Durkheim asserted that it was imperative for the sociologist to overcome the protective feelings of repugnance shielding social phenomena from scientific analysis. The failure to disentangle fact from feeling, to root out emotion, he warns, would mean “the negation of all science" (40). Compared to some of his contemporaries, this wholesale repudiation of emotion represented a polemical position. Max Weber, by contrast, remained unconvinced throughout his career that the objects of the social world could be entirely isolated from the evaluative presuppositions and subjective attachments which constituted them to begin with. Nevertheless, Durkheim’s strong, unambivalent stance captures something of the fin-de-siècle mood of residual Enlightenment enthusiasm over the possibility of producing a modern scientific knowledge of the social domain freed from superstition and emotional prejudice. This enthusiasm was shared across all the emerging social scientific disciplines, each of which took a pronounced interest in bringing a methodological objectivity modeled on the natural sciences to bear on the study of the affective life of the subject. The neoclassical economists of the late nineteenth century epitomized this tendency, at once intensifying their focus on the pleasures and desires of the utilitarian subject while deriving their increasingly impersonal methodological premises from mathematics and the physical sciences. Alfred Marshall, for example, understood the ebb and surge of human appetites to be the principal engine of social and economic life—but he modeled his conception of appetite on the law-bound, measurable oscillation of a pendulum.

Affective life was at the heart of the social, but in order to study it, feeling needed to be overcome.