“The Secret History of Emotion is a masterful revisionist account of the role of passion in the Western tradition. Daniel Gross describes the radical transformation of a public rhetorical conception of emotion into an internalized psychological view that has become the generally accepted physiological theory of emotional states. The Secret History of Emotion presents an incisive narrative argument that will surely inspire more reevaluations of our contemporary genealogies of affects.”--Steven Mailloux, University of California, Irvine
— Steven Mailloux
“With The Secret History of Emotion, Daniel Gross has achieved what I thought impossible: he compresses into these pages a compelling history of emotion from Aristotle to today. His argument that there exists a great tradition of understanding the emotions as a psychosocial phenomenon is cogent, coherent, and interesting from beginning to end. This is a remarkable book.”--David Konstan, Brown University
— David Konstan
“Daniel Gross’s The Secret History of Emotion is a brilliant example of the newest new rhetoric. Gross takes on an uncritical, ahistorical, biologically justified theory of the emotions, and shows how partial and impoverished is such a representation. He offers an exhilaratingly critical intellectual history of the passions in a tightly argued engagement that reveals new possibilities for invention, for political engagement in the present and future. Pointing to the turn from seventeenth-century political rhetoric to eighteenth-century psychology, Gross’s argument launches a powerful critique of those who would naturalize the passions, offering instead a historically grounded, critical, theoretically astute, and above all social account of the emotions. His new rhetoric of the passions with admirable brevity demolishes banal received ideas that limit the imagination of social change.”--Page duBois, University of California, San Diego
— Page duBois
“Gross's deft and remarkable book should be required reading for neurobiologists and, of course, for humanists of every school. Gross reminds us that emotions are rarely private. Most feelings, rational or ‘irrational,’ and all expressions of feeling, are obviously and irreducibly social.”--Stephen Pender, Times Literary Supplement
— Stephen Pender, Times Literary Supplement
"If indeed Aristotle was correct to propose that rhetoric is the art of finding the available means of persuasion, Daniel M. Gross has done an excellent job of making such means available in his new study of emotion. . . . Gross is a splendid writer--insightful and moving. This text is accessible, even for those unfamiliar with affect theory, and, in fact, it may be the perfect place to start your reading if you are interested in the history of emotion and how affect theory might enrich your own work."
— David Rogers, American Book Review