Arendt's work contains two key insights about the relationship between emotions and political agency. Chapter 1 focused on one of these: emotions must be transformed into public issues to support political agency. This chapter begins by developing the second insight: the public shape that emotions obtain through such transformations is fragile. With these two insights in place, I draw further on Arendt to argue that people need ‘empowering factors’ to transform their emotions into public issues and maintain them in this shape. I identify and explore four such factors: affiliations, spaces, institutions and laws, and conceptual resources. Empowering factors do not just facilitate the transformation of emotions into public issues. They also support political agency in general. However, each factor also comes in a disempowering form that inhibits political action and reflection on emotion. Medicalisation can produce and mobilise such disempowering factors, but it does not necessarily do so.

The Fragility of Political Emotions

Women, ethnic minorities, working-class individuals and members of other groups continue to be vulnerable to silencing and exclusion from political discourse based on claims that they are overly emotional and irrational. But resources permitting them to transform their emotions into public issues and action have become more readily available today than they were in the past. A general ‘emancipation of emotion’ seems to have transpired in recent years (Wouters 2012; see also Han 2017: 41–8; though cf. Scheff 2013). This emancipation is visible not so much in the fact that politicians and other political actors speak and act in ways that appeal to the emotions of their audiences, that is, their use of emotional rhetoric (see Richards 2008). Political actors have been engaging in this at least since Aristotle and undoubtedly for much longer. Instead, I would suggest it is most apparent in the proliferation of meta-emotional rhetoric in politics, by which I mean rhetoric about emotions, including what emotions people have, what people do with emotions, and what emotions do to people and things. In contemporary politics, voters and media commentators often demand emotional authenticity and ostentatious shows of emotions of politicians and other political actors. For example, in the British snap election of 2017, then- Prime Minister Theresa May was derided for her unemotional style, which earned her the moniker ‘Maybot’ in the media (Crace 2017). Meanwhile, political actors publicly discuss their intention to act on emotions.