CFP: Ideas of Anger – Indignation, righteous anger, and resentment from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

Edited by Simone Guidi, Alice Orrù, Francesco Toto

In the framework of the history of Western passions, indignation occupies a strategic position, situated at the intersection of philosophical anthropology, moral reflection, and political theory. While ancient and medieval traditions had codified its status predominantly within the meeting point between virtue theory, the distributive conception of justice, and the Aristotelian-Scholastic notion of “righteous anger”, it is starting from the Renaissance transition and throughout modernity that indignation is profoundly redefined, becoming a powerful critical operator and an engine for the reconfiguration of social bonds.

In the path moving from Humanism to the Enlightenment, indignation thus ceases to be a mere emotional and individual reaction to become a category of political space and an actor in intersubjective and social relations. In this process, its metamorphosis also interfaces with that of a wider network of passions, which still binds it to the notions of justice and “righteous anger”, but also to those of resentment, envy, merit, dissent, and crisis. In the course of the eighteenth century, this network of passions took on a new political, moral, and theological hue, assuming an even more markedly historical-political significance. On the one hand, therefore, indignation, “righteous anger”, and resentment feed the posture of Enlightenment intellectuals in the face of the atrocities of history; on the other hand, they penetrate the structures of philosophical textuality and the political novel, acting as a device for unveiling reality against the mystifications of power. Ultimately, reaching the threshold of the contemporary world, they become the motivational and political engine of the processes of emancipation and the breaking of false universalities.

Issue number 44 of Lo Sguardo intends to investigate this thematic core, exploring the metamorphoses of indignation over a time span ranging from the Renaissance to the threshold of the nineteenth century. Contributions that fit within the following guidelines are particularly encouraged:

1. Indignation, righteous anger, and resentment read in the light of anthropology and the theory of passions between the Renaissance and the early modern era
2. Indignation, righteous anger, and resentment between theology and political crisis in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
3. Indignation, righteous anger, and resentment in the political literature of the Enlightenment
4. Indignation, righteous anger, and resentment in the critiques of the modern colonial model (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries)

ACCEPTED LANGUAGES: ITALIAN, ENGLISH, FRENCH, SPANISH

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION OF PAPERS: 01/02/2027

Procedure: Send the article, complete in all its parts and drafted according to the editorial guidelines of the journal, through the OJS editorial platform of Lo Sguardo, selecting the appropriate call under the entry “Section”:

https://editorial.losguardo.net/ojs/index.php/LS/about/submissions

The articles will be subjected to a double-blind peer review. The entire submission and selection process will take place through the aforementioned platform.

Simone Guidi, Alice Orrù, Francesco Toto
[email protected] | [email protected]