The Underside of Social Movements: The Effects of Destructive Affective Ties

摘要

Recent scholarship analyzes the role of emotions in social movements, focusing on the ways emotions contribute to the building and maintenance of movements and highlighting the function of positive affective bonds among members. This article analyzes the pejorative aspects of group life, the creation of negative affective bonds, and the production of emotions that are destructive to individuals and to group life. Using a case study of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the leading New Left organization of the 1960s, I analyze the factors that contributed to the deterioration of positive affective bonds among members and their replacement with negative group dynamics, which had a deleterious effect on individual activists as well as on the life course of the movement in terms of alienation, disaffection, and demobilization.