The politics of humiliation: A modern history.

Center for the History of Emotions

Frevert, U. (2020). The politics of humiliation: A modern history. Oxford University Press.

Humiliation practices are common, for example, in parenting and education, on the internet, in penal law, and in politics. Thus, after 1944, many French women accused of liaising with Germans were degraded by having their hair shorn in public.

The politics of humiliation investigates humiliation as an instrument of power in public settings over the past 250 years, demonstrating that modernity never relinquished the pillory but simply reinvented it. It is no longer the state that shames and humiliates but society.