What is it about?
It is argued that social order emerges from interactions among human individuals developing and internalizing emotional beliefs about their place within a wider social environment in the form of a social contract. Holding such emotional beliefs, knowing that other people hold them as well, and knowing that others’ emotional beliefs are roughly similar to our own is what makes predictability and cooperation—that is, social order—on a large scale possible.
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Why is it important?
Nation-building projects aiming to restore social order in failing states cannot be reduced to “mechanical” polity-building efforts. We do not claim that political procedures and institutions are irrelevant for the establishment, maintenance, and reproduction of social order. Our contention is that efforts in rebuilding political institutions in failing states are less likely to succeed if not coupled with a wider concern for the restoration of emotionally fulfilling rituals that would connote a sense of meaningful participation in political institutions and social life in general.
Perspectives
I believe that humans have inherited both prosocial and antisocial propensities from the evolutionary past, and those propensities are, to a great extent, emotionally mediated. The key to restoration of broken social order is in encouraging prosocial and curbing antisocial propensities. We have started to follow this line of thinking in this article, and although its full ramifications are yet to be considered, I think we have already reached some interesting conclusions.
PhD Armano Srbljinovic
University of Zagreb
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Implications of the Sociology of Emotions for the Restoration of Social Order, Emotion Review, April 2014, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1754073913503371.
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