Eva Illouz
Making Self-Interest into an Emotion
As a profession, psychologists have been seen as scientists of the mind, modern-day priests, and shapers of the languages of introspection and self-understanding. Yet this paper shows that psychologists have also been the promoters of rational forms of action. Psychologists who worked inside economic organizations in the 1930s not only scrutinized emotions with a new scientific vocabulary but also promoted the view that grievances between workers and management be formulated and negotiated according to “self-interest.” This paper examines how psychologists made emotions rational.
Eva Illouz has been President of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem since 2012. Before that she held the Chair of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2004, she delivered the Adorno Lectures in Germany and was a visiting Professor at Princeton University. In 2009 Eva Illouz was Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She is the author of Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (2000), The Culture of Capitalism (in Hebrew, 2002), Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture (2005), Cold Intimacies: Emotions in Late Capitalism (2007), as well as most recently, Why Love Hurts (2012). Earlier this year, she received the Anneliese Maier Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.