least reduce the angry emotional state. Often it is taught
alongside assertiveness training in communication which purportedly allows for the healthy
expression of the emotion.
Anger gets a bad press. By contrast, we never hear of ‘happiness management’ or ‘joy
training’. Seneca’s negative assessment of anger is echoed by Galen and by most religious-based
moral codes: it is one of the seven deadly sins in Catholicism; it is equated with unrequited desire in
Hinduism; it is defined as one of the five hindrances in Buddhism; in Judaism anger is considered a
negative trait; and in the Qur’an anger is attributed to Muhammad’s enemies.
By comparison, Aristotle in the Rhetoric attributes some value to anger that has arisen from
perceived injustice because it is useful for preventing injustice.[5] In Chapter 2 of Book I Aristotle
defines rhetoric by reference to reason, to human character, and to emotions; and in Chapter 3 he
defines three categories of oratory including political, forensic and ceremonial. This is important
because it establishes the link between political anger and forms of discourse suited to its
expression.
Following Aristotle, I will argue for the positive rehabilitation of anger. Political anger, if this
concept and distinction can be sustained, I would say is mostly related to a denial of freedom
and/or a perceived injustice. When women were denied the vote in New Zealand before 1893 they
were angry and their anger was expressed in organized protest and in different forms of political
discourse and organization. The same is probably true for women who were denied the vote in
France before 1948, in Switzerland before 1972, and in Afghanistan before 2001, and by women
living in Saudi Arabia today: the abrogation of freedom often and appropriately results in political
anger that often gets expressed in legitimate forms of protest and discourse that constitutes part of
the struggle for rights. All of this is in accord with Hessel.

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The expression of political anger in a democracy is perfectly legitimate and indeed even
politically desirable as an antidote to the exercise of arbitrary or illegitimate power that involves the
abrogation of freedom and unfair and unequal treatment before the law. Mahatma Gandhi once
remarked, ‘I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger,
and as heat conserved is transmitted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmitted
into a power that can move the world’. He drew on Tolstoy’s interpretation of the Gospels and
was inspired by satyagraha (devotion to the truth) and ahimsa (nonviolence) as a basis for his civil
resistance and disobedience that he developed in South Africa against state racism and then later in
the struggle against the British Raj.
My approach is to historicize democracy and to see the legitimate expression of political
anger as an engine of change aimed at the extension of existing freedoms and the generation of
new freedoms. I want to emphasize the relationship between political anger and forms of discourse
suited to the expression of anger that have developed a home in the English language tradition and
culture.
Anger is an ancient emotion and, as Susanna Braund and Glenn W. Most (2005) demonstrate,
it is found everywhere in the ancient world, from the very first word of the Iliad through all literary
genres and every aspect of public and private life. Yet, it is only very recently that classicists,
historians, and philosophers have begun to study anger in antiquity. The current debate about
anger in antiquity took place among the classicists in the 1990s – Martha Naussbaum, Douglas
Cairns, David Konstan, Richard Sorabji and William Harris.
Anger and epic seem to go hand in hand. The wrath of Achilles occurs in the Iliad; the debate
about anger is explored at the end of the Aeneid; Aristotle defines anger positively in the Rhetoric.
The gods are often said to be angry and the debates about the Ancients have also focused on the
delegitimization of women’s anger in the Greek polis while shoring up masculine anger, providing
a valorization of anger in Athenian society.
In The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks David Konstan (2006) argues that
the emotions of the ancient Greeks were in some significant respects different from our own, and
that recognizing these differences is important to our understanding of Greek literature and
culture generally. (p. ix)
He also argues that the Greeks’ conception of the emotions has something to tell us about our own
views and in particular about the nature of particular emotions. In one sense we might say that by
considering the emotions, and in particular anger, in relation to modern democracy we are
engaging in a ‘psychopathology of democracy’.
Aristotle suggests that to know how to stir an emotion you must know what the emotion is
about, and to know what it is about you must know what the people engaged in the relevant
transaction are thinking: ‘Anger may be defined as an impulse, accompanied by pain, to a
conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight directed without justification towards what concerns
oneself or towards what concerns one’s friends’ (Bk II, Ch. 2). The great strength of Aristotle’s
analysis, Konstan argues, is not that he gets the emotions absolutely ‘right’ where others get them
absolutely ‘wrong’, but that ‘[his] approach ... better describes what the emotions meant in the
social life of the classical city state’, which provides the ‘narrative context’ for his account (p. 28).
Yet Aristotle advises us about anger in order to enlighten us about the force of deliberative oratory
that can influence citizens in the life of the assembly that was ‘intensely confrontational, intensely
competitive, and intensely public’. Aristotle was writing for
a world in which self-esteem depends on social interaction: the moment someone’s negative
opinion of your worth is actualized publicly in the form of a slight, you have lost credit, and the
only recourse is a compensatory act [i.e. revenge in anger] that restores your social position.
(pp. 74-75)
Konstan goes on to say that ‘the Greeks were constantly jockeying to maintain or improve their
social position’ and that they ‘were deeply conscious of their standing in the eyes of others’ and
‘intensely aware of relative degrees of power and their own vulnerability to insult and injury’
(p. 259). While I accept the differences in the emotional worlds of the classical Greeks and that of
the modern West today, especially for women, Aristotle’s lessons and descriptions do not seem too

