Antipathy

Abstract:In the nineteenth century, a new term emerged for moral disgust, which then, as now, sat uneasily within physiologically and socially based models of emotions. The history of “antipathy”—antagonist of that politically and aesthetically important emotion, sympathy—reveals tensions in liberal society around the role of moral disgust. Often invoked with disclaimers about its imprecision, antipathy’s revival evidences efforts to grapple with a newly puzzling feeling. Examining the term’s use by theorists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries including Jeremy Bentham, David Hume, John Hey, and Alexander Bain, this paper shows how an initially neutral term came to describe an emotion thought dangerous to social cohesion, and was then in turn revalorized in the service of racism.