Public Passion: Rethinking the Grounds for Political Justice [1 ed.] 077353878X, 9780773538788

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P u b l i c Pa s s i o n

McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Ideas Series Editor: Philip J. Cercone   1 Problems of Cartesianism Edited by Thomas M. Lennon, John M. Nicholas, and John W. Davis   2 The Development of the Idea of History in Antiquity Gerald A. Press   3 Claude Buffier and Thomas Reid: Two Common-Sense Philosophers Louise Marcil-Lacoste   4 Schiller, Hegel, and Marx: State, Society, and the Aesthetic Ideal of Ancient Greece Philip J. Kain   5 John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England Charles B. Schmitt   6 Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of SelfRecognition in EighteenthCentury Political Thought J.A.W. Gunn   7 John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind Stephen H. Daniel   8 Coleridge and the Inspired Word Anthony John Harding   9 The Jena System, 1804–5: Logic and Metaphysics G.W.F. Hegel Translation edited by John W. Burbidge and George di Giovanni Introduction and notes by H.S. Harris

10 Consent, Coercion, and Limit: The Medieval Origins of Parliamentary Democracy Arthur P. Monahan 11 Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768–1800: A Contribution to the History of Critical Philosophy Manfred Kuehn 12 Paine and Cobbett: The Transatlantic Connection David A. Wilson 13 Descartes and the Enlightenment Peter A. Schouls 14 Greek Scepticism: Anti-Realist Trends in Ancient Thought Leo Groarke 15 The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought Donald Wiebe 16 Form and Transformation: A Study in the Philosophy of Plotinus Frederic M. Schroeder 17 From Personal Duties towards Personal Rights: Late Medieval and Early Modern Political Thought, c. 1300–c. 1650 Arthur P. Monahan 18 The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill: Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi Translated and edited by George di Giovanni

19 Kierkegaard as Humanist: Discovering My Self Arnold B. Come

29 Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity John R. Hinde

20 Durkheim, Morals, and Modernity W. Watts Miller

30 The Distant Relation: Time and Identity in SpanishAmerican Fiction Eoin S. Thomson

21 The Career of Toleration: John Locke, Jonas Proast, and After Richard Vernon 22 Dialectic of Love: Platonism in Schiller’s Aesthetics David Pugh 23 History and Memory in Ancient Greece Gordon Shrimpton 24 Kierkegaard as Theologian: Recovering My Self Arnold B. Come 25 Enlightenment and Conservatism in Victorian Scotland: The Career of Sir Archibald Alison Michael Michie 26 The Road to Egdon Heath: The Aesthetics of the Great in Nature Richard Bevis 27 Jena Romanticism and Its Appropriation of Jakob Böhme: Theosophy – Hagiography – Literature Paolo Mayer 28 Enlightenment and Community: Lessing, Abbt, Herder, and the Quest for a German Public Benjamin W. Redekop

31 Mr Simson’s Knotty Case: Divinity, Politics, and Due Process in Early EighteenthCentury Scotland Anne Skoczylas 32 Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century Jeffrey M. Suderman 33 Contemplation and Incarnation: The Theology of MarieDominique Chenu Christophe F. Potworowski 34 Democratic Legitimacy: Plural Values and Political Power F.M. Barnard 35 Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History F.M. Barnard 36 Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race, and Empire, 1815–1849 Martin S. Staum 37 The Subaltern Appeal to Experience: Self-Identity, Late Modernity, and the Politics of Immediacy Craig Ireland

38 The Invention of Journalism Ethics: The Path to Objectivity and Beyond Stephen J.A. Ward 39 The Recovery of Wonder: The New Freedom and the Asceticism of Power Kenneth L. Schmitz 40 Reason and Self-Enactment in History and Politics: Themes and Voices of Modernity F.M. Barnard 41 The More Moderate Side of Joseph de Maistre: Views on Political Liberty and Political Economy Cara Camcastle 42 Democratic Society and Human Needs Jeff Noonan 43 The Circle of Rights Expands: Modern Political Thought after the Reformation, 1521 (Luther) to 1762(Rousseau) Arthur P. Monahan 44 The Canadian Founding: John Locke and Parliament Janet Ajzenstat 45 Finding Freedom: Hegel’s Philosophy and the Emancipation of Women Sara MacDonald 46 When the French Tried to Be British: Party, Opposition, and the Quest for the Civil Disagreement, 1814–1848 J.A.W. Gunn

47 Under Conrad’s Eyes: The Novel as Criticism Michael John DiSanto 48 Media, Memory, and the First World War David Williams 49 An Aristotelian Account of Induction: Creating Something from Nothing Louis Groarke 50 Social and Political Bonds: A Mosaic of Contrast and Convergence F.M. Barnard 51 Archives and the Event of God: The Impact of Michel Foucault on Philosophical Theology David Galston 52 Between the Queen and the Cabby: Olympe de Gouges’s Rights of Women John R. Cole 53 Nature and Nurture in French Social Sciences, 1859–1914 and Beyond Martin S. Staum 54 Public Passion: Rethinking the Grounds for Political Justice Rebecca Kingston

Public Passion Rethinking the Grounds for Political Justice

Rebecca Kingston

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2011 isbn 978-0-7735-3878-8 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-3926-6 (paper) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2011 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in the United States on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free, processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Kingston, Rebecca Public passion: rethinking the grounds for political justice / Rebecca Kingston. (McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of ideas; 54) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3878-8 (bound).–isbn 978-0-7735-3926-6 (pbk.) 1. Emotions--Political aspects.  2. Political psychology.  3. Political science – Philosophy.  4. Emotions (Philosophy). I. Title. II. Series: McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of ideas; 54 ja74.5.k55 2011

320.01'9

c2011-902705-4

This book was typeset by Interscript in 10/12 New Baskerville.

For my son, Gabriel Paul

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Contents

Acknowledgments  xi 1 Bringing Passion Back In  3 2 Contagion Theory Revisited  23 3 Cities and Public Passion in Plato and Aristotle  61 4  The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Debate on Passions and Public Life  92 5  Montesquieu and Public Passion  107 6  Revisiting the Republic of Love  128 7 Self-Interest and the Public Good in the Discourse of Monarchical Honour  149 8  Fear  164 9 Normative Political Theory in Light of Public Passion: Justice out of Passion  182 Bibliography  211 Index  227

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Acknowledgments

i would like to thank many people who helped to inform the intellectual trajectory documented in this work. The roots of this book were developed when I was a faculty member at Saint Francis University. In my various discussions with friends and colleagues there, including Sara King, Gorjana Litvinovic, Deirdre Moloney, Martha O’Brien, and Timothy Whisler, I began to work out the initial ideas of this analysis. At the University of Toronto I have appreciated the opportunity to develop courses related to my research interests. Students in both my graduate and undergraduate courses on the emotions in politics have taught me lessons that a text could not, and helped me to sustain my enthusiasm for the topic. Kiran Banerjee, Yi-Chun Chien, Leonard Ferry, Julie Gorecki, James McKee, and Toby Rollo, in particular, have convinced me of the ongoing importance of this field. The wider intellectual community in Toronto has helped me to begin more serious interdisciplinary discussion of these matters. Many thanks go to the Emotions Reading Group, whose work has been funded for two years by the Jackman Institute for the Humanities. I also would like to thank faculty members within the Department of Political Science and the broader university who have been supportive of me in various ways and who have been valuable interlocutors on matters related to emotion and politics, including Ed Andrew, Ryan Balot, Nancy Bertoldi, Megan Boler, Joe Carens, Simone Chambers, Joseph Fletcher, Todd Hall, Peggy Kohn, Jenny Nedelsky, Cliff Orwin, Curie Virag, and Melissa Williams. Various sections of this book have been presented in different settings, including the Workshop in Political Theory at McGill University, meetings of Montesquieu scholars in France, panels of the Canadian Political Science Association, and the Emotions Symposium at the University of Toronto. I am thankful for a number of comments and challenges that have helped to enrich my discussion a great deal. In particular, I would

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like to thank Sophie Bourgault, David Carrithers, Fred Dallmayr, Jean Ehrard, Catherine Larrère, Michael Mosher, Steven Newman, Céline Spector, Christina Tarnopolsky, James Tully, and Catherine VolpilhacAuger for their friendship and ongoing interest in my work. Special thanks to Charles Taylor (happy eightieth!), whose work and teaching have always been an inspiration for me. Funding for the research that informs this project has come from a grant through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. I also recognize the great amount of logistical support offered to me by the administrative staff of the Department of Political Science and at the University of Toronto as a whole. Thanks in particular to Mary-Alice Bailey, Sari Sherman, Catharine Tunnacliffe, and Leanne Thomas. Great thanks as well to my editors at McGill-Queen’s University Press and especially Jonathan Crago and Maureen Garvie for their excellent work. Thanks also to Mike Worden for help with the index. Some passages from chapter 4 have been adapted from my piece “The Political Relevance of the Passions from Descartes to Smith.” The excerpt is reprinted from Bringing the Passions Back In: The Emotions in Political Philosophy edited by Rebecca Kingston and Leonard Ferry (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008), with permission from the publisher. All rights are reserved by the publisher. Last but not least, I would like to thank my husband, Ronnie, my mo­ ther, Pauline, and my son, Gabriel, for his good sense, humour, and love.

P u b l i c Pa s s i o n

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Bringing Passion Back In And when, as far as possible, all the citizens rejoice and are pained by the same successes and failures, doesn’t this sharing of pleasures and pains bind the city together? ... We agreed that the having of pains and pleasures in common is the greatest good for a city. Plato, The Republic V, 462b

handel’s famous sinfonia “Arrival of the Queen of Sheba,” from his oratorio Solomon, evokes an atmosphere of pomp and joy as the queen, not known for her humility, makes her lavish entrance to the court of her host. First performed in 1748, it is the musical articulation of a moment of shared participation in the sentiments of honour, respect, and aspiration for status that are partly constitutive of a monarchical regime. That same year, the idea of the principe or “principle” of government was coined by Montesquieu in his major work of political theory, De l’esprit des lois. Montesquieu’s idea of the “principle” is central to his analysis, as it serves as a defining feature of a regime.1 Montesquieu uses the term to refer to passions that motivate citizens within any given regime, be it virtue or love of the republic in a democracy and aristocracy, honour in a monarchy, or fear in despotism. Contrary to modern understandings of trust that are thought to be essential for any well-functioning, responsible, and successful political and economic institutions, Montesquieu’s principles of government are deliberately regime specific. Until recently, this idea of the “principle” has been overlooked in commentary on Montesquieu’s political thought. This book joins a growing body of literature that argues that attention to this idea is crucial for understanding both Montesquieu’s work and its significance within wider trends of

1 Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, III, i.

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the history of political thought.2 Thinking about politics in this way provides us with new questions and insights. In the language of recent developments in social science, the focus of this work is an analysis and intellectual history of the nature and status of affective networks at the level of the state.3 As Alfred Schutz has acknowledged, while Weber’s idea of subjective meaning provides a useful tool for approaching the study of social and political life, the idea itself hides a number of layers of analysis and a complexity of questions, including the need to inquire into the many different types and qualities of relation within a political community.4 This book explores some of the reasons for and implications of adopting a perspective inquiring into the nature of shared affect at the level of the regime, as one type of political relation among many. The focus of analysis, then, is neither action nor behaviour but the underlying horizon of meaning and the affective mood associated with it that help to shape political intentions within a community. The affective mood shapes our expectations when entering into a specifically public relationship with our fellow subjects or citizens.5 While the terms “emotion” and “affect” are generic and can apply to a wide variety of subjective states related to public and political life, “passion” here is invoked (in the tradition of nineteenth-century French medical

2 As Paul Rahe states, “If Montesquieu rivals Aristotle as an analyst of political regimes, it is because he attends to the procedure Plato followed in the eighth and ninth books of The Republic and supplements his strictly institutional analysis with an attention to political psychology which gives to his political science a suppleness, a flexibility, a subtlety, and range elsewhere unexcelled in modern times” (Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, 13). Excepting Rahe, most recent attention to the notion of the “principle” of government in Montesquieu has been focused on the functioning of the principle of honour as it is considered to be more relevant to an understanding of the particular characteristics of modern liberal democracy. See, for example Spector, Montesquieu: Pouvoirs, richesses et sociétés; and Krause, Liberalism with Honor. There is also a growing literature on conceptions of emotion in eighteenth century thought. See, for example, Coleman, Anger, Gratitude and Enlightenment Sociability; Frazer The Enlightenment of Sympathy; Kelly The Propriety of Liberty; and Eustace, Passion Is the Gale. 3 See, for example, Clarke et al., “Moving Forward in the Study of Emotions,” 174; Gould, “Passionate Political Processes,” 155–75; Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations; Fischer, Parkinson, and Manstead, Emotion in Social Relations; Berezin, “Secure States”; and on a more radical note, Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes. 4 Schutz, Phenomenology. 5 Part of the intention of this concept is to give a more overtly political slant to what Schutz has called the “they-orientation”: “In the face-to-face situation the partners look into each other and are mutually sensitive to each others’ responses. This is not the case in relationships between contemporaries. Here each partner has to be content with the probability that the other, to whom he is oriented by means of an anonymous type, will respond with the same kind of orientation. And so an element of doubt enters into every relationship” (Schutz, Phenomenology, 202).