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far-fetched as descriptions of the American Congress, the classroom, the playground, political party
gatherings, parliamentary debates and even philosophy of education conferences.
When we talk about anger in a positive sense in modern democracies we should draw
distinctions between annoyance, irritation, frustration, mild anger, outrage and fury. We might
even draw the distinction between passive anger and aggressive anger that spills over from
discourse and peaceful protest into violence and bullying. The discursive forms of political anger –
the rant, the tirade, the diatribe, the harangue, and satire that combines anger with humour,
sometimes with cynicism and parody, sometimes with irony or sarcasm, often with burlesque,
exaggeration, and double entendre, all produce the militantly angry forms of discourse. But can
anger expressed in discourse be violent?
In this context I am reminded of the play and the 1959 black and white British film based on
John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger [6], directed by Tony Richardson and starring Richard
Burton and Claire Bloom, about a love-triangle between Jimmy Porter, a disaffected lower-middle-
class, university-educated man, who lives with his wife Alison, the daughter of a retired Colonel in
the British Army in India, and Helena an actress friend of Alison’s. Intellectually restless, with ‘a
chip on his shoulder’, Jimmy reads the papers, argues and taunts his friends over their middle-class
acceptance of the world around them. He rages to the point of violence, reserving much of his bile
for Alison’s middle-class friends and family.
Jimmy: Somebody said – what was it? – We get our cooking from Paris – that’s a laugh – our
politics from Moscow, and our morals from Port Said. You know, I hate to admit it, but I think I
can understand how her Daddy must have felt when he came back from India, after all those
years away. The old Edwardian brigade do make their brief little world look pretty tempting. All
home-made cakes and croquet. [Sits on cistern. ALISON wanders to table and ashtray.] Always the
same picture: high summer, the long days in the sun, slim volumes of verse, crisp linen, the smell
of starch. If you’ve no world of your own, it’s rather pleasing to regret the passing of someone
else’s. But I must say it’s pretty dreary living in the American Age – unless you’re American, of
course. Perhaps all our children will be American? That’s a thought, isn’t it? [Act 1, p. 12]
Look Back in Anger came to exemplify a reaction to the affected drawing-room comedies of Noel
Coward, Terrence Rattigan and others, which dominated the West End stage in the early 1950s.
Kenneth Tynan (1964), who referred to the play’s ‘instinctive leftishness’ in his Observer review,
wrote in a piece on ‘The Angry Young Movement’ that Jimmy Porter ‘represented the dismay of
many young Britons ... who came of age under a Socialist government, yet found, when they went
out into the world, that the class system was still mysteriously intact’.
Osborne, who died in 1994, was notorious for the ‘theatre of anger’ directed against the
British establishment. Olivier was dismissive of the play and thought it bad theatre. Yet the play
transformed British theatre and Porter captured the angry and rebellious nature of the post-war
generation, spawning what George Fearon, a press officer, referred to as ‘angry young men’, a
group of playwrights including Osborne and Kingsley Amis who were characterized as being
disillusioned with traditional English society.
Not surprisingly, their views, not to be seen as a movement, were usually from the Left
(though Osborne increasingly moved to the radical Right), sometimes anarchistic, and concerned
with describing various forms of social alienation in post-war Britain. The group was nurtured by
the Royal Shakespeare Company with overlaps with the Oxbridge malcontents (Kingsley, Philip
Larkin, John Wain) and with a small group of young existentialist philosophers including Colin
Wilson, Stuart Holroyd and Bill Hopkins. Sometimes the ‘angries’, as they were referred to, were
seen also to include Harold Pinter, John Braine, Arnold Weskler and Alan Sillitoe. This was a
formidable force in British theatre, even if the literary high ground had been stolen by James Joyce
and Dylan Thomas.
It was a movement that had only one thing in common – the class positionality of a kind of
political anger aimed against the Establishment that explored existentially the alienation of human
beings, celebrated working-class heroes and led to the rediscovery and legitimacy of working-class
culture. Colin Wilson claims they were the first group of working-class writers. In his masterful
literary biography of John Osborne subtitled The Many Lives of an Angry Young Man, based on
Osborne’s private notebooks, John Heilpern (2008) records John Mortimer’s remark that ‘He
[Osborne] was an absolutely lovely Champaign-drinking man’, adding ‘and an absolute shit, of

