Sing the Rage

Can anger serve justice, even though moral training has long favored detached, rational judgment? Sonali Chakravarti takes up this puzzle by examining South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which heard testimony from 1996 to 1998. Day after day, witnesses described apartheid's crimes in raw emotional terms, weeping, shouting, and sobbing as they spoke.

Chakravarti contends that these displays, though unsettling, were essential to the process of transitional justice and to the political future the country hoped to build. Her inquiry draws on Adam Smith and Hannah Arendt, thinkers who recognized both the hazards anger poses in public life and the harm done when it is shut out.

Building on their insights, she maintains that how anger is expressed and received can disclose what would otherwise stay hidden about a new political order, the barriers that keep people from full civic participation, and the boundaries of political life itself. Her central claim is that anger, along with the skill to listen to it, can build trust among citizens and an acknowledgment of their shared dignity and worth.