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science) to refer to a type of affective state that is complex and of long duration, and in the midst of which various short-term episodes of emotion can occur.6 By the term “public passion,” I seek to indicate that there is an intersubjective mood or general affective atmosphere both complex and of long duration that tends to be specific to regime types. Analysts of contemporary politics are often uneasy with the raw emotion that can characterize our political practice, and scholarly discussions of politics have frequently portrayed the work of passions in public life in a negative light.7 Emotions have been viewed as the vehicle for the expression of prejudice, factional interests, and the advancement of partial claims by those who generally carry little regard for the rights and liberties of others.8 Because of this discomfort with the idea of passions in politics, theorists have generally neglected to consider them in a positive way when developing their normative theories of politics. While, as Cheryl Hall suggests, it may be wrong to ascribe to contemporary liberal theory all the woes of contemporary liberal democratic practice, it is 6 Charland, “Reinstating the Passions,” 239. According to Charland, “passions are organized and enduring affective-motor-intellectual complexes that alter and filter the environment through mechanisms of association and dissociation, imagination and evaluative judgment, motor attraction and repulsion, impulse and inhibition, in accordance with a fixed idea. Unlike emotions, which are ‘preformed’ responses, passions are social and cultural products” (ibid., 253–4). While Charland makes a category distinction between emotions and passions, I am suggesting that emotions, as a term interchangeable with “affectivity,” provide an overarching category in which passion in Charland’s sense is included. As I will show, these terms have undergone significant shifts in meaning over their history. According to Bernard Rimé in Le Partage social des emotions, the term “emotion” first appeared in France in the 1500s with the connotation of collective emotion and mood. It was only later (post-1640) that this term became almost exclusively used in reference to individuals. I track one facet of these shifts in chapter 4. Barbara Rosenwein suggests that in early modern Europe the term “passions” was invoked as a way to refer to emotions in  general, perhaps in the absence of the term “emotion.” See Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. 7 Perhaps one classic statement of this in relation to the history of political theory is Stephen Holmes’s Passions and Constraint. In reference to contemporary politics, Mabel Berezin states, “The market and the nation-state, the twin public institutions that embed the economic and political in modern social life were a-emotional, in theory, if not in practice, from inception.” She suggests that one of the reasons for this was the dominance of one strand of Weberian thinking in social scientific analysis. Insofar as emotions traditionally did have a place, it was largely in relation to explaining deviant behaviour patterns such as the authoritarian personality or the resistance of peasants to forces of modernization. See Berezin, “Secure States.” 8 Holmes in Passions and Constraint provides an articulation of this traditional view within liberalism that the state and its institutions serve as means to regulate and overcome the often potentially destabilizing effects of citizens motivated by their passions. This characterization of early liberalism is also supported by Hall in The Trouble with Passion, chap. 3. For a good discussion of the relationship between Montesquieu and liberal theory see Larrère, “Montesquieu and Liberalism.”

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nonetheless the case that the vast majority of opinion setters in the West have been educated in the principles of the liberal tradition that either marginalize or silence the passions as far as political life is concerned.9 This tendency, in turn, has had negative consequences for our actual experience of liberal democracy. George Marcus argues that the ideal and rationalist pretensions of traditional liberal theory have given rise to unreal expectations in the practice of liberal democratic politics and thereby have contributed to the growth of cynicism and alienation among contemporary citizens. Indeed, Marcus demonstrates that certain reform initiatives in American political history (such as the move to regulate and limit the role of political parties in the Progressive Era) helped to promote the idea of the autonomous voter making decisions independently of the oppressions of social hierarchy or partisan loyalty. The underlying justification was a view that any basis for citizenship grounded in affect was likely a product of undue or harmful influence over the citizenry, an influence that obscured judgment and made it difficult for citizens to discern their real interests. This outlook helped to shape expectations that political claims, if they were to be judged to be legitimate, were to be voiced in a juridical language of impartiality divorced from any emotional content.10 Nonetheless, given that we cannot in general eradicate our emotions from an authentic expression of our political judgments in many cases, these reforms have generated unsuitable and indeed impossible expectations of political life; hence the rise of cynicism, and an improper understanding of ourselves as political actors.11 In response, there is now a growing sense of the inadequacy of political theory that cannot fully account for the place of emotion in politics, particularly in a positive way.12 In this light, a study partly inspired by Montesquieu’s notion of the principle of government – combined as his theory is with a commitment to a broad notion of individual human rights and a defence of human liberties – can be one means by which to

9 Hall, The Trouble with Passion, 36. 10 Marcus, The Sentimental Citizen, chap. 1. 11 A cross-section of new research on the centrality of emotions in political judgment from a largely behaviouralist perspective is offered by Redlawsk, Feeling Politics. As will be clear, my approach introduces some aspects of what might be called methodological holism (in the form of emotions shared by individuals and perceived as shared) and thereby should be seen on a different plane, though perhaps complementary to this research. 12 On this point see Hall, The Trouble with Passion, as well as Ferry and Kingston, Bringing the Passions Back In; Koziak, Retrieving Political Emotion; Marcus, The Sentimental Citizen; Walzer, Politics and Passion; a special issue of Philosophy and Social Criticism 28, no. 6 (November 2002) devoted to the question of politics and the emotions; and Berezin, “Secure States.”



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reflect on what is increasingly recognized as an important deficit of contemporary political theory. One way in which Montesquieu and others within the history of political thought can contribute to a better understanding of the place of emotion in politics is by helping us make sense of a phenomenon I call “public passion.” In defence of an emotion-centred analysis of politics, as suggested by Sandelands, our first and primordial knowledge of society is through feeling.13 Furthermore, the tone of social interaction that impacts our feelings in society is most profoundly shaped by political choices and institutions broadly conceived. Uncovering those feelings and exploring the place that we might give them in a normative theory of politics are crucial to a deeper understanding of political experience. Public passion is the experience of the same emotion shared by a community or a large majority of its members. It is an emotion that can be acknowledged more or less as shared and that concerns actions or events of importance for all members. In ancient times, when populations were much more homogeneous, public passion formed an ongoing conscious basis of regime identity. The citizen classes who held power in ancient Greek republics shared a certain outlook and helped to instil a disposition within the community, a disposition that helped to define a set of moral priorities and set the parameters for public debate. The nature of public passion was directly related to the type of regime or constitution. The passion was “public” because it characterized the words and actions of the political class (that is, the class to which power and citizenship was ascribed within the terms of the constitution); it concerned objects of significance for the whole community; it carried with it a particular vision of justice; and it both realized and revealed through its particular commitments the broader character of the community. In contemporary times, given more pervasive institutional commitments to multiculturalism and moral pluralism, there may not always be as obvious an expression of shared emotion within a community as there was in ancient times, but it still can be recognized in more latent form with regard to central public commitments for a particular community and/or the type of regime that governs it.14 Public passion can become apparent 13 Sandelands, Feeling and Form in Social Life. 14 We might call these “public feeling rules,” to adapt the meaning of an older term (see Hochschild in The Managed Heart). Hochschild defends the place and role of what she calls “feeling rules” within the private sphere and over which individuals retain some autonomy in their choices as to how and whether to conform to these rules, but she is critical of any attempts to manipulate these rules for commercial purposes, as in requiring employees to adopt specific principles of deep acting – for example, the Walmart greeter, or feigned compassion in the service industry – as a condition of continued employment. While these

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when public commitments are challenged, or in times of political upheaval, re-evaluation or change, or in response to events that provoke, often unexpectedly, overwhelming public emotional response.15 The idea of a public passion does not have to imply homogeneity, or a betrayal of commitments to multiculturalism and moral pluralism (as was argued perhaps most forcefully by Iris Marion Young), but indeed can form a background or backdrop to diverse outlooks and competing views on policy.16 This point, along with more discussion of what I mean by public passion, will be developed more precisely in the next chapter, after I lay the grounds for rethinking our conceptions of emotions in politics more generally. As a first reaction, one might ask what is the point of the idea of public passion if, as I argue, it can be compatible with liberal pluralism and it is not cosmopolitan? Does it contribute anything beyond our traditional liberal regime-centred theories of politics? The answer is that a good normative theory of politics must take into account what our actual experience of politics is. If we are ignoring one essential aspect of our political experience, that is, the fact that we are essentially (though not exclusively) both creatures who feel, and creatures who tend to share feelings, and if we neglect to represent any aspect of this essential fact into our theories of what we ought to do and how we ought to do it, then our conclusions will not provide appropriate guidance. It is a standard trope of political theory that our understanding of what is good in politics has to correspond at some

feeling rules clearly have a public dimension and not just a social one as acknowledged by Hochschild, the sort of public dimension I am seeking to analyze here is not developed in Hochschild’s work. 15 Charles Taylor suggests that this form of public phenomena, described as a common space full of a powerful shared emotion, such as experienced in the grieving and funeral rites for Princess Diana, is something more prevalent in modern society, given the greater importance in the modern social imaginary of what he calls “spectator” spaces, or spaces of mutual display. See his Modern Social Imaginaries, 168–70. 16 Young, “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference.” Young’s main point here is to suggest that any theory that emphasizes shared subjectivity over difference has a tendency to presume a certain type of homogeneity that can only but be exclusionary in some form or another, thereby being both utopian and politically dangerous. My counterposition is to suggest that intersubjectivity is much more fluid and polysemic than supposed by Young and many of her interlocutors, and thus it does not have to be regarded as in conflict with the politics of difference. Indeed, it could easily be argued that the “politics of difference” itself recommends just a more sceptical form of intersubjective encounter to be shared by citizens, a disposition that is both suspicious of its own drive for community and “a metaphysics of presence” as well as one that is open to change and receptive to the “otherness” one can encounter in a public setting. In addition, there are manifestations of shared intersubjectivity that are not only not utopian but very real and palpable even in modern-day liberal democratic politics. To discount and ignore these intersubjective experiences is to neglect an important feature of our political reality that we should seek to harness to a theory of justice.



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level to what we are as human beings (rational, sociable, unsociable, etc.). The contribution here is to argue that we have neglected in our tradition a good account of both our emotional nature and our tendency to share emotional states. This omission must be reincorporated into our theories of politics to allow for a more valid or more sophisticated and convincing account of where we should be aiming and of how we get there. Our shared emotional nature is an aspect of our political experience that should be incorporated into our theory of justice. Also, starting from a new understanding of ourselves as political beings does carry the possibility that the ends we argue for may be somewhat modified, as well as how we argue for them. This, in turn, can have important implications for political practice. In the context of a growing body of literature on the emotions and their centrality to our lived experience as both thinking and social individuals, this particular study’s contribution is fourfold. First, it offers an account of why this perspective came to be neglected within the history of ideas until recent times. My emphasis on Montesquieu is explained by his attempt to revive this perspective, but, as I argue, his attempt was largely unsuccessful for a number of reasons. Second, the focus of this study is at the level of regime, with the argument that in addition to the circulation of political affect at the level of the group and the social, we should be attentive to the ways in which regime structures themselves can be associated with patterns of collective intersubjectivity.17 This study places itself largely within the realm of the subjective and intersubjective and in a loosely phenomenological vein, nonetheless acknowledging that the mechanisms by which affect may be circulated reach beyond what we could possibly be fully conscious of. Third, I seek to incorporate into my discussion of the circulation of affect at the level of regime an acknowledgment of the multiple meanings of any one emotion. In other words, I try to emphasize that individuals are agents in and through their experience of emotion at the level that concerns me here, giving one emotional state multiple possibilities of meaning and action, much like the way in which language also functions within a community.18 Fourth, unlike previous studies, I reflect on the impact that acknowledgment of this phenomenon could have on our normative theories of politics. This last contribution is somewhat exploratory and speculative and seeks to open up a dialogue on the issue rather than settle it definitively. 17 For a broader perspective on the workings of political affect, a study informed by poststructuralist approaches to politics and a more pre-subjective or embodied affective outlook, see Protevi’s Political Affect. My project shares with Protevi a challenge to the hegemony of the abstract adult subject in our traditions of political thinking in favour of shared traits in social and political communities. 18 This is a feature of political affect most recently acknowledged and theorized by Tarnopolsky in her Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants.

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Given the mixture of cultural norms and expectations within many modern regimes, is the idea of public passion particular to regime types even possible, as well as desirable? As a preliminary response, it may help to acknowledge that human beings are generally emotional beings and that it is precisely through emotional capacities that we can overcome other barriers relating to differing forms of identity. In this sense, passion in politics can play an important integrative role (in addition to its acknowledged disintegrative one). Moreover, in an increasingly globalized world, the core principle of identity common to some degree to all is hybridity at the level of both ethnicity and culture.19 From this perspective, the idea of a clear-cut and singular cultural identity is itself a product of judgment that can only be understood through an exploration of deeper factors in politics, including the play of history and its interpretation, factors that include the force of emotion.20 Emotion has already been a factor in helping to forge a sense of identity central to multicultural politics, and so it should not be surprising that it is operative in a continuing process of transformation and community building. An objection to the conjecture that passions should have an important positive role in modern political theory may be that a focus on the passions will help to undermine commitments to equality, liberty, and justice that are central to liberal and democratic politics.21 However, awareness of the workings of emotions in political life does not have to run contrary to seeking a better embodiment of those principles. Judith Butler has recognized that the grief and fear coming out of the American experience of 9/11 can be harnessed to provide further force for the quest for justice.22 Indeed, many of the best-known defenders of the emotions in political theory hold that recognition of the potentially positive work of the emotions does not preclude some need for a mechanism to differentiate their beneficial manifestations from more problematic forms in relation to an ethos of liberty, equality, and justice.23 Of course, authors take different paths in order to discern this, some by suggesting

19 See, for example, Bhabha, The Location of Culture. 20 See, for example, Anderson, Imagined Communities. 21 Robin in Fear argues that elite manipulation of emotion and the willingness of the public to be carried along by this is highly destructive of the liberal and democratic possibilities in contemporary politics. 22 Butler, Precarious Life. Similarly, Jonas in The Imperative of Responsibility acknowledges the importance of fear as a motive in leading individuals to accept responsibility for devising new solutions for the problems of environmental devastation. I thank Melissa Williams for suggesting this latter reference. 23 See, for example, Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought and her Hiding from Humanity as well as Walzer, Politics and Passion.