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course’, and Osborne’s own assessment when asked if he was a paranoid person confirmed this
assessment: ‘Oh yes’, he replied, ‘I see treachery everywhere. In my opinion, you should never
forgive your enemies because they are probably the only thing you’ve got’ (p. 20).
Anger and the culture of political anger occupied a central place in British life in the late 1950s
and 60s, and in periods thereafter. It was central to the anti-war culture in the USA that overturned
American foreign policy and the war in Vietnam. From that time we look forward in anger to the
late 1960s, to the 60s counterculture that erupted in forms of organized protest by students and
young people across the Western world, fuelled by the anti-war protest songs of Donovan, Bob
Dylan and Joan Baez, among others. This was also a distinctive ‘culture of anger’ inspired by the
ideal of peaceful protest that invented new cultural forms of protest and civil acts of disobedience
to ‘ban the bomb’ and demand democratic rights.
The countercultural movement rode on the back of the civil rights movement and coalesced
with the free speech movement at Berkeley, with the constellation of the New Left inspired by
Herbert Marcuse and others, second generation women’s rights and feminism, environmentalism
and the organization for gay rights. Of my generation, who doesn’t remember the ‘sit-in’, the
‘happening’, the slogans – ‘make love not war’ – and taking part in peaceful rallies? These forms of
protest learned the new forms of democratic action, including pacifist and non-violence expressions
of political anger, from anti-colonial struggles.
Only by studying their own culture, and in particular the culture of the 50s, 60s and 70s, will
students and the youth of today understand the significance of student protests and the
counterculture that invented new forms of expression of political anger in discourse, music,
literature, drama, dress and style that were predominantly non-violent, consistent with its
underlying values, and effective as a means of public pedagogy.
Students today are suffering in the neoliberal crisis after the big financial meltdown and face
mounting debt with few prospects for work. They are relearning the lessons of the first post-war
generation of citizen activism, critical democratic consciousness and its successes against all
bureaucratic and totalitarian perversions of social democracy. Western democracies and political
rights are being looked to as a model by the youth of the Arab Spring, not the story of free trade
ands global capital but indigenous narratives that borrow from the alternatives of social democracy
and the tradition of non-violence. Today more than ever we need to convert political anger into
mass mobilizations against the elimination of powers of collective bargaining and the move against
teachers and students as governments, having bailed out the bankers, now set about cutting their
education budgets and laying off teachers.
The philosophy of nonviolence is an effective strategy for social change that channels political
anger into acceptable forms of protest within a democracy. Nonviolent campaigns include a variety
of forms of discourse and social action: critical forms of education, creative humor and persuasion,
civil disobedience, nonviolent direct action, and targeted communication. Nonviolence is a
powerful tool with a respectable history – the suffragettes, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, César
Chávez. Advocates of nonviolence believe cooperation and consent are the roots of political
power; if that is so then the peaceful expression of political anger derives from a concept of political
love.
If peaceful protest fails to move the authorities then revolutionary protest will follow; if
revolutionary protest fails, revolutionary violence most surely will occur.

Notes
[1] I am indebted to Christine Henderson for alerting me to Hessel’s polemic. She is the partner of Frank
Docherty, the Scottish surrealist political painter who has painted an anti-war and anti-state
bureaucracy series. All his paintings are ironic or cuttingly humorous. See
http://www.frankmdochertyrsw.com/introduction.html
[2] Indignez-vous! Indigène editions official website:
http://www.indigene-editions.fr/actualites/indignez-vous-a-la-conquete-du-monde.html. See also
Time for Outrage! – English translation of Indignez-vous! Biography and Writings of Hesse, ed. Denis
Touret (Charles Glass Books: http://www.charlesglass.net/). Finally see: A Talk with Stephane
Hessel at The American University of Paris. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-9ud4w9jCY;

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Bruce Crumley (2011) Stephane Hessel and the Handbook of the Revolution, TIME, December 14.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2102243,00.html
[3] See the official blog at http://tomalaplaza.net/ and the collection on the Spanish revolution at
http://archive.org/details/spanishrevolution
[4] See Seneca’s Essays, vol. 1, with ‘On Anger’:
http://www.stoics.com/seneca_essays_book_1.html#ANGER1. See also Alain de Botton’s ‘Seneca
on Anger – Philosophy: a guide to happiness’ at
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6877249402964035542#
[5] See the full text based on the translation by W. Rhys Roberts and hypertext by Lee Honeycutt at
http://www2.iastate.edu/~honeyl/Rhetoric/index.html
[6] See the film version available at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051879/ and the movie trailer at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKk5gzEhphY

References
Braund, S. & Most, G.W. (2005) Ancient Anger: perspectives from Homer to Galen. Yale Classical Studies XXXII.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harris, William (2002) Restraining Rage: the ideology of anger control in classical Greece. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Heilpern, John (2008) The Many Lives of an Angry Young Man. New York: Knopf.
Konstan, David (2006) The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: studies in Aristotle and classical literature. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Tynan, Kenneth (1964) Tynan on Theatre. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

MICHAEL A. PETERS is Professor of Education at the University of Waikato, New Zealand,

Emeritus Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA and Adjunct Professor
in the School of Art, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Australia and the
Department of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University, China. He was Excellence Professor at the
University of Illinois (2005-11), held a personal chair at the University of Auckland (2000-05) where
he was also Head of Cultural and Policy Studies, and was Research Professor at the University of
Glasgow (2000-05). He is the executive editor of Educational Philosophy and Theory (Wiley-
Blackwell), and founding editor of Policy Futures in Education and E-Learning and Digital Media
(Symposium). He is the author of some 60 books and hundreds of articles including most recently
The Last Book of Postmodernism (2011). Correspondence: mpeters@waikato.ac.nz

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