Feeling Rules

After Arlie Hochschild published her book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, just before the 2016 election, it came to feel prescient. And the conversation Krista had with her in 2018 has now come to point straight to the heart of 2020 — a year in which many of us might say we feel like strangers in our own land and in our own world. Hochschild created a field within sociology looking at the social impact of emotion. She explains how our stories and truths — what we try to debate as issues in our social and political lives — are felt, not merely factual. And she shares why, as a matter of pragmatism, we have to take emotion seriously and do what feels unnatural: get curious and caring about the other side.

Arlie Hochschild is professor emerita in the sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of ten books including The Managed Heart, The Second Shift, and Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, a finalist for the National Book Award.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Arlie Hochschild — The Deep Stories of Our Time." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.