The chapter answers the question ‘Why has the rule of law become so fragile?’ as set up by the 2023 Nine Dots Prize competition. It shows how the liberal narrative of the rule of law is built on repressing the political elements of the legal system. Using Jungian psychoanalysis to analyse the crises of the rule of law, the author shows that the more we repress democratic politics from the legal system, the more the politics will strike back as ‘shadow’ in a distorted, anti-democratic form. The chapter also deepens the analysis of how DWE works politically with anger, preventing it from turning into ‘free-floating rage’ that can be exploited by authoritarian populism. It introduces the notion of ‘critical feeling’ to complement ‘critical thinking’ in contemporary academia.

Anger, akin to the wrath of God or the wrath of Achilles, the godlike hero from the Iliad, has long been considered a powerful and empowering emotion that is not for everyone. This chapter shows how in modern societies it rages in common people, while fighting in war, starting revolutions, contesting and sometimes even overthrowing political systems. But it is not only a genuine emotion felt and put into action. Anger can also be provoked, staged or even faked in order to strengthen a regime in power and justify its political decisions to the world. This was the case when in 1938 an alleged Volkszorn (people’s anger) was propagandistically declared the trigger of the infamous ‘Night of the Broken Glass’. For democracies, anger has to be considered a highly ambivalent feeling. On the one hand, it signals and legitimately expresses that people are dissatisfied and feel disappointed. On the other hand, anger can be extremely destructive when it renders a person impervious to the opinions and feelings of others and ends up in the refusal to engage in dialogue and the rejection of basic democratic rules, negotiation and settlement.

This chapter explores the fate of obstinate enemy garrisons who chose to withstand British breach assaults in the Napoleonic era. Under customary laws of war, British soldiers had the right to put such garrisons to the sword. In the sieges of the Peninsular War, British soldiers generally gave mercy to their French counterparts, part of a consistent pattern of self-regulating restraint that characterised Anglo-French combat during the war. A shared Anglo-French martial culture of honour and civility prevailed. Amongst other national enemies, however, in other contemporary global theatres of war, a very different picture emerges. British soldiers put defending Spanish and Indian troops to the sword at the sieges of Montevideo, Seringapatam and Gawilghur, raising important questions about the complex ways in which military and cultural factors coalesced, in shaping patterns of restraint and excess. These comparative case studies reveal the paradoxical Janus-face of enlightened ‘civilized war’ in action, with moderation and protections accorded to those enemy soldiers who fell firmly within its self-defining and self-limiting boundaries, and a dramatic lowering of restraints towards those combatants deemed to be on its margins or beyond.

This chapter investigates British sack atrocities to civilians during the Napoleonic era. It analyses how British soldiers represented this violence in their memoirs, especially through the lens of sensationalist gothic horror; and the challenges of estimating the scale of atrocities. It adopts a multi-contextual and multi-causal framework for understanding these atrocities, from situational rage and the brutalising experiences of war to the cultural and political contexts in which sack violence could operate. Whilst most British soldiers participated in the plundering of stormed towns, the murder and rape of civilians during sacks was perpetrated by only a minority. Across soldiers’ writings, we find horror, shame, and moral outrage at such acts; empathy towards the suffering civilian; and a moral duty to bear witness. And despite lamenting the inevitability of such atrocities, this did not prevent individuals, especially officers, from intervening to protect civilians, especially women, acts framed by chivalric and humanitarian ideals.

Deborah Archer employs Lauryn Hill’s 2012 song “Black Rage” as a lens through which the reader can understand the 2014 uprisings based on the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. By flipping the popular American song “My Favorite Things” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music to describe the racism at the nation’s heart and the Black rage it evokes, Lauryn Hill offers a haunting and powerful ode to Black America in “Black Rage.” This chapter will include a close textual analysis of the song and discuss the ways it evokes Black America’s experience of racism and the Black rage which gives fuel to Black resistance. As “Black Rage” was dedicated to the residents of Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, the chapter will discuss the systems of racial oppression exposed in the months following the murder of Michael Brown and connect it to the broader architecture of racial oppression in America. By adapting the Rodgers and Hammerstein song, Lauryn Hill is saying that racism, and the Black rage it engenders, are also quintessentially American.

This chapter explores competing perspectives and appraisals of anger in society and in education. It highlights the possibility of accepting and productively using moral anger, in contradiction to the prevalent approach of many educational psychologists and philosophers who are basically against anger. The chapter starts with a discussion of views admonishing against anger, from philosophy and psychology, before exploring their limitations, alongside more tolerant approaches to anger. It then considers the potential productive value of exploring anger in education.

The Iliad gives a thoroughgoing account of the Trojan War and of war as an inescapable feature of human life through a plot driven by the rage of its central hero Achilles. Achilles’ rage evolves from a bitter conflict within the Achaean camp into a vengeful hatred of the Trojan hero Hector until Achilles succeeds in killing Hector and assuring the fall of Troy; the poem concludes as Achilles accepts his own impending death and makes peace with Hector’s grieving father.