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that certain types of emotions, such as shame and disgust, are altogether incompatible with a liberal and democratic ethos, and others by suggesting that it is the harmful application of these emotions, not the emotions themselves, that should be condemned.24 The question of how exactly this discernment is to be made is not an easy one to answer, but is explored in this book. What is evident is that these traditional liberal and democratic ideals take on a somewhat different nature in theory when combined with the reality of emotions in the life of the polity. While the broad tenets of liberal and democratic theory have the merit of allowing us to think of politics in the abstract, away from the messier realms of interaction, and thereby carry with them the implied claim of an external measure of justice, they also carry the danger of being perceived as more and more irrelevant to actual political practice. In this light, there is merit in seeking a more embodied understanding of politics that we can ally with the leading ideals of liberal democratic theory. So an understanding of peoples on the basis of patterns of public emotional characteristics avoids the excessive formalism that can characterize many traditional approaches to liberal theory while also sidestepping cultural identity and recognition politics. Furthermore, a focus on the emotions does not ignore power differentiation within a community, insofar as emotions can be seen at different times as the product of manufactured complicity and/or the self-conscious achievement of suitable perspective in public matters. In this analysis I do not seek an explanatory principle by uncovering a universal causal relationship that will apply across regimes. At times, the emotions of the public will be shaped by influential leaders or educational schemes; at others, it may be popular emotions that overcome or overwhelm leaders. This work’s purpose is to explore the idea of public passion, the idea that there can be emotions of a particular quality in politics that distinguish themselves by their shared quality among citizens of a regime – an idea that can deepen our understanding of politics and help refine our normative assessments of what politics should be. Competing streams of contemporary political theory collude in ignoring and overshadowing the way in which emotion and passion can play an important and positive role in politics. Despite its ancient origins, the idea of a politics centred on the mapping of what I call public passion is still relevant in understanding politics today.

24 For a presentation of some of the arguments against Nussbaum regarding the appropriateness of shame and disgust for democratic life, see chapters by Christina Tarnopolsky and Marlene Sokolon in Bringing the Passions Back In, ed. Ferry and Kingston.

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competing versions of liberalism and the passions Accounts of passion as provided in traditional liberal theory have been inadequate for the task of developing an effective understanding of the place of passion in politics in general and the functioning of public passion in particular. While several theorists have made arguments concerning the inadequacies of liberalism in this light, I do so in a new way. This chapter provides a brief sketch of both consequentialist and deontological versions of liberalism to show how both fall short in coming to terms with the importance of the emotions in politics.25 From this basis, it is then possible to develop my idea of public passion to help respond to these deficiencies, beginning with a study of key moments in the field of intellectual history. If we concede the need for our normative political theory to be representative in a fundamental way of the basic features that make us human, how do we know when this theory has failed us?26 In particular, if we consider liberal theory and its development in historical context, can we not say that there is already there an acknowledgment of the basic emotional features of the human condition? In what way, then, can we suggest that contemporary liberal theory might be deficient? Of course, liberalism, as a broad set of dispositions and political arguments adopted by defenders of contemporary liberal democracy, is multi-faceted and indeed manifests itself in somewhat different ways in differing contexts.27 Still, there are grounds for suggesting that most liberals will adopt one of two approaches that have characterized the broader

25 I adopt this breakdown of liberalism into consequentialist and deontological versions from Pettit’s The Common Mind, chap. 6. 26 For an answer to the question of why we should expect normative theory to be representative of us in basic ways, see chapter 9. 27 This variance can be found clearly at the level of ordinary speech where, for example, in a French context, liberalism is most often taken to mean those who advocate a retreat in state regulation of the market for reasons of economic growth, while in the American context the same term is often used to designate those more clearly associated with the centre-left side of the political spectrum with a generally more favourable view of the positive impact of government regulation. Oddly enough, in intellectual history, one perceives the exact opposite trend. It has been argued that the French tradition, including Constant and Tocqueville, developed with a stronger sociological outlook, and that thereby the French liberal tradition has been more generally more sensitive to questions of the social nature of human beings than the traditionally more individualist Anglo-American tradition of liberalism in its formative years. See Siedentop, “Two Liberal Traditions.”



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terrain of comprehensive moral theory. Those who adopt a utilitarian, or consequentialist, approach measure the rightness of a policy or set of political institutions by focusing on the outcomes or consequences of a decision or action or structure. Those who adopt a deontological approach focus on the rightness inherent in a decision, action, or structure as measured, for example, by its conformity to basic legal norms or its protection of basic rights. These two positions are not fully incompatible, and certain contemporary liberal approaches, including perhaps the most influential offered by Rawls, provide some combination of the two. By a brief exploration of the place of public emotion in utilitarian and deontological approaches, I aim to show that the general contours of contemporary liberal theory are compromised because none of these approaches broadly conceived provides a fully convincing account of the depth and contours of emotion in politics. Even though revolutions and the overthrowing of authoritarian governments have generally been effected through the invocation of a social contract and individual rights, the most profound and meaningful forms of political reform, particularly in the nineteenth century, have been largely instituted as a result of political movements adopting utilitarian modes of argument. Utilitarians espouse a firm commitment to a basic equality of human beings and seek to accommodate the competing preferences of human beings in ways that take seriously the actual, not ideal, experiences of citizens. It might appear then, in the first instance, that utilitarian theory would allow for greater sensitivity to the psychological disposition of citizens and provide a truly public account of emotion. The general tenet of utilitarian theory is to direct policy choices and/ or individual ethical decisions with the principle of the “greatest happiness for the greatest number” – that is, “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.” 28 To consider this comprehensive moral doctrine insofar as it can be a specific political morality is to focus on how basic social structure as well as policy choices can and should be determined by a concern to relieve suffering and promote overall well-being in society.29 As Mill repeatedly emphasizes, “the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent’s own happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness and

28 Mill, “Utilitarianism,” 407. 29 In considering utilitarianism as it can be construed as a more narrow political morality, I am following the lead of Kymlicka in his Contemporary Political Philosophy, chap. 2.

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that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator.”30 In utilitarianism the public is always understood as a collection of ­individuals, and citizens’ individual desires and preferences, be they measured as actual attitudes or through extrapolations of what would constitute their informed preferences, are the basic data to be aggregated. While this approach is based on a concern for equality, impartiality, and political accountability, by positing a quasi-scientific principle in the making of public policy, its logical structure hides tensions and is blind to some manifestations of emotions that are important and fully relevant to political life. The deficiencies of the approach vis-à-vis consideration of the place of emotion in politics are threefold. In the first instance there is a tension in the account with regard to the required disposition of the decision or policy-maker. From a policy-maker’s point of view, decisions need to be motivated by a concern for and devotion to the public good. In this sense, an emotional disposition is embedded in the heart of utilitarian philosophy as it is the basis on which the public figure can be motivated to apply the greatest happiness principle to a political community. However, there is also a competing requirement that the person aggregating public preferences remain emotionally neutral, driven by the ­fundamental principle of alleviating suffering, not so much out of compassion (a consistent utilitarian spreads the principle to animals) but because suffering is simply acknowledged as a bad thing. In his The Life You Can Save, Singer suggests that this principle should trump all other commitments and attachments.31 Indeed, acting on devotion to the common good in utilitarian theory requires strict emotional neutrality in the act of aggregation so as to ensure impartiality and the true reflection of what is good for all. So it would appear that the emotional motivation required to bring a public figure to adopt and apply utilitarian logic is subsequently denied in the practice of the calculation. There is a tension in the utilitarian account of the proper emotional disposition of the policy-maker. Jesse Prinz suggests that while utilitarianism can be considered a metaphysical emotionism, in that it holds moral properties to be essentially related to emotions (i.e., happiness, in contrast with Kantianism, for example, which distinguishes duty and happiness), it is not an epistemic emotionism, in that it is driven by the agent having a concept of emotion as happiness but not requiring actual feeling to have a sense of the moral 30 Mill, “Utilitarianism,” 418. 31 Singer, The Life You Can Save.



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good (as would, for example, a moral sense theorist).32 Still, it is hard to conceive what the appeal of this moral theory would be without some implicit emotional attachment to public welfare. Its appeal to emotion is conflicted, not fully conceptual or metaphysical. Second, the aggregation of preferences leaves no room for considering that some desires or preferences often supported with a degree of emotional intensity should be weighed more heavily than others because of their public importance. For example, a fear of a loss of dignity, given a denigrating public statement or symbol, may in utilitarian logic be overridden by a majority consensus as to the desirability and/or innocuousness of that statement/symbol. Even in circumstances where in the aggregate the pleasure in retaining the symbol would be greater than the fear of a loss of dignity in getting rid of it, something is clearly wrong with a theory that places these two emotional responses on a par. Surely the fear of a loss of dignity is the much more serious and important concern. Our intuitions tell us that a suitable theory of politics must have a means for recognizing how the quality of some emotional concerns should act as trump, even when they are overcome in pure numerical or quantitative terms.33 A good theory of public emotion must not only acknowledge public feeling but be able to draw from that commitment some principles to override and discount certain preferences on not only qualitative grounds (as in John Stuart Mill) but specifically public ones. A third deficiency in utilitarian theory vis-à-vis the emotions relates to its overly narrow account of how to assess the dispositions of the public. With regard to the notion of preference, as is a commonplace in criticism of this approach, the theory takes the idea at face value and does not consider the murkiness of how preferences come to be developed, articulated, and modified, assuming that politics only enters in once these preferences can be considered as settled. Furthermore, and what is of most interest to me in this study, the theory does not offer any convincing account of public

32 Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals. 33 Even if one might wish to construe this tension on the surface as one between the desire to retain a symbol and a principle of human dignity, the wish to uphold the dignity of others can only in the end be more important because we feel it to be so. So, in opposition to a strict Kantian analysis of this scenario, we might argue that our capacity for reason cannot be the basis for the principle of dignity, for we do not grant that same primacy to reasoning machines but only to living and thinking beings with whom we share a form of life. Something much more complicated is happening in this instance. Related to this is the oft noted point with regard to utilitarianism that it cannot account for the special form of emotional ties we have with those dearest to us. According to this criticism, there are important emotional concerns that ground greater moral obligation to those closest to us, even though measures of aggregate utility would dictate otherwise.

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and shared emotion. To suggest that political emotion is only manifest in and through individual preferences disregards a long history and experience wherein public performance both gives rise to and articulates shared public sentiment. So, on several counts, utilitarianism cannot provide us with a suitable understanding of the place of emotions in politics, and in liberal democratic politics in particular. While the preceding cannot serve as a thorough adjudication of its appropriateness for a broader theory of politics, the inability of utilitarian theorists to account adequately for emotion in politics should raise important reservations and suspicions regarding its authority to move us in more general terms. In response to the declining status of utilitarian theory in contemporary political theory, some theorists have espoused a deontological approach to an analysis of political life, with a focus on an appreciation of basic human rights. A rights approach has undeniably enriched contemporary political life globally in many ways and has ensured a more cosmopolitan ethos among citizens of Western liberal democracies, making these citizens more cognizant of the fate of individuals in repressive political circumstances and more suspect vis-à-vis their own relationship to political authority. The pervasiveness of this paradigm has done more than any previous form of political argument to spread a strong sense of political justice. The rights approach has harnessed deep emotional forces and mass mobilization to bring about political changes to help ensure greater respect for the dignity of all.34 In the modern context, perhaps nothing is more closely associated with just expressions of indignation in public life than claims that fundamental rights have been overridden and violated. Given this history, it is somewhat ironic that rights theories have often been criticized for harbouring a rather shallow or “thin” conception of the individual. Part of the controversy relates to the attribute or quality on which and through which a claim to basic rights is based. For many, the feature that identifies a human being quae a bearer of rights is rational capacity.35 Still, legal recognition of the rights of those who demonstrate no clear capacity for reason, as well as some acknowledgment of

34 See Ishay, The History of Human Rights. 35 Of course, rational potential itself can be subject to a variety of measures. In Locke’s version of rights theory, deemed recently by Jeremy Waldron as a more solid founding for rights than most other contemporary rights theories, rational potential is acknowledged by a human’s capacity to conceive of God and of divine law. See Locke, Second Treatise; Waldron, God, Locke and Equality.



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the limited application of the language of rights to living beings other than humans, suggests that the grounding for a rights claim cannot ultimately be rational capacity. Dombrowski has suggested that what grounds the claim to be a being harbouring basic rights is the capacity of agents to feel and indeed to suffer as a result of the intentional actions of other agents, i.e., their status as “moral patients” rather than moral agents.36 However, from either perspective – that is, whether we regard rights as based on some understanding of the nature of rational capacity or on a being’s status as a moral patient – rights will only regulate the development of individuals by helping to eliminate the most obvious and egregious of harms while offering no larger perspective on deeper individual and communal moral and character development. The criticism is important with regard to considering the place of emotion in politics. For while we see that a rights theory does not have to discount the importance of humans as emotional beings, the theory does not offer us any good basis by which to judge positive and negative uses of emotion other than to rule that certain forms of suffering are to be remedied by public intervention. As such, it arguably offers little guidance on the type of society to be fostered through public institutions and moral education so as to prevent, rather than just remedy, such injustices. In other words, it presents itself as largely a reactive strategy in questions of social justice and provides no clear basis on which a broader project or strategy might be grounded. In addition, a rights approach allows for no clear means to adjudicate the quality of life in a given society with regard to matters that surpass questions of basic rights, such as a communal disposition more conducive to well-being. At an individual level, from a rights perspective our dispositions – that is, how we manage our own emotional lives – are a matter of purely individual choice and whim. With no concern for the spirit in which rights are deemed authoritative and given institutional protection, a rights approach may be neglecting the very qualities essential for a long-term respect for rights. Without the fostering of an underlying strong commitment to ­justice and respect for the dignity of all, a rights regime may easily be undermined. Thus, while a rights approach cannot be said to neglect fully or ignore the emotional capacities of human beings, it does not offer any real basis for directing the emotional lives of citizens or for determining how our emotions can best be harnessed for promoting justice. As such, it leaves a major part of human experience unexamined, even though those 36 Dombrowski, Babies and Beasts.

