Manuel Almagro is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Valencia. He is the author of The Rise of Polarization: Affects, Politics and Philosophy, published with Routledge and shortlisted for the Nayef-Al Rodhan Book Prize 2025. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Manuel discusses why prevailing accounts of affective polarization misunderstand the phenomenon, how narratives shape political life, and why his broader philosophical commitments guide both his research and his everyday experience.
What is your work about?
My book is an attempt to pin down a phenomenon that defines our time, one most of us are very familiar with but which is hard to understand. Since around 2012, this phenomenon has been termed “affective polarization,” after Shanto Iyengar and other political scientists observed an interesting pattern in how citizens responded to certain survey questions. This pattern has become both the definition of the phenomenon and the basis for a diagnosis of the current political situation. And both of these, I argue in the book, are mistaken and problematic. We need to change the story we’re telling about what’s going on.
The standard story is the following. Almost everyone living in a contemporary democracy today has found themselves clashing with a family member, friend, neighbor, or coworker over some hot political issue. And the thing is not just what we disagree about but also how our disagreements play out. There’s often a sense of heaviness or even danger in those moments, mixed with the feeling that those we’re talking to are wrapped in armor, completely untouched by reasons or evidence. This is supported by evidence: the story says, “On the one hand, people are increasingly reporting negative feelings toward members of the opposing political group and positive feelings toward members of their own group.” We increasingly perceive others as bad people, less intelligent, ill-intentioned, etc. This is what Iyengar and others found. On the other hand, simply identifying with a group is enough for someone to develop a tendency to favor members of their own group and to disadvantage those in the opposing group. So, affective polarization is understood and explained in terms of identities and emotions, which reinforces the diagnosis that a segment of the population is polarized. Polarized people (usually “the others,” of course) are those who appear closed off to reason, who defend their political identity at all costs, who let their emotions run the show, who abandon critical thinking, who seem to be arguing in bad faith, and so on.
My book pushes back on this standard story. Not only is it misleading but it also ends up helping the very actors who are trying to divide public opinion for political gain. Affective polarization is real, for sure, but the issue isn’t ordinary people, and it’s not something we can explain just by pointing to emotions or political identities. There are other factors in play, and taking them into account is key to properly understanding the phenomenon. That’s what the book is about: giving a more complete picture of affective polarization so we’re better equipped to intervene. And to do that, we need to get the story right.
How does it fit in with your larger research project?
That’s a great question, one I try to ask myself fairly often. Before answering it, though, let me say something about the question itself, because it is an important one. In research—and at least in philosophy, which is what I mainly work on, though I think this applies elsewhere, too—there’s always the risk of getting stuck inside a particular debate. The phenomena we study are often so complex that any one of their many aspects is rich enough to absorb all our attention and effort. For example, once you step into the labyrinth that is the literature on polarization and you take out your conceptual-analysis toolkit, the risk of getting lost in one of its many enigmatic caves is very high. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’ve seen firsthand the huge advantages of breaking problems down into their most basic components and focusing the analysis on as concrete issues as possible. But there’s always a risk: losing sight of what we were working toward in the first place. Often, the broader project in which a more specific question is embedded is what matters the most.
With that said, let me try to answer the question. On the one hand, my training and my main research interests are philosophical, and they are quite specific ones at that. They really took shape at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Granada, where I was educated. There, Wittgenstein’s anti-representational and anti-descriptive views of meaning and the mind are very influential. Moreover, the label “the political turn in analytic philosophy” was coined within this group, along with a very particular way of understanding that turn. The idea isn’t just to use the tools of analytic philosophy to analyze and detect social and political injustices. There’s also a strong commitment to the idea that the best theories are those that allow us to reveal situations of injustice and intervene in them—an idea fundamentally shaped by Wittgenstein’s take on normativity, according to which there’s always the possibility of error.
This is the broader framework in which my work on affective polarization fits—a work that, by the way, isn’t “my work,” but part of a research line I share, formally and informally, with others, especially Neftalí Villanueva. So, this particular project on affective polarization serves a double purpose: on the one hand, there is a genuine interest in understanding processes of affective polarization so we can detect them, reduce them, and avoid them; and, on the other hand, it is a testing ground for continuing to explore more philosophical questions about the nature of meaning and the nature of our mental states.
What directions would you like to take your work in the future?
Regarding this more specific project on affective polarization, a question that’s been drawing more and more of my attention is the issue of narratives, understood as discourse with a certain length and structure, in which the meaning communicated isn’t reducible to the sum of the linguistic meanings of the individual sentences. From the perspective of philosophy of language, I find this phenomenon incredibly interesting in its own right, and I think it has received far too little attention within the field. There’s some fascinating work by Rachel Fraser on narrative testimony, and David Beaver and Jason Stanley also discuss narratives in their book The Politics of Language, in which they argue that narratives, among other things, serve to, say, link different practices and resonances in a way that activates them all together. But there’s not much more work, to my knowledge.
The potential applications of narratives to different issues are enormous. Lately, I’ve been thinking with my colleague Manuel de Pinedo about how narratives relate to the phenomenon of deep disagreement. I’ve also been working with colleagues on how the notion of narrative matters to the intersection between epistemic injustice and discursive injustice, and we recently published a paper that briefly explores the possibility of a kind of hate speech that manifests narratively.
When it comes to affective polarization, I already discussed the relevance of narratives in the book and introduced them as an additional dimension of the phenomenon. I’m increasingly convinced that narratives play a central role in processes of affective polarization, in a very particular way: they manage to get large segments of the public to embrace certain ideas in the abstract without those ideas necessarily shaping their concrete judgments.
Do you see any connections between your professional work and personal life?
Of course! This question actually makes me laugh a bit because more than one colleague has told us, half surprised, that for me and my teammate, Neftalí Villanueva, everything is connected. Whatever explains a process of affective polarization is, in our minds, connected to the attitude a certain artist showed in their latest interview, to how our department is evolving, to how one ought to approach students in the classroom, and even to how a certain women’s basketball team organizes itself and prepares for the next season. And honestly…yes!
Like so many things, this is a habit I inherited from the place where I was philosophically trained, and it’s one I’ve strengthened throughout my postdoc years. As I said before, I think it’s vital not to lose sight of the broader project in which the more specific questions we work on are embedded—and the very nature of these larger projects tends to send their tentacles into many dimensions of everyday life. Showing this, in my view, is essential for philosophy. I also think it’s incredibly important to take the issues we work on very seriously. In this sense, my colleague Michael P. Lynch has been an enormous source of inspiration for me in recent years. I’m very lucky to be surrounded by amazing, interesting, and deeply inspiring people. In those conditions, it’s hard not to see connections between one’s work and one’s personal life.
And finally, my own personal life has shaped a lot of the way I see my role in the profession. It also plays an important narrative role in the book, but I won’t say more about it.
Manuel Almagro
Manuel Almagro is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Valencia. He is the author of The Rise of Polarization: Affects, Politics and Philosophy, published with Routledge and shortlisted for the Nayef-Al Rodhan Book Prize 2025.
Richard B. Gibson is Editor of the Current Events in Philosophy and the Bioethics series. He is a bioethicist with research interests in human enhancement, emergent technologies, novel beings, disability theory, and body modification.
