This volume demonstrates how the emotions in mass industrial societies have been neglected to devastating effect. It shows how emotion has become increasingly separated from action, how - in a world of disjointed and synthetic emotions - social solidarity has become increasingly problematic, and how compassion fatigue has increasingly replaced political commitment and responsibility. The book ranges from discussion of the relation between knowledge and the emotions in thinkers as diverse as Durkheim and Baudrillard to a "postemotional" analysis of the carnage in former Yugoslavia. The author concludes with a discussion of the postemotional society - where the peer group replaces the government as the means of social control.