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f­ acets are fully relevant to public life and indeed essential for the promotion and longevity of a rights-based regime.37

37 Some have regarded John Rawls’s Theory of Justice as a more recent articulation of a rights theory that does come to terms with and provide solid appreciation for the place of emotions in politics (Krause, “Desiring Justice: Motivation and Justification in Rawls and Habermas”; Okin, “Reason and Feeling in Thinking about Justice”; Frazer, “John Rawls between Two Enlightenments”). Rawls was well aware of the emotional requirements in the underpinnings of his contract theory. As early as 1963 he was writing about the emotional underpinnings of moral attitudes and on how the development of a commitment to a just society would require a moral framework issuing in part from a prior sense of love and attachment to others (Rawls, “The Sense of Justice,” 96–116). His appeal to a citizen’s basic sense of justice is clear in both his early Theory of Justice as well as his later Political Liberalism, 81. Rawls acknowledges a need for reciprocity and friendship in a political community as a condition of an ongoing practice of proper democratic deliberation, implying identification and emotional attachment shared by all individuals. He notes also that citizens must have both knowledge and desire to follow public reason and to realize its ideal in political conduct (“The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” 580). In addition, he by no means ignores the centrality of emotion in individual lives as they can play a part in individual conceptions of the good. It is a central component of what he calls the background culture of a society (Collected Papers, 576). So from one perspective, it appears that Rawls has overcome some of the deficiencies acknowledged in our analysis of traditional utilitarian and deontological approaches to political theory. Nonetheless, there is a basis on which it could be suggested that the emotive capacities of human beings are still excessively marginalized in Rawls’s theory. Insofar as citizens relate to each other in the public forum, the dominant consideration expressed by Rawls is that citizens reflect and act on serious matters of public policy through the practice of public reason, understood as “a framework of what he or she sincerely regards as the most reasonable political conception of justice, a conception that expresses political values that others, as free and equal citizens might also reasonably be expected reasonably to endorse” and focused on an understanding of the good of the public (Collected Papers, 581; see also Political Liberalism, 213). As an ideal conception, it applies to a vision of how observers of a just and well-ordered society would expect citizens to act. Public reason requires that citizens shape political debate by ongoing consideration of the presence and indeed legitimacy of competing conceptions of the good in society. In consequence, the discussion of serious political proposals and the evaluation of public officials in a healthy democracy are expected to be constrained by the demands of the political structure: “When firm and widespread, the disposition of citizens to view themselves as ideal legislators, and to repudiate government officials and candidates for public office who violate public reason, is one of the political and social roots of democracy, and is vital to its enduring strength and vigor. Thus citizens fulfill their duty of civility and support the idea of public reason by doing what they can to hold government officials to it” (Collected Papers, 577). So while Rawls certainly allows a place for emotion in the background culture, in addition to being a supporting condition for public deliberation (as a general desire for justice and more specific desire to follow public reason), there are clear constraints on types of acceptable motivations and rhetorical strategies advanced in the public forum. This argument does not marginalize emotion per se, but it does suggest an attitude of extreme suspicion vis-à-vis certain types of emotional motivation. Nussbaum has identified instances where this is justified, as in her dismissal of both disgust and primitive shame,



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Further evidence of the deficiencies of traditional liberal accounts of politics in providing an adequate account of the emotions comes from a cursory survey of recent literature in the field. In response to some of the given that they are in conflict with the basic presumption of equality prevalent in democratic versions of morality (Upheavals of Thought). Her argument is developed with regard to liberal democracies in particular in Hiding from Humanity. Still, a number of theorists object to this attempt to parse out acceptable and unacceptable emotions for democratic life. See, for example, Tarnopolsky, “Plato on Shame and Frank Speech in Democratic Athens”; Sokolon, “Feelings in the Political Philosophy of J.S. Mill.” It could mean the repudiation of a wide spectrum of emotional motivation, such as anger (insofar as it may project a lack of appropriate respect toward the other) or all forms of shame (insofar as it may presume inequality) or honour (insofar as it suggests a sense of greater importance and could be deemed to be grounded in largely an aristocratic ethos). The virtual outlawing of certain emotions in the public life of liberal democracies raises at least two issues. First, is it possible to posit a practice of liberal democratic interaction that will outlaw certain types of emotional disposition vis-à-vis other citizens? Second, is it desirable? For Rawls, good citizens of a democratic polity will have a sense of the inappropriateness of certain types of emotion and motivation when deliberating about serious public matters, as all their actions in this forum must be governed by a particular conception of justice consonant with democratic political values. Rawls recognizes that there may be a plurality of political conceptions of justice, and so he does not spell out the range of dispositions deemed acceptable in a liberal democratic forum. Still, he maintains that all serious political intervention, including the act of voting, should be governed by one of these conceptions and that citizens are to reason by public reason whenever institutional essentials and matters of basic justice are at stake; this idea suggests the expectation that not only our political conclusions but also all facets of our public deliberation, including our emotions, must be liberalized. Of course Rawls is not suggesting that all democratic citizens indeed do or even would be expected to conform to this expectation in all aspects of their political behaviour. But there is a sphere of deliberation in which this behaviour is to be expected. To address the question of its possibility at this point would require an important detour into the question of the rationality of emotions and of our ability (or the extent of our ability) to control them. For more limited objectives here, I question the central claim that rational constraints determining acceptable and unacceptable emotional dispositions are in themselves desirable from the point of view of liberal justice. Should citizens be expected to be calm and respectful toward all political views, including ones they truly find outrageous and abhorrent? In certain cases, our emotional response urging us to rule certain types of proposals out of order may serve us better in defending the principles of liberal democracies than any form of political argument. To continue the argument may be to give greater public legitimacy to a position than its due. In his discussion of public reason, Rawls implies that in matters of public importance we should adopt not just stances but attitudes and motivations that are fully in line with basic expectations of liberal democracy. While this position reinforces his point of the need of a sense of civic friendship, it also suggests that this stance of friendship should be an unconditional one, regardless of what is said or done. It also suggests that theoretical argument will always be the best way to promote justice. By seeking to marginalize the emotions considered incompatible with reasonable expectations of equality and respect, Rawls takes away from individuals the resources they may need in dealing with those public positions that are deemed worthy of condemnation and ridicule.

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problems noted here, a number of theorists have engaged in a process of intellectual retrieval, revisiting canonical texts in Western political theory and seeking a more sophisticated account of judgment and autonomy that incorporates a more mature understanding of the human subject as both reflective and emotive. Two recent works stand out in particular: Michael Frazer’s The Enlightenment of Sympathy and Duncan Kelly’s The Propriety of Liberty. Both of these works engage in a thoughtful reconstruction of the ways in which the emotions can be more carefully and accurately integrated into an understanding of the process of reflective autonomy and independent judgment at the core of the liberal vision of the human subject. Both stand as important correctives to the traditional liberal accounts analyzed in this chapter. However, I also have reservations about these projects, reservations that have informed and indeed transformed my initial approach to these issues. While I will be working out the specific features of my own way to link an understanding of the emotions and normative political theory in my last chapter, it is important to mention here, I think, that one must be careful not to invoke the emotions as a new way of tending to the process of judgment in a liberal setting without any sense of the implications for the outcomes of reflection. In other words, while both of these theorists do appear to value the emotions and take them seriously to some degree, it is also evident that the underlying impact of the invocation of emotions in individual deliberation is to end up at roughly the same ends of liberal commitment as where they started out. Emotions are invoked so as to provide a more realistic account of the process of individual reflection and deliberation or the psychology of the liberal subject, but in no way do they appear to affect the norms or commitments that help to distinguish appropriate from inappropriate outcomes. I think that we should be more open to the ways that the consideration of the emotions may disrupt our sense of traditional norms. While working through these issues in systematic fashion, it is important to begin with an accurate account of the ways in which emotions can figure in the life of the political subject, and only on the basis of this can we begin to work out what our central political commitments can and should be. We should be open to the possibility that a receptivity to the place of emotion in our collective lives will not only impact the manner in which we might practice our commitments but will reshape their very form and content. I begin this project, focusing on only one aspect of the place of emotion in our collective lives, with a much greater sense of the potentially radical possibilities that a serious consideration of the emotions can bring to the discipline of political theory.



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overview of the chapters This study has required a look at not only the broad intellectual context in which Montesquieu was writing but also an understanding of the ­history of debates, up to contemporary times, on the nature of the emotions and the passions. In addition, it has required attention to contemporary criticisms of liberal theory that single out liberalism’s traditional lack of appreciation for the inescapable and often positive role that emotion can play in politics. Consideration of these various areas of intellectual debate has allowed me to develop a better understanding of the significance of Montesquieu’s formulation within his own context. Furthermore, a better appreciation of Montesquieu’s enterprise has allowed me to appropriate, and develop to fuller conceptual potential, an idea that could be a positive addition to the current debates surrounding liberalism and its deficiencies. The idea that is developed in this work is what I call the idea of “public passion.” The above exploration of the uneasy relationship between the emotions and contemporary moral theory relevant to politics has highlighted the need for a concept that will recognize the importance of the emotions for politics, while recognizing a complexity of considerations in doing so. It has singled out the need for new approaches to help make better sense of our political experience. Chapter 2 explores the question “What is an emotion?” Drawing on recent debates in both philosophy and psychology, I sketch a picture of the political application and significance of these new ideas. I also develop in greater detail the idea of public passion by comparing and contrasting the notion with contagion theories as well as a more recent concept of strong reciprocity. The next section, an historical survey, begins with a reconstruction of the classical background to the idea of public passion, drawing largely from the work of Plato and Aristotle. The next chapter focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth century background as a means to situate Montesquieu’s response to these questions. My argument is that the ancient world did have a concept of “public passion,” but that by the end of the eighteenth century, via a trajectory that leads through Descartes, Shaftesbury, and Adam Smith, the idea had been weakened significantly. In this context, Montesquieu’s work can be considered in part as an attempt to revive features of this ancient concept, but in ways more conducive to the experience of modern political regimes. I do not wish to claim that Montesquieu’s theory will provide us with the elements of a theory of public passion to “correct” all the current

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deficiencies of contemporary liberalism that I identify. Rather, I regard his theory as significant because in the first instance it demonstrates a sort of “last-ditch” effort in eighteenth century theory to recuperate an understanding of the public role of emotion that was central to understanding politics in classical times but was on the decline. Second, Montesquieu’s theory shows an important intuition and gives us some direction in ascertaining how we might think of a theory of public emotion that is allied to justice but not in all instances defined by a sense of a love of the whole. Finally, given a number of recent works that invoke Montesquieu on questions related to emotion and politics, this work seeks to provide an alternative, and for the most part more positive, understanding of Montesquieu’s thought in this regard. The four chapters of the book that constitute the third section are loosely inspired by Montesquieu’s framing of the issue. Chapter 5 explores the broad questions of Montesquieu’s understanding of the nature of the passions and his analysis of the relationship between the passions and the law. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 explore the dynamic of each of the principles he singles out – namely, love, honour, and fear – as the motivating principles for republics, monarchies, and despotisms, respectively. In the final chapter I return to a discussion of this more general notion of a “public passion” and discuss possible objections to the idea, as well as directions for the revision of contemporary normative theories of politics. The general thrust of this book, then, is to recognize deficiencies within traditional liberal and democratic theory in making sense of our actual experience of politics. This failure makes the normative hold of these theories less attractive. One means proposed to bring our theories closer to the actual experience of politics is to integrate into our understanding of politics a more sophisticated human psychology, and in particular the psychology of emotion. A question raised by this proposal is how to distinguish emotional response and content judged to be largely personal and related to private reflection and interactions from emotional response and content that is more clearly public as well as evocative of justice. In response, I argue that there are resources from within the Western intellectual tradition for thinking about collective emotion that can be considered central to justice, politics, and public life. As a small step toward integrating acknowledgment of a place for the passions in political theory, I draw on Montesquieu’s theory of politics and develop it further to help resuscitate a modern version of the ancient idea of “public passion.”

