Feeling politically committed
Taking action and joining an activist organization has often been introduced as the foremost questions to be answered by sociology of activist commitment. And yet far too little attention has been paid to commitment outside the institutional frame: long before joining any organization, how do we come to feel politically committed? This paper is based on a participant observation of the recruitment methods of a French Trotskyist organization, as well as a dozen of life stories with young recruits of this organization. Recruits are indeed to undergo several trials before being granted full “professional revolutionary” membership. Emotions actively contribute to spawning the recruits’ political subjectivity through their experience of the recruitment methods. The study of emotions from a phenomenological perspective may thus throw into relief certain features of political commitment that might otherwise be missed.