Ljudska povijest emocija: Kako su naši osjećaji sagradili svijet kakav poznajemo

People like to think they are rational beings who survived thanks to reason and calculation. But the author argues the opposite: the most important historical moments - from the birth of philosophy and the great religions, to the fall of the Roman Empire, the Scientific Revolution, to the bloodiest wars - were driven by feelings, not just cold facts.

The book takes the reader on a wide journey through history and different cultures: from ancient Greece (where "melancholia" was a humoral imbalance, not depression), through India, Gambia, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, to the modern United States. The author draws from psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, art, and religious history to show how the understanding and experience of emotions has changed - from the "passions of the soul" in the Middle Ages, through "emotions" as a modern concept in the 19th century, to today's emotional "regimes" and "scripts".

Emotions are social constructs that influence laws, wars, art, religion, and everyday life. The book shows how fear, shame, anger, love, or disgust have shaped social norms, empires, and revolutions. Firth-Godbehere emphasizes that our feelings and beliefs about them have actively shaped the world—and continue to shape it today.

This is an accessible yet profound synthesis of the growing discipline of "the history of emotions," which forces us to question how much of our feelings are "natural" and how much is culturally conditioned. Ultimately, the book reveals how much of human history is actually the history of the heart, not just the mind.