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Contagion Theory Revisited

this chapter reflects on the nature of emotion and looks at some contemporary scholarship on the place of emotion in politics so as to set the stage for a discussion of public passion. The first line of analysis focuses on how we might (re)consider the nature of emotion. Drawing on work in the philosophy of mind, I suggest that as we can generally be conscious of the emotions, especially those most relevant collectively, and relate them to some form of judgment, they are thereby potentially rational. From this position, the place of the emotions in political life and their role as a constitutive feature of political regimes appear in a much different light than usual. Recent work in philosophy provides the basis for distinguishing the idea of public passion from theories of crowd mentality and mass behaviour (sometimes called “contagion theory”) fashionable in social science in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century, as well as in contemporary theories of collective action. This preliminary discussion will provide a suitable analytical context for tracing the history of this idea of public passion from classical times to the Enlightenment. As in the previous chapter, I invoke the term “emotion” to indicate a broad category encompassing what we generally acknowledge as brief moments of moderate to intense affect, as well as more diffuse and ­longer-term manifestations of affect. “Public passion” refers to a longerterm, more stable state of affect that forms part of the disposition of an individual in relation to public matters and vis-à-vis fellow citizens and/ or subjects; it concerns basic expectations of the spirit in which interaction concerning public matters generally occurs. It is a form of affect that is shared and generally acknowledged as such, so the idea of “public” actually connotes three things: the object of affect (i.e., concerning public matters), the source of affect (individuals sharing in the same

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affect), and the quality of affect (a consciousness of the affect as shared and thereby experienced in a more ritualized fashion). I sometimes invoke the term “emotions” and sometimes “passions” as I try to situate the phenomenon I am analyzing within the literature on political emotion that covers a great range of things. Of course, not all emotions related to public matters are shared. I am seeking in this work to shed light on only one manifestation of public emotion that in many ways forms a background to what has largely been the focus of the existing literature on the emotions in politics. Public passion, then, is only one form of political emotion but one that is generally shared and that is relevant to the defining characteristics and practices of the established regime. reconsidering the emotions The nature of the emotions is the subject of a great deal of literature. The development of the idea of a particularly “public passion” could be situated as an offshoot of what is sometimes (unhappily) called the social constructionist theory of the emotions, itself a development of more general propositional theories (referring to a spectrum of theories running from pure judgment theories of emotion to more nuanced notions of the cognitive basis of emotional experience), although I do not subscribe to a wholeheartedly cognitive approach for all manifestations of emotion.1 To situate my approach, what follows is a brief account of emotions

1 On the links between cognitive theories of the emotions and social constructivist theories, see Armon-Jones, “The Thesis of Constructionism.” For a discussion of the tensions between the two, see Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are, chap. 5. In general, I subscribe to Griffiths’s position that the word “emotion” evoked in ordinary language applies to phenomena that are categorically distinct. That is, some forms of human feeling and behaviour can be attributed to an affect program that functions quasi-automatically among human beings (though not fully immune to being shaped in its expression and containment, i.e., emotional output, by culture) and other forms of feeling and behaviour can be identified with more cognitivist and/or appraisal mechanisms, without ruling out some role for the unconscious in a number of its manifestations. For my purposes here, and in dealing with emotion at the broad level of the regime, it is clear that political manifestations of emotion are more readily attributed to the second level than to the automatic workings of the “affect program” (although, as argued by the “hot cognition” theorists, some of the culturally inculcated emotional responses may come to have a more automatic dynamic; still, it could be suggested that emotional responses that have been ingrained through forms of education are also subject to modification through reflection, in a way that disgust for a rat in one’s surroundings, for example, cannot be, given its more direct link to evolutionary dynamics). So I subscribe to a modified appraisal theory of emotions for the purposes of this analysis, without fully rejecting the important place for the affect program in a broader vision of our emotional lives.



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theory in contemporary philosophy. With reference to the arguments of Ian Hacking, I explore what is meant specifically by social constructionist in this instance to shed further light on the individual and collective dimensions involved.2 This discussion will allow me to spell out in greater detail what I mean by “public passion” and to provide some justification as to why this is an important concept in making sense of certain features of our political life. Propositional theories of the emotions have been generated within the last thirty years in an attempt to overcome the deficiencies of the long-standing view of the emotions as occurrences within the human soul that are completely distinct from perception, rationality, and judgment. The traditional view involved the claim that human beings could be overwhelmed by emotions. Emotions were thought to be universal and natural insofar as all human beings were thought to be subject to the same emotional template or spectrum. A similar understanding is prevalent today in some psychological and neuroscientific accounts of emotional experience tracing its cause to chemical changes in the brain and the limbic system in particular.3 Associated with this approach are those who identify emotions with a particular physiological state, stemming from William James’s now famous dictum that consciousness of physical changes in the body (what some term “feeling”) is a thorough account of what emotion is.4 Research in neuroscience has undoubtedly contributed a great deal to our understanding of emotional dysfunction and has helped in the treatment of mental illness. Still, the reductionist tendencies implied by these approaches as an overall account of emotional life have raised criticism from other theorists of the philosophy of mind. In particular, defenders of a propositional approach to the study of emotion have raised four important criticisms. In the first instance, these defenders suggest that while it may be the case that certain emotional experience can be associated with either physiological changes or chemical changes in the brain, there is no reason why one should assert these changes to be the actual cause of the emotion. In fact, it can be clearly shown that the same physiological or chemical change does not always translate into the same emotional experience. Jesse Prinz has labelled this the Somatic Similarity Problem – that certain emotions like anger and righteous indignation (one can be angry without being indignant), joy and pride, physical

2 Hacking, The Social Construction of What? 3 Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, and Le Doux, The Emotional Brain. 4 See, for example, Lyons’s Emotion.

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revulsion and moral disgust, or sadness and guilt manifest themselves with the same bodily pattern.5 For these emotions, only the particular circumstances and the evaluation of those circumstances can be said to inform the full meaning and experience of the emotion. The set of physical feelings and reactions that we associate with our emotions is thus much smaller than our varied and subtle vocabulary for making sense of our emotions. Indeed, some argue that having an emotional experience does not require any physiological reaction at all. Part if not all of our emotional experience, then, at least in a number of instances, is constituted by our thoughts and judgments about a particular situation. A second important criticism of traditional approaches to the emotions raised by defenders of a propositional approach is the recognition of the degree to which changes in individual evaluation play a role in modifying an initial emotional stance. For example, if Patricia is distressed on finding that her car is no longer where she parked it, giving rise to a belief that the car has been stolen, her emotional response will be dissipated or changed by finding on her voicemail a message from her partner saying that he took the car to run an errand and will return it shortly. Of course, the new emotional state will depend to an important degree on Patricia’s situation (does she need the car immediately to 5 Of course, Prinz does not defend a cognitivist approach, but he does acknowledge that this problem of identical physical reactions with different emotions can present a challenge to “feeling” theories of emotion, like the one that he does defend. Prinz notes, “The problem for the James-Lange approach is not that there are too many bodily patterns, but that there are too few. If we group similar patterns together, the array of bodily patterns associated with emotions seems quite limited. Different emotions are associated with the same or similar somatic changes. Consider guilt again. Above, I said that guilt is associated with frowning. It is a low-energy downtrodden emotion. This should sound familiar. The same would be said about sadness. If we study the bodily expressions of guilt, we may find that they overlap with the expressions of sadness considerably. Or, to take a more obvious example, consider anger and righteous indignation. These are distinct emotions. One can be angry without being indignant (though, interestingly, the converse is less plausible). If there were a unique bodily pattern for every emotion, then we would expect anger and indignation to be somatically distinguishable. This is unlikely to be the case. Sometimes different emotions correspond to the same bodily patterns. Call this the Somatic Similarity Problem” (The Emotional Construction of Morals, 65). Jenefer Robinson reaches a similar conclusion: “So far, then, the reasonable conclusion to this discussion would seem to be that, although some distinctions can be made – in skin conductance and heart rate especially – among some ‘basic’ emotional responses, yet in ‘standard’ cases where there is no suppression of the response or other defeating conditions, no uniquely identifying physiological profiles have been discovered that would unambiguously distinguish every case of one emotion from every case of another. At this stage it looks as if emotions are going to have to be individuated not by some specific pattern of physiological changes but by means of some sort of evaluation” (Deeper Than Reason, 32). Often cited in this light are the famous Schachter and Singer experiments.



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go to an important meeting?) as well as possibly her evaluation of her relationship with her partner (is there a pattern of her partner appropriating things while she is using them? Does the partner always take three times longer to run an errand than planned? Or does she find such behaviour endearing?). Defenders of a propositional approach to the study of emotions recognize that emotions are complex and that there may be not just one but a whole set of informational and evaluative judgments that can help constitute an emotional response to a particular situation. Because changes in information as well as evaluation carry with them significant changes to an emotional state, it is often argued that biological and/or physiological factors can best be considered effects rather than causes of emotion. A third argument in favour of propositional theories of the emotions is that they can take into account the place of feeling without abandoning the primacy of judgment. While some theorists of emotion such as Robert Solomon are regarded as adopting a purely cognitive approach, by the claim that they identify emotion solely with the judgments constitutive of emotion, many recognize that there is also a “feeling” component important to the emotional experience.6 Indeed, it may be largely a matter of semantics insofar as Solomon does not deny that feeling most often accompanies emotion; he just does not regard this feeling element as part of the core of what makes an emotion: “Emotions may typically involve feelings; they may even always involve feelings. But feelings are neither necessary nor sufficient to differentiate emotions.”7 In this way, defenders of a propositional approach do not deny that physical changes are associated with emotional response, but rather they recognize that it is because of the importance of the matters involved for issues of self-identity and meaning that judgments cannot be fully reducible to certain physical changes. A fourth line of defence for propositional theories of the emotions is the recognition of vast cultural differences in the experience of emotions. A variety of anthropological studies have demonstrated the existence in non-Western cultures of emotions that do not have clear counterparts in the West.8 These studies find that the vocabulary used by differing cultures to describe emotional experience is in part constitutive of those experiences insofar as it shapes the participant’s interpretation of life and events.

6 Leighton, introduction to Philosophy and the Emotions. 7 Solomon, “A Subjective Theory of the Passions,” in ibid., 62. 8 See Heelas, “Emotion Talk across Cultures”; Lutz, “The Domain of Emotion Words on Ifaluk”; Wierzbicka, “A Culturally Salient Polish Emotion: Przykro (pshickro)”; Choi and Choi, “Cheong: The Socioemotional Grammar of Koreans.”

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While there may be a limited sense in which brute physical reaction or phenomenological experience as a universal component of emotion has its place in certain situations (such as fear and an impulse to flee in the face of an unexpected physical threat), these reactions will always be shaped and modified by particular cultural norms (so, one could argue, that the type of fear associated with jaywalking will be felt quite differently for many Parisians – fear as exhilaration – versus residents of a small mid-Western American city – fear as terror – versus a provincial German town – fear as shame). Because of the role of cultural factors in shaping and fine-tuning even what have been considered to be the most basic of emotions associated with self-preservation, for defenders of a propositional theory of the emotions clearly the evaluative and informational components of emotional experience are again most central to what we call an emotion. Alongside these discussions surrounding the viability of a propositional approach to the study of emotions are other points of dispute within the field. For my purposes here, I identify three important axes of discussion: the manner in which we may talk about the “rationality” of emotions in general; the question of the unity of the emotions; and the role of culture in helping to shape emotional response. The question of the nature of the rationality expressed in emotion is a complex one. As one alternative, we find proponents of the view that we are individually responsible for our emotional lives. Robert Solomon, the best-known defender of this view, suggests that emotions can be regarded in their essential nature as judgments that reflect our choices and values, although with an important self-regarding focus.9 It is a view that Martha Nussbaum traces back to the Stoics.10 From this perspective, all emotional response invokes an essentially rational element in its core similar to that exercised in other forms of other moral judgment. Some have suggested that while rationality may be a quality of emotional response, it is not appropriate to suggest that the form of cognition or appraisal involved in our emotional lives is the same as that of other forms of logic.11 Sometimes the emotions allow for forms of ambivalence that are fully functional in ways that moral reasoning would not allow for. For example, we can punish our children, by denying them an ice cream treat or grounding them for a weekend, with the feeling that it is the right thing to do but still feel unhappy for doing so. In the realm of politics, we may make a fully justified policy choice, such as 9 Solomon, The Passions, 125. 10 Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire. 11 Greenspan, “A Case of Mixed Feelings.”



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taking money from specialized health care to pay for more preventive health care services, but feel ambivalent knowing that even the optimal decision has significant personal costs for certain individuals. The feelings of ambivalence as a part of our lived experience do not add up to logical inconsistency, nor do they just reflect a more tragic idea of moral pluralism such as that espoused by Isaiah Berlin, in which our liberal principles always carry the potential to conflict with each other.12 In many of these instances there is no tragic or irresolvable confusion, no mere clash of logic or moral principles over the proper thing to do. In other words, in many of these instances the ambivalence is not over what moral principle it is appropriate to follow, but an acknowledgment that in the realm of experience every good decision may have its costs in terms of suffering. It is not a rational conflict, but an experiential tension. Another aspect of a modified propositional account of emotion that it is important to incorporate into a theory of emotion relates to the motivational quality leading us to action – a quality that cannot be captured by the reduction of emotions to mere judgments.13 Emotion as being something of a “judgment-plus-active-principle” may go a way toward countering those opponents of a cognitive theory who suggest that there must be an aspect in the core of emotion other than merely judgment, for the theorist must be able to account for why, between two similar judgments and evaluations, one may be experienced emotionally and the other dispassionately.14 In addition to the question of how to fully characterize and articulate the propositional qualities associated with emotion, there is the question of whether to regard all emotions as the same. It may be misleading to suggest that all emotional feeling can be reduced to the same phenomenological description, and thus, here we may need to give ground to the non-cognivitists, at least for part of the emotional spectrum.15 On one side, we can envisage primary emotional reactions, such as fear generated by being chased by a raging bull, that can be regarded as either physically determined or related to elemental thoughts and instincts of self-preservation, although with some differing forms of experience depending on matters of habituation and cultural context. On the other side of the spectrum are those emotional reactions that could be said to be rooted in a complexity of interpretations and evaluations: that is, either conscious or less conscious judgments about ourselves and the world around us.

12 See, for example, Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind. 13 Greenspan, “A Case of Mixed Feelings.” 14 Robinson, “Emotion, Judgement and Desire.” 15 See Ferry, “Troubling Business.”

