The Politics of Resentment in Moromeții
The Politics of Resentment in Moromeții

Summary/Abstract: This study takes as its point of departure Max Scheler’s phenomenological analysis of ressentiment, developed in dialogue with Friedrich Nietzsche’s reflections, yet seeking to dissociate it from morality. Max Scheler situates ressentiment at the intersection of psychology (focused on individual behaviour) and sociology (where he explores its collective manifestations and typologies). The term’s modern ambiguity emerges from its proximity to anger, envy, and hatred, with which it forms a conceptual constellation. To clarify these interrelated emotions, I draw on Peter Sloterdijk’s studies on anger, Fabrice Wilhelm’s on envy, and Gabriel Liiceanu’s on hatred. My main focus is the transition from individual to collective emotion—the capitalization of ressentiment as a “depository of rage”/“depository of human savings of wrath”—and its ideological transformation into a “righteous political anger” (Georges Didi-Huberman), “the intellectual organization of political hatreds” (Julien Benda), or “class hatred.” As a case study, I examine two characters—Țugurlan and Niculae Moromete—from Marin Preda’s canonical novel Moromeții (The Moromete family) I & II (1955, 1967). They illustrate two stages of ressentiment: a genuine, pre-ideological form on the verge of class consciousness, and an ideological one, where ressentiment becomes a socially transformative instrument within the newly established communist regime of 1950s Romania. The analysis considers both the individual’s relation to their microsociety and the broader processes of accelerated modernization in interwar and postwar Romania, tracing the complex emotional dynamics that can either mitigate or intensify ressentiment.

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