In his path breaking essay of 1997 and its book-length expansion in 2001, Reddy offers a cognitivist theory of emotions followed by a brief, emotion-focused history of the French Revolution and its aftermath. His key concepts serve to spell out emotional logics in a way that keeps the latter from ideological reduction. Still, his concepts do not seem to give justice to those affects in history which tend to resist direct verbalization. Nor are they really handy in explaining historical changes of affects. As for the history of emotions, Reddy presents sentimentalism as part and parcel of both the dynamic and the disaster of the French Revolution. While this is convincing, his parallel assertion that sentimentalism has been thoroughly erased in the following centuries is not. With the overall privatization of affects in modernity, sentimentalism has increasingly been pushed off the public stage, and yet its persistent presence in our ‘internal theatre’ cannot be doubted. It continues to be an important part of the modern system of affective production, inviting us to scrutinize its problematic relationship with capitalism as well as modern literature.