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The emotions would be distinguished by differing degrees of association to the independent cognitive functions of our own minds.16 We can be mistaken about our emotions, and about what we hold at a cognitive level. For example, our anger toward our close associate may in fact be rooted in negative feelings about ourselves or a sense of shame for something we have done.17 We have often experienced a disconnect between what we know to be factually true – for instance, that flying in a plane is essentially safer than driving in a car – and our feeling nonetheless that accentuates our fear of the plane over that of the car.18 So it must also be acknowledged that there are deep mechanisms that help to shape our emotional outlook in spite of our cognition. The acknowledgment of such situations has led some theorists to subscribe to new forms of appraisal theory. Jenefer Robinson develops what she calls “affective appraisal” theory, somewhat akin to Prinz’s notion of “embodied appraisal.”19 Robinson holds that appraisals are at the root of our emotional experience but that these appraisals are of a non-­cognitive kind and are generated directly by various emotional systems that give rise to a process eliciting automatic physical reaction as well as ongoing cognitive processing. While I agree that any theory of emotion must include room for more automatic reactions than those generally associated with a cognitivist approach, I do not think that all emotional experience can or should be covered by the affective appraisal mechanism. Robinson suggests that emotions are primarily affective appraisals that can subsequently be modified by cognitive processes. However, emotion at times appears not only to be modified by more conscious thought but indeed triggered by it. A child’s last day of the school year may be met at first with indifference, or even trepidation at the thought of having to make other plans for childcare. Yet on further reflection one may become increasingly aware that the child is growing older, that she will no longer have the teacher she loves, will no longer be with her best friends every day, and all these facts coming together and being

16 As Ferry argues, our language use and practice correctly reflect a certain ambivalence in our attitudes toward the emotions insofar as we regard individuals as responsible for some aspects of their emotional lives (we say, “Get over it,” and we punish crimes committed with malice more severely), but not others (we say, “He was overcome by fear/grief,” and we might regard individuals who are madly in love to not be quite themselves and thereby less responsible for what they do). Still, the ambivalence of our language use and practice may not accurately reflect the actual points where instinct falters and responsibility begins. On this point, see also Ben-Ze’ev, The Subtlety of Emotions, 244. 17 A classic commentary in this vein is Rorty’s “Explaining Emotions.” 18 See the opening discussion in Dan Gardner’s Risk. 19 Robinson, Deeper than Reason; Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals.



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conceptualized in a negative light can trigger a feeling of sadness that was not initially there. It does not mean that all reflection is emotional, but reflection may indeed generate emotion in certain instances, more actively than just a random trigger. It may be best to subscribe to the position taken by Paul Griffiths, that the general concept of emotion brings together a range of mechanisms, some of them cognitive and others that more clearly fit Prinz’s notion of embodied appraisal generated by automatic processes.20 Still, Griffiths’s work needs the caveat that these two dimensions of emotion do not work fully independently of one another. The distinction between automatic and appraisal mechanisms of emotion may not cohere neatly to the distinction between primary or more primitive evolutionary responses and more culturally developed ones, as Griffiths suggests. Certainly, what may have begun as a process induced by reflection and some form of cultural learning can, with enough conditioning, come to be experienced as a form of automatic reflex, just as in many circumstances we can overcome our initially automatic fear of flying. In this book I focus on those aspects of emotional experience that could be said to belong to the more cognitivist side of the propositional spectrum, not because all political emotion can be said to be so but because the types of emotion generally shared by a political community often are related to more fundamental principles or practices that are either taught or contested publicly; thus they are given more prominence and articulation than most of the appraisals that help to constitute emotional experience in general. However, in terms of a broader theory of emotion, I do not disregard or reject all claims of the non-­cognitivists.21 I am sceptical that any one description or definition can fully cover all aspects of what we have come to call our emotional experience. A third question associated with these issues and that forms part of the background of the discussion in this book is that of the social roots of emotion. Cultural values undoubtedly play a role in the development of our sense of identity and meaning. In this regard, all theorists of the emotions, apart from those who subscribe to a purely naturalistic view, 20 Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are; Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals. 21 For a more in-depth discussion of the differences between cognitivist and non-­ cognitivist theories of emotion, and one of the best defences of the latter within contremporary moral and political philosophy, see Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals, esp. chap. 2. In suggesting that emotions more broadly shared by social groups are more readily affiliated with cognitivist understanding, I am echoing the judgment offered by Rosenwein in Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, 14. Still, Rosenwein focuses on emotions shared by smaller social groups and does not consider the broader regime-centred “public passion.”

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will recognize an important role for society in the shaping of our emotional lives. Where theorists may differ is in recognizing the degree to which even seemingly basic emotions are either manufactured or to a significant degree shaped by the social context. Social constructionism, or what I call “contextualism,” refers to a group of theorists who argue that in general the beliefs, judgments, and desires that constitute emotions are not natural but are generated by the norms and beliefs of particular communities or cultural systems.22 Following Armon-Jones, we can identify two versions of contextualism. The first will attribute all emotional content to social causes (“no emotion can be a natural state”); the second may acknowledge an underlying naturalist impulse in certain situations but will nonetheless highlight how the power of social norms can shape that experience of emotion in significant ways.23 The general implication of the contextualist viewpoint is that through various means, both formal and less formal, emotions and emotional behaviour not only can be taught, but are taught to a great degree. Contextualists can often adopt a functionalist framework for explanatory purposes – that is, to suggest that the transfer of judgments, beliefs, and cultural norms as well as behavioural norms that constitute the emotional experience across cultures and through time serves the purpose of sustaining cultural values.24 Still, there is no reason to assume that a contextualist approach to understanding this dynamic necessarily requires adopting a broader functionalist explanatory framework.25 While contextualism defines itself as a particular approach to the study of emotions, it is apparent that any reflective cognitive theorist of the emotions must recognize, at least with regard to the weaker version of contextualism, that the beliefs and evaluations that go into emotion cannot but be 22 Armon-Jones, “The Thesis of Constructionism,” 182. Other theorists (largely in the fields of psychology, sociology, and anthropology) associated with this approach include James Averill, Errol Bedford, J. Coulter, Paul Heelas, and Catherine Lutz. See, for example, Harré, The Social Construction of Emotions; Harré and Gerrod Parrott, The Emotions; and Averill, “Emotion and Anxiety.” For a discussion of the weaknesses of social constructionism with regard to the emotions and its potential conflict with basic cognitive or propositional, theories, see Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are, chap. 5. 23 Armon-Jones, “The Thesis of Constructionism,” 186. 24 Ibid., 184. 25 It has long been recognized that functionalism as a theory carries circular logic (i.e., the needs of the social system that are recognized as an outcome of social processes are integrated into the theory as the very cause of the dynamic through which they are produced) and that it does not adequately show the important role of human and political agency in the development and evolution of social organisms. Indeed, the difficulty that functionalist approaches often have in accounting for change is a reflection of this.



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shaped by cultural circumstances and context. Psychologists have shown at a basic level that people will regulate their perceptions of emotional meaning with reference to the apparent reactions of others.26 The idea that our emotional lives can be shaped by a cultural context, similar to norms, is not only scientifically validated but indeed useful for our understanding. In particular, it can help to shed light on the social and political manifestations of emotion in a way that a purely naturalistic theory of the emotions cannot. The transferral of cultural norms that help to inform our emotional experience does not have to meet any preordained social function, particularly prior to any consideration of human agency. Of course, contextualism has crude as well as sophisticated versions. It is important to highlight that a contextualist approach should look to the cultural continuities of basic beliefs, evaluations, and behaviour patterns that help to constitute emotional experience, but it should also allow for some realm of personal interpretation and application of these cultural rules, both in terms of when an emotion may be appropriate and to what degree. How do these features of contextualism relate to the study of politics in particular? I suggest that some forms of political emotion experienced by groups as a whole, largely in response to events or through the active intervention of power holders, can be accounted for more easily through a general social contextualist perspective. These are forms of emotion that are largely disregarded or discounted in various contemporary accounts of liberal democratic theory. The point of focusing on this phenomenon is in part to show that fully individualistic and naturalistic explanations of our emotional makeup are insufficient to make sense of the place of some aspects of emotions in politics, given how emotions are inextricably tied to particular contexts and thereby more contingent than suggested by traditional naturalistic approaches. More importantly, such a focus highlights certain tendencies or moments of shared experience that develop through time in part as a result of politics, alongside ongoing conflicting claims and adjudication. past accounts of shared emotion: from the crowd as wild beast to the logic of collective action Neither traditional approaches to liberal democratic theory nor indeed discussions of the character of emotion itself provide an account of “public passion.” However, in the general field of social science there are at 26 Fischer, Parkinson, and Manstead, Emotion in Social Relations, 12–13.

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least two approaches that share some affinities with this notion. This section explores theories of the crowd and contagion associated with the work of the late nineteenth-century sociologists Gustave LeBon and Gabriel Tarde, carried into the early twentieth century by Elias Canetti, and most recently rearticulated in the Brafman brothers’ 2008 best-­ seller Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior.27 From a broad perspective it is easy to see how social science in general has had a difficult time coming to terms with emotion as manifested on a public scale. While Charles Mackay provided the first modern historical overview of the pathological working of crowds in 1841, theories of collective behaviour became a preoccupation of nineteenth-century sociologists in response to debates surrounding progressive democratization across Europe.28 The work of French social scientists Le Bon and Tarde reflects clear concern about the spreading of political power and the potentially dangerous effects of collective emotion, particularly through the vehicle of the crowd.29 Further reflections on the working of emotions in broader social processes carried over into the work of early twentieth-century social scientists such as Lester Ward, Edward Ross, William McDougall, and Sigmund Freud. In reaction to many of these presumptions of irrational behaviour of people in groups, twentieth-century theorists of rational choice began to rethink these dynamics and to attribute to collective action a clear and discernible logic. The inadequacies of the presumptions of self-interest in explaining all forms of social behaviour led some rational choice theorists to develop presumptions of “strong reciprocity” – that is, the idea that individuals can be moved in certain circumstances, even when it may be contrary to their long-term individual interest, by the preferences of others, or brought to adopt their disposition.30 As a preface, then, to my discussion of emotion and politics, sketching the contours of these two competing understandings of the nature and place of public emotion will help to highlight the characteristics and novelty of my concept of public passion.

27 Brafman and Brafman, Sway. 28 Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Mackay’s work has had unusual resonance in contemporary debate, considering that its publication dates back to 1841. Most recently, the work was cited by Maureen Dowd in an article relating to the popular controversy surrounding the building of a mosque near the site of the former World Trade Centre (“Going Mad in Herds,” New York Times, Sunday, 22 August 2010, 9). 29 LeBon, Psychologie des foules; LeBon, La psychologie politique; Tarde, Les lois de l’imitation; Tarde, L’opinion et la foule. 30 Bowles et al., Moral Sentiments and Material Interests.



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Le Bon is notorious for his conception of the crowd. It was, in fact, a notion commonly shared by a number of his contemporary social scientists including Tarde, but its impact lingered into the 1960s through the work of Elias Canetti.31 As a political psychologist, Le Bon was concerned with identifying the features of the turn-of-the-century world that were transforming the behaviour of citizens and the practice of politics. He acknowledged a particular type of crowd mentality, one that did not apply to each and every agglomeration of individuals but that would form among individuals gathered together under the influence of a particular catalyst shaping thoughts and sentiments in a similar way.32 Indeed, for the notion of crowd to apply, he does not even require that the individuals be found in the same location. The types of instances he identifies for the formation of the crowd are those involving the influence of certain “violent emotions” including events of national importance.33 The particular features of crowd mentality signalled by Le Bon include a generalized loss of “conscious personality.”34 This loss of consciousness entails a loss of control. The sense of self is taken over by a “collective soul” that determines feelings, thought, and action in a way that is manifestly different from that experienced by the isolated individual. With this loss of a sense of self comes a loss of a sense of responsibility, opening the crowd up to a wide spectrum of possible actions that would be generally considered off limits if reflected upon on an individual basis. Le Bon’s analysis, apart from being an expression of a generalized fear of mass politics common among intellectuals of the time, concludes that the way in which crowds take on a particular identity is through the sharing of an emotion fully divorced from reflection and rationality, one that guides the crowd to extremes of feeling and action. For Le Bon, the appearance of crowds in the political sphere is a sign of a decline of civilization and a veering away from any form of social discipline.35

31 Canetti, Masse et puissance. 32 “Le fait que beaucoup d’individus se trouvent accidentellement côte à côte ne leur confère pas les caractères d’une foule organisée” (Le Bon, Psychologie des foules, 10). 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 11. 35  “Les civilisations ont été créées et guidées jusqu’ici par une petite aristocratie intellectuelle, jamais par les foules. Ces dernières n’ont de puissance que pour détruire. Leur domination représente toujours une phase de désordre. Une civilisation implique des règles fixes, une discipline, le passage de l’instinctif au rationnel, la prévoyance de l’avenir, un degré élevé de culture, conditions totalement inaccessibles aux foules, abandonées à elles-mêmes. Par leur puissance uniquement destructive, elles agissent comme ces ­microbes qui activent la dissolution des corps débilités ou des cadavres. Quand l’édifice d’une civilisation est vermoulu, les foules en amènent l’écroulement. C’est alors qu’apparaît

