Emotional and social communities

This conference organized at Sciences Po by David Do Paço and Guillaume Piketty explores how emotional and social communities interacted, completed and challenged in modern European history. Doing so history of emotions progressively meets social history. According to Barbara Rosenwein, an emotional community is ‘a system of feeling’ based on a ‘social community’, i.e. a relational group of people sharing the same economic, social, political interests. This community could be socially diverse and was not exclusive. An individual could also belong to several emotional communities, based on the different moments of her/is life, and the different interests s/he defended when s/he performed her/is emotions