Volume 22, No. 1, 2026 Book symposium on Manuel Almagro’s The Rise of Polarization Affects, Politics, and Philosophy (Forthcoming)

The following is a short synopsis of the book The Rise of Polarization: Affects, Politics, and Philosophy. It presents an overview of the book’s central claims concerning the nature and significance of affective polarization.

A central thesis of Manuel Almagro’s The Rise of Polarization concerns the power of narrative to drive the phenomenon known as affective polarization. Societies are affectively polarized to the degree that they are divided in their emotional attitudes towards each other—to the degree, in other words, they see the other side as untrustworthy, ignorant or hateful. While other views of polarization tend to emphasize the importance of identity politics and misinformation as drivers of affective polarization, Almagro argues that people’s rational engagement with, and commitment to, political narratives is a further dimension of polarized societies. As such, Almagro’s book is essential reading for anyone trying to understand our current political dynamics. Yet, Almagro’s focus on the importance of what he calls “abstract” political narratives also raises some complex questions about the nature of narratives, the possibility of political criticism and the power of authoritarian movements. In this essay, I ask some of these questions, exploring the extent to which Almagro’s account can answer them. I end by suggesting that, at least in the United States, the weaponization of narratives has reached a new turning point.

Recent philosophical approaches to affective polarization have moved beyond purely identitarian and emotivist frameworks, emphasizing instead its multi-dimensional structure. In The Rise of Polarization (2025), Manuel Almagro identifies five core dimensions—identity, emotion, narrative, credence, and linguistic expression—and argues that political attitudes are shaped not only by ideological commitments but also by life-course contingencies, including socio-economic trajectories and biographical exposures that influence partisan attachments. This paper builds on Almagro’s analysis while introducing performative contingency as an additional and analytically distinct dimension of affective polarization. Drawing on Greg Myers’ work (2004), we argue that political opinions should not be understood solely as relatively stable attitudes articulated through linguistic practices, but also as socially enacted within specific discursive contexts that shape whether, where, and how political views are expressed. While Almagro explicitly recognizes the context- sensitivity of political utterances, our contribution consists in making this performative dimension analytically explicit as a distinct aspect of affective polarization. Integrating performative contingency refines the philosophical understanding of affective polarization by highlighting the synchronic contingencies of opinion expression alongside the diachronic contingencies of socialization emphasized in existing accounts. As discussed by Myers (2004), measuring polarization solely through survey responses or public statements risks conflating stable partisan commitments with context-driven performances. Likewise, interventions aimed at mitigating polarization must address not only belief revision and emotional regulation but also the institutional and discursive formats—media architectures, debate structures, and civic forums—that shape the public enactment of political opinion. While performative contingency may not always be the primary driver of polarization, we argue that it constitutes a pervasive and analytically indispensable dimension of the phenomenon.

Manuel Almagro’s criticisms of two-dimensional views of affective polarization motivate his theorization of partisan identities in his multi-dimension view. Particularly, he rejects individualist accounts of political identities in favor of an identity constructivist view in which narratives play a key role in shaping these identities. While Almagro does not explicitly provide the details of his constructivist view, this paper brings together scholarship on social construction with Almagro’s work to theorize the narrative construction of political identities. I explain how political identities are constitutively constructed by partisans using certain narratives, and how identities are discursively constructed within narrated world-views. Then, I use the socially constructed nature of political identities to raise a challenge to the diagnosis that partisans use narratives to express their identities. While the expressivist diagnosis is correct to show how partisans use narratives to express their attachments and other attitudes, I suggest it is mistaken to take political identities to be expressible, as attitudes are, given the non-internalized and socially constructed aspects of political identities. Instead, I offer an invocational model of identity participation that shows how partisans use narratives and express attitudes as ways of invoking political identities.

In this paper we argue that the literature on affective states has converged onto two interrelated, but ultimately distinct (and non- derivative) notions of affect: one that characterizes affective states as those with a certain functional profile, and one that characterizes them based on their phenomenology. We argue that, given explanatory gap issues, neither concept can be derived from the other, resulting in a pluralist consensus as to what affect is. We also examine Almagro’s proposal to understand affective polarization as a non-individualistic phenomenon and how consistent his usage is with the two presented notions. We conclude that Almagro might have identified a certain form of polarization that, although related, doesn’t clearly fit the category of affective polarization.

Almagro’s book contains a set of assumptions that are not compatible with one another. The first one, the distinction between the descriptive and the evaluative, is necessary to explain what’s going on in many of the examples discussed throughout this paper, in which affective attitudes are promoted under the guise of purely informative utterances. This assumption plays a crucial role in Almagro’s book. Secondly, some of the book’s deeper insights rest on the idea that neutrality is nothing more than a myth, that there’s no epistemic vantage point. There can be epistemic nodes that are better than others, but not one from which our issues can be assessed in a way that should be convincing to everyone. Finally, the third assumption is the political turn in analytic philosophy, which invites us to evaluate our philosophical positions by paying attention to their practical consequences. When taken together, however, these assumptions turn out to be inconsistent, because the political turn may require us to reclaim neutrality.