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From this perspective, the spreading of emotion in the crowd is likened to the spread of disease through the metaphor of contagion. It portends the waning of conscious and responsible citizenship and leads to the power of the irrational, the unconscious, and the suggestive. Once in a crowd, the cultivated individual becomes instinctive and barbarous.36 Although Le Bon concedes that the crowd can be capable of heroic actions, according to his view its character and behaviour always revert to a primitive state.37 It is not only the racist overtones that undermine Le Bon’s analysis (he suggests that there are fundamental racial characteristics that shape the emotions differentially and thereby the dispositions of crowds differ by racial background) but also its anti-democratic bias. For Le Bon, civilization is the outcome of planning by a powerful aristocratic elite, and an expansion of the public sphere to a broader democratic base would be a threat to all the gains of civilization. In addition, he views emotion through which a group could establish a common identity as the antithesis of rationality. His model is based on an outmoded and overly simplistic view of the character of emotion. Gabriel Tarde offers a slightly more sophisticated rendering of the same theme, making an important distinction between “the crowd” and “the public.” While “the crowd” applies strictly to groups of people found in a similar location and sharing the same ideas and passions as a result of some common experience, like a primitive gathering of peasants, “the public” is a phenomenon of a more advanced society, given that it is often generated as a result of journalism and manifests itself as a contagion without direct personal contact.38 Still, in both instances, individual differences are not harmonized but become less significant, given the leur rôle. Pour un instant, la force aveugle du nombre devient la seule philosophie de l’histoire” (ibid., 4). 36 Ibid., 14. 37 “Les multitudes manifestent parfois de l’héroisme, un dévouement aveugle à certaines causes, mais du jugement, jamais” (Le Bon, La psychologie politique, 125). 38 “Des personnes qui passent dans la rue, allant chacune à ses affaires, des paysans rassemblés dans un champ de foire, des promeneurs, ont beau former un amas très dense, ils ne sont qu’une cohue jusqu’au moment ou une foi commune ou un but commun les émeut ou les meut ensemble. Dès qu’un spectacle nouveau concentre leurs regards et leurs esprits, qu’un danger imprévu, une indignation subite oriente leurs coeurs vers un même désir, ils commencent à s’agréger docilement, et ce premier degré de l’agrégat social, c’est la foule” (Tarde, L’opinion, 32); “La formation d’un public suppose donc une évolution mentale et sociale bien plus avancée que la formation d’une foule. La suggestibilité purement idéale, la contagion sans contact, que suppose ce groupement purement abstrait et pourtant si réel, cette foule spiritualisée, élevée, pour ainsi dire, au second degré



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tendency of individuals to begin to mirror one another with a strong communion of ideas and passions.39 In the case of the crowd, as for Le Bon, this drive to common passion also changes its character through mutual encouragement and in general leads to aggression, intolerance, and myriad forms of extreme and violent action.40 The public shows similar characteristics but in a more muted form: “Les publics comme les foules sont intolérants, orgeuilleux, infatués, présomptueux, et, sous le nom d’opinion, ils entendent que tout leur cède, même la verité quand elle les contrarie. N’est-il pas visible aussi que, à mesure que l’esprit de groupe, l’esprit de public, sinon l’esprit de la foule, se développe dans nos sociétés contemporaines, par l’accélération des courants de la circulation mentale, le sentiment de la mesure s’y perd de plus en plus?”41 Publics tend more often to be distinguished by allegiance to a common idea or opinion than by the sharing of a passion. Still, when spurred by the influential words of an opinion-maker, publics can experience a strong sense of friendship that minimizes differences and softens the hearts of all toward their fellow citizens, much like what was generated in the past by a gathering at the country fair. But publics can also be joined by a common hatred, and indeed madness, in ways that make them even more dangerous than a hating crowd. The worst manifestations of public sentiment may be those that on the surface appear most benign – that is, in timid and lazy publics. Here, as a direct result of common sentiment, as has been evident throughout the course of history, argues Tarde, the public becomes complicit in a wide array of criminal behaviour through a shared sentiment that stifles and restrains most impulses to resistance and rebellion.42 The value of the work of Le Bon and Tarde is that it reminds us of collective phenomena often ignored in analysis today. There clearly is a de puissance, n’a pu naître qu’après bien des siècles de vie sociale plus grossière, plus élémentaire” (ibid., 6). 39 Ibid., 28–9. 40  “Si diverses quelles soient par leur origine, comme par tous leurs autres caractères, les foules se ressemblent toutes par certains traits: leur intolérance prodigieuse, leur orgueil grotesque. Leur susceptibilité maladive, le sentiment affolant de leur irresponsabilité née de l’illusion de leur toute-puissance, et la perte totale du sentiment de la mesure qui tient à l’outrance de leurs émotions mutuellement exaltées. Entre l’exécration et l’adoration, entre l’horreur et l’enthousiasme, entre les cris vive et à mort, il n’y a pas de milieu pour une foule. Vive, cela signifie vive à jamais. Il y a là un souhait d’immortalité divine, un commencement d’apothéose. Il suffit d’un rien pour changer la divinisation en damnation éternelle” (ibid., 36). 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 47–8, 57–8.

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­ ynamic of not only similar dispositions across a public but also shared disd positions: that is, times when members of a particular political community or organization see or experience themselves through a shared bond of sentiment, and not just as legal subjects of the institutional structures that govern them. In addition, both Le Bon and Tarde avert us to the possibility that this sense of community identity in shared emotion need not be automatic or permanent but is often a product of particular situations or events. While this recognition may be ephemeral and may not outlast subsequent attention to divisive issues, at times this aspect of political and public life is palpable. Furthermore, it can manifest itself both as a celebration of community and a debilitating feature of political life. Still, Le Bon and Tarde do not provide us with an adequate understanding of the phenomenon. Both infuse their analyses with a sense of suspicion of the popular classes and suspicion of the mainly dysfunctional effects of crowd and public influence. This attitude is tied to an understanding that regards the multitude, when making an appearance in the public arena, to be inauthentic insofar as its members are assumed to be either driven by an irrational unconscious or by the more powerful character and charisma of elite opinion-makers. Furthermore, the emotional attributes of a feeling public are regarded as largely devoid of logic and reason, though they may in certain instances fill a useful political role. Most importantly, Le Bon and Tarde shift from an observation of emotional commonality to suppositions of a slippery slope toward homogeneity; in other words, both assume that the sharing of common sentiment is a risk to individuality and first indication of its loss. Neither seems to recognize the possibility that shared sentiment of one type with regard to certain matters of public importance could be coupled with differing opinions and political stances. In the early twentieth century, a number of social scientists from a variety of disciplines tried to provide a less negative account of the place of emotion in social and political development. This new wave of thinking also shared the benefit of seeking some means of explaining differences among groups and their behaviour. Lester Ward and Edward Ross offered accounts of social development driven largely by the emotions.43 43 See, for example, Gerver, Lester Frank Ward; Ross, Foundations of Sociology. Ross provides a particularly frightening view of the mob: “Remove the fear of consequences by the anonymity of the crowd, take away the sense of personal responsibility by the participation of numbers, and people will step by step descend into depths of evil-doing and violence that measure how far their prevailing inclinations lie below the moral standard which social pressure has forced upon them … Analyzing the mob as thus defined, we find at the base of it that mental quality termed ‘suggestibility’ which comes to light in gregarious animals, children, certain lunatics, hysterical patients, and hypnotized subjects. It



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William McDougall, in The Group Mind, offered an account of group psychology with a strong focus on emotions that looked to the importance of organization and a collective and conscious sense of common purpose as criteria for differentiating between morally defensible and more “primitive” forms of group.44 Sigmund Freud subsequently sought to interpret group dynamics through the libidinal drives of individuals, and explained the origins of group identification through a process in which individuals repressed more basic feelings of jealousy and hostility.45 All these early twentieth-century social scientific studies benefited from examining a wider variety of realms of social emotion than the crowds at the centre of the analyses of Le Bon and Tarde. These later authors also appreciated emotion as being integral to the process of social and political development rather than being largely dysfunctional. However, they shared with their predecessors the idea that reason and emotion were completely distinct faculties and often in opposition with each other. They regarded emotion as a positive force only insofar as its often unintended outcome coincided with the rational demands of justice and altruism. In this light, McDougall and Freud have a tendency to stress the importance of both strong leadership and highly developed state organization to ensure that otherwise potentially unruly emotional forces are channelled in productive ways. There is no sense in these writings that emotion can be intrinsically constitutive of a sense of justice. In part to counteract the idea that politics was little more than the management of the irrational drives of the public, rational choice theorists sought to highlight in the domain of collective action the strategic thinking in what appeared on the surface to be irrational. While for many years this approach was dominated by the idea of self-interest as the prevailing motivational consideration, at least for purposes of explanation, recent adherents to the approach have sought to incorporate a more complex psychological template. The search for a broader template is in part motivated by a recognition that the assumption of the universal pursuit of self-interest often left some outcomes unexplainable; for example, threats of punishment and material incentives are not always effective in the realm of public policy, and some actions of benevolence or punishment are performed on a regular basis with little or dominates childhood, but fades as character sets and the will hardens. In adult life it is so overborne by habit and reason as to be dominant only under abnormal conditions such as disease, fascination, or excitement” (Foundations of Sociology, 102–3). Still, Ross also acknowledged in the tradition of Lester Ward that the basic social forces can be reduced to a complex mix of natural and cultural desires (chap. 7). 44 McDougall, The Group Mind. 45 Freud, Group Psychology.

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no direct positive payoff. By incorporating the idea of “strong reciprocity” into traditional models of rational choice, theorists such as Elinor Ostrom, Ernst Fehr, and Herbert Gintis argue that they can explain a much broader range of behaviour.46 The notion of “strong reciprocity” refers to the idea that certain actors in larger societies characterized by relative diversity will strive to act in ways that adhere to the expectations of others and thereby conform to established norms, even when it may go against their direct self-interest, in cases where there is a perception that others are behaving cooperatively. Against a background of good will, certain individuals are more likely to engage in actions often described as altruistic, even where their direct gain is minimal or there is a price to pay. Similarly, acts of punishment, which may carry a high cost, may be engaged in for purposes of protecting group norms and solidarity. The targeted trends of behaviour and disposition are not considered to be altruistic in strict terms because the actions are contingent and conditional on the nature of the social context. Therefore a change in the context, such as the instituting of laws to oblige individuals to assist strangers in need, may do more to focus attention on the deficiencies of social trust and in consequence may do more to hinder good neighbourliness than to encourage it.47 In terms of the emotions, defenders of the “strong reciprocity” approach suggest there is an imitative logic in the basic dispositions of many citizens. In social climates where cooperation is the norm, while self-interested behaviour may still be not uncommon, that paradigm cannot fully account for the actions of a large number of people: In collective action settings, individuals adopt not a materially calculating posture, but rather a richer, more emotionally nuanced reciprocal one. When they perceive that others are behaving cooperatively, individuals are moved by honor, altruism and like dispositions to contribute to public goods even without the inducement of material incentives. When, in contrast, they perceive that others are shirking or otherwise taking advantage of them, individuals are moved by resentment and pride to retaliate. In that circumstance, they will withhold beneficial forms of cooperation even if doing so exposes them to significant material disadvantage.48

46 Gintis, “Strong Reciprocity and Human Sociality”; Bowles et al., Moral Sentiments and Material Interests. 47 Kahan, “The Logic of Reciprocity, Trust, Collection Action, and Law,” 365. 48 Ibid., 339.



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While starting from very different types of questions, recent work by another noted theorist of collective action, Charles Tilly, reinforces the work of Herbert Gintis. In Regimes and Repertoires, Tilly focuses on patterns of contentious politics within and among regimes.49 He shows how patterns of contentious politics, including the level of violence associated with protest, have a direct correlation with the degree of state capacity in a regime and with the level of democracy practised in it. In high-­ capacity democratic states such as those in Western Europe, collective protest tends to shun violence; in high-capacity non-democratic states such as Saudi Arabia, the violence of political contention can be muted but concentrated when mobilized; in low-capacity non-democratic states such as contemporary Iraq, violence is often pervasive, given the great dispersion of power.50 Tilly does not comment specifically on the place of emotion in the politics of contention. And while it is true that behaviour cannot be an exhaustive measure of emotion, protest can certainly be regarded as a form of emotional behaviour and thereby can be studied as a point of access to understanding political emotions in deeper terms. Tilly’s idea of a repertoire is developed to counteract theories of the irrationality of crowds (such as that of Le Bon), as well as traditional theories of rational action that assume that individuals involved in contentious politics have a full set of possible choices.51 He suggests that a regime’s history, as well as key features of a regime’s institutional structure, provides a context that limits significantly the choices of those engaged in contentious politics. The idea of a “repertoire” in protest politics suggests that the nature of social relations in a regime has a profound effect on the set of real possibilities for political actors: “Strong or rigid repertoires imply great embedding of contention in previously existing history, culture, and social relations.”52 There is the implication in Tilly that perception of the disposition of others has an important impact on identifying viable political choices; in this way Tilly’s “repertoire” shows some affinity with Gintis’s notion of strong reciprocity. But what is crucial for Tilly, something ignored by Gintis, is the question of the resources and capacities that may permit political actors to continue to enforce their perspective in the face of opposition.

49 Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires. 50 He summarizes his general typology in ibid., 81. 51 Ibid., 40–1. 52 Ibid., 41.

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Tilly’s focus on contentious politics does not admit of a deep consensus in even the most secure and high-capacity democracies.53 Yet despite the focus on politics as conflict, there is an underlying acknowledgment that a history of conflict within a regime nonetheless shapes a community in particular ways that allow us to recognize some agreement on acceptable modes or methods of politics and appropriate ways in which dissent should be expressed. Furthermore, despite his emphasis on history as shaping the horizon of political actors, Tilly makes no attempt to appeal to deeper unconscious factors of social and political identity in explaining political action. So what can these two newer versions or offshoots of rational choice literature offer to help us understand the idea of public passion? Gintis’s arguments allow us to recognize the explanatory inadequacies of the narrow individual focus of traditional rational choice theory. The idea of strong reciprocity adds to the equation the idea that social context can have a strong impact on the psychological parameters of individual ­decision-making. Tilly also shows how a history and social context are essential in shaping political choice. So both offer added support for the importance of not only a receptivity to the emotional character of one’s surroundings but indeed for some adaptation to them or mirroring of them, but in ways that do not rule out contestation. For Gintis this adaptation is particular to very specific types of political communities, but it is strong enough to affect one’s decisions to the point that they counter traditional expectations of interest maximization. For Tilly, this adaptation occurs in all types of regimes and forms a context in which interest calculations are embedded, thereby shaping the outcomes of that reasoning. These variants suggest that the notion of a common disposition or emotional solidarity need not be automatic, but can be conditional (as held by Gintis), but also that it need not mean social consensus in that it can form a backdrop for the various expressions of a politics of dissent, or contentious politics in general (as held by Tilly). Furthermore, Tilly helps us to recognize that a common heritage in the backdrop to a politics of conflict need not be related directly to ethnic or cultural characteristics but is for the most part regime specific. Where both variants fall short is in helping us to better understand the very push to adaptation that underlies these accounts. There is clearly some idea of association with a political community in a profound psychological sense that either hinders or constrains a politics defined by 53 “I think that democratization always occurs in part as a result of contention and always generates extensive contention; a peaceful maturing into orderly democracy is a crippling myth” (ibid., 61).



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the  language of interest.54 This phenomenon of adaptation and mirroring is also quite distinct in form from the motive of patriotism or altruism as it has been traditionally understood. Thus, while the history of social science from the mid-nineteenth century offers us much food for thought in thinking about the place of emotions and passions in political life, none of these approaches fully captures the phenomena that I wish to reflect on here, and that I argue has been a major focus of political commentary since classical times. Still, before exploring how classical thinkers articulated the working of shared emotion in politics, it would be helpful to pause and work out in a clearer fashion what I mean by public passion. the idea of public passion: the first articulation In the course of this book I provide articulations of the idea of public passion at three junctures. First, here I provide a basic introduction to the idea, flowing from my criticisms of previous attempts in modern social science to come to an understanding of shared emotion in political communities and how it shapes political expressions. In my discussion of intellectual history in chapters 3 to 5, I explore the different ways this core idea has been articulated from the classical texts of Plato and Aristotle to Montesquieu. I show how Montesquieu sought to retrieve this core idea of public passion in a manner particular to his times. This means that while he should be praised for having the insight to seek to revive an idea that was losing ground in his own intellectual context, we do not need to see in his work a definitive articulation of the idea and what it can offer. In my analysis of his idea of public passion, I again present core features of the idea, then explore both the strengths and weaknesses of Montesquieu’s articulation. In the book’s final and concluding chapter, I provide a third articulation that builds on the core features of the idea of public passion to show how it can contribute more directly to contemporary debates on the role of the passions in a normative theory of political justice. Public passions do not go unacknowledged in literature and in commentary on politics. In the early twentieth century, Stefan Zweig singled out moments of great human accomplishment, and in many of these moments, such as Mahommed’s conquest of Constantinople and the fall of Byzantium, or the conquest of Panama, he suggests that accompanying 54 This would seem to undermine this general approach as a tool in understanding politics, regardless of its possible explanatory (i.e., predictive) potential, a fact that perhaps many of its practitioners have already conceded. On this point see Petit, The Common Mind.

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the importance of extraordinary individual action in these events, the feats were acknowledged as significant through shared public sentiment, whether wonder, horror, or joy.55 More recently, the manifestation of shared public sentiment has received renewed attention in studies focusing on the character of fear in contemporary America, such as in the wake of 9/11, as well as on the workings of collective joy and the possibilities for civic love.56 Still, much of this commentary provides an inadequate theoretical basis for making full sense of it, or focuses on only one form of emotional expression, so that it is difficult to use the analysis to make sense of a diversity of political phenomenon. In addition, such outbursts of common sentiment are often regarded as nefarious, dysfunctional, or lacking in critical potential. They have been linked to the workings of elite manipulation, to a neo-Tocquevillian dynamic suggestive of the public’s incapacity to exercise real autonomy or to deep instinctual and quasi-reductionist features of human nature.57 Few of these readings suggest that public passion can be seen as a positive or a constitutive feature of political experience. Closer to the mark is the recent work of Joseph de Rivera, who analyses a phenomenon he calls “the emotional climate,” referring to the atmosphere within a political community that affects how people feel and act in public situations.58 However, from this experimental psychology perspective, de Rivera does not link this phenomenon to regime types; he assumes a basic negative-positive polarity in the realm of collective emotion (a view I argue in chapters 6 and 8 is overly simplistic), and he does little 55 Zweig, Les heures étoilées de l’humanité. 56 Examples of these works include Stearns, American Fear; Furedi, Politics of Fear; Robin, Fear; Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets; Mongoven, Just Love. 57 This latter characterization could be said to apply to Alford’s Group Psychology and Political Theory. While I have some sympathy with Alford’s approach insofar as it seeks to correct a fiction of much of contemporary liberal democratic theory that we spring from the earth as autonomous individuals, I do not agree with his contention that groups are relevant to politics largely as realms to work out more primal psychological drives. In this text I do not address the more subconscious ways in which group psychology works, something that encompasses more than just the emotions, but instead look upon the collective emotions as a largely self-conscious feature of collective interaction. Another text that explores the relevance of collective emotion in political theory is Reisman’s classic work The Lonely Crowd. Of course, for Reisman, as for Tocqueville, this manifestation of sentiment, increasingly mirrored among the citizens of America, is regarded as a pathological phenomenon. 58 De Rivera, Kurrien, and Olsen, “The Emotional Climate of Nations and their Culture of Peace.” De Rivera’s approach to empirical analyses has inspired other psychological studies. See, for example, Conejero and Etxebarria, “The Impact of the Madrid Bombing on Personal Emotions, Emotional Atmosphere and Emotional Climate”; Bar-Tal, Halperin, and de Rivera, “Collective Emotions in Conflict Situations.”



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to work out the normative implications of this recognition in the fundamental terms of how public passion relates to the development of an appropriate sense of justice. The possibility of distinct emotional cultures at the level of the state has also been acknowledged by Peter Stearns, but again without invocation of regime type as a factor, nor with any distinction between private and public cultures.59 Two recent works in social science have explored differing emotional expressions as they function in collective terms and as they relate directly to regime-centred politics. William Reddy in The Navigation of Feeling, in which he coins the term “emotional regimes,” and Richard Ned Lebow in A Cultural Theory of International Relations, explore how collective emotion is partly constitutive of political community.60 However, neither adequately discusses the implications of their conception for purposes of normative theory, and they tend to focus on the actual history of emotional expression in practice rather than on how intellectual history has come to shape our understanding of emotional phenomena. In addition, Reddy tends to avoid any discussion of how differing regimes can shape the content and tone of public emotion, seeking instead to focus on the rules of emotional display, while Lebow is mainly concerned with how public emotion can impact the interaction of states and their conduct of war, providing an alternative account to mainstream realist theories of international relations. While both of these accounts provide support for my analysis, they do not go far enough in exploring the internal or domestic dynamics, variants, and meanings associated with the notion of a shared public emotion. A promising area of study invoking the idea of collective emotion in states concerns the process of emotional reconciliation in previously wartorn societies or societies that have undergone major trauma.61 In many 59 Stearns, “Dare to Compare.” A recent ph.d. dissertation has also sought to explore the work of affect as it relates to political collectivities, but with concern for its implications in international relations and regarding largely the non-subjective and pre-conscious work of affect in helping to shape political identities that then help to fuel political conflict. See Ross, “Affective States.” 60 Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling ; Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations. See also my unpublished paper, “Assessing the Notion of Emotional Regimes,” presented at the Politics of Social Cohesion conference, cesem, University of Copenhagen, September 2009. 61 See, for example, Hutchison and Bleiker, “Emotional Reconciliation.” As these authors state, “Scholars and politicians need to recognize more actively and explicitly the political opportunities that disruptive events can open up. Doing so requires a systematic understanding not only of the feelings associated with first-hand experiences of trauma, but also of the manner in which these affective reactions can spread and generates collective emotions, thus producing new forms of antagonism” (386). See also Noor et al., “On

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of these situations the cultivation of empathy may help to create a culture of forgiveness. Still, there are instances of political trauma (such as Germany after World War II) where civic friendship cannot or should not be the highest priority of policy-makers, and where an outlet for anger and a need for more retributive forms of justice are paramount. In general this literature suffers from a neglect to consider the complex relation between emotions and the nature of political justice. As well, it offers empathy as an unproblematically positive emotion for collective political life, something I critically examine in chapter 9 of this book. I think this field, rather than offering any convincing answers, helps us to see why more study in the relation between emotions and justice is needed. Within contemporary political theory literature focused on the emotions with a more normative bent, such as in the work of Hall, Koziak, Sokolon and others, the dominant view is that emotions relevant to politics are a collection of essentially idiosyncratic responses to matters of public importance and may vary considerably within a given population. While I will be differentiating my work from these theorists more thoroughly in the next chapter, the most important difference between my approach and theirs is that I am exploring the working of emotion that can be considered as a shared disposition and often eliciting a common response among those living within the same regime. At the outset I distinguish my account of public passion from Durkheim’s notion of collective consciousness, as I in no way claim that this idea stands separate and apart from the individuals who constitute society.62 The notion is also distinct from the particular dispositions associated with various character types or even cultural types that individuals develop through the course of their private lives.63 So what is the “public” in public passion that is not collective consciousness? Three features make the emotion public: its quality as shared, its focus or object of concern acknowledged as something that has impact on the life of everyone in the political community, and the importance attached to that concern. As an example, we may note that Americans and Canadians share many practices, outlooks, interests, and general traits, to the point that many abroad have great difficulty distinguishing one group from the other. However, we also can acknowledge that when it comes to political Positive Psychological Outcomes.” A very moving account is Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull. 62 This is not to confuse it with some reified notion of Durkheim’s collective consciousness or object of analysis distinct from the very individuals who engage in public life. 63 Clearly, there are empirical links here among emotions developed through personal relationships and those related to public matters, but for analytic purposes in this study I concentrate on the public nature of these emotions.



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culture as opposed to broader sociological tendencies, Canadian and American sentiments and attitudes tend to diverge significantly, whether in reference to social services, health care, or gun control.64 Thus a shared appreciation for a performance or cultural event is not sufficient; the object of shared concern must also be judged to be something that is of fundamental importance. In the Canadian case, the desire to acknowledge health care as a public good and the understanding that its central importance mandates that it be managed (though not necessarily delivered) as a public good both distinguishes the overall Canadian position from the American one (fought largely on the terrain of fear of big government and its possible overcoming), while still allowing for the possibility of different policy stances within that shared desire. My idea of public passion is distinct from a notion of trust that is often evoked in the literature on the underpinnings of economic and political institutions, for trust is an individual disposition affecting the amount of risk-taking one might be willing to undergo in a collective forum. Public passion is more historically contingent than trust, because trust manifests itself in the same way for the effective functioning of a wide range of institutions whereas public passions differ among regimes. It also is important not to mistakenly identify public passion with altruism or love for the whole. I reject the Freudian idea that the wide-ranging possibilities of group psychology at the level of regime can be reduced in explanatory terms to libidinal drives or love instincts diverted from their original aims.65 We will need to be open to the way in which a collective concern for justice can manifest itself through a number of distinct collectively shared emotions. Some competing contemporary accounts have tried to make sense of common emotional experience at a broader social level. Brennan has suggested that at the level of the hormonal and unconscious features of emotional response (what she calls “affect”), a projection transmitted largely through pheromones and olfactory organs helps to explain forms of emotional dysfunction such as anxiety disorders, as well as the emotional moods of a gathering.66 This “transmission of affect” takes place at a primordial level, but its effects can be dealt with at the level of “feeling,” which for Brennan allows for conscious management. She develops this theory in part to develop an alternative to a cognitive approach that focuses on individual interest and seeks to explain group behaviour

64 For an excellent analysis and explanation of these differences, see Kaufman’s The Origins of Canadian and American Political Differences. 65 Freud, Group Psychology, chaps. 4 and 6. 66 Brennan, The Transmission of Affect.

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through theories of collective action often informed by rational choice methodology. While she acknowledges that traditional understandings of affect as purely irrational are defective and that a fuller understanding of emotion must include a recognition of its “calculating component,” she rejects the idea that individuals are essentially self-contained in all aspects of their psyche.67 Brennan’s theory can be regarded as a complement rather than an alternative to theories of contextualism in the realm of emotion. While the explanatory mechanisms differ, both acknowledge the possibility of common emotional states that encompass within a particular group a rational component whose origin can be traced to primordial levels. In other words, the shared emotional dynamic among the group is a result of factors shaping individual consciousness rather than stemming from a series of individual decisions or dispositions separately formed. In this sense both run counter to general presuppositions of traditional theories of collective action.68 However, Brennan’s theory requires an active physical presence for the transmission of affect, while contextualism merely requires the communication of communal norms and values and shared practices. More recently, the discovery of what have been named “mirror neurons” suggests that the sharing of emotions among people takes place pre-consciously.69 The basic suggestion here, the focus of a great deal of neurological and behavioural testing, is that human brains are pre-­ programmed through the work of mirror neurons to mimic the expressions seen in others’ faces. This automatic behavioural reaction in turn helps to generate the corresponding emotional state, thereby eliciting a natural and unconscious level of empathy in the observer. It gives a distinct physiological grounding for one aspect of broader behavioural mimicry, sometimes called “the chameleon effect,” one that is said to issue in forms of emotional convergence.70 These behavioural, physiological, and pre-conscious explanations for the presence of shared emotions are supportive in general ways of my notion of public passion. However, I also suggest (and develop the idea later in this book) that while we might consider these basic phenomena as social passions, in order for them to be fully acknowledged as public passions, there should be possible acknowledgment among the participants

67 Ibid., 120. 68 Ibid., 60–1. 69 See Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain; Iacoboni, Mirroring People. 70 See Chartrand and Bargh, “The Chameleon Effect”; Chartrand et al., “The Chameleon Effect as Social Glue”; Goldman, Simulating Minds, 277–8.



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themselves of the shared disposition, given its tie to matters of communal importance. In addition, while these behavioural theories are generally tested among individuals in close proximity and in a shared physical space, the notion of public passion I am developing here requires the positing of an imaginary shared space. It is this latter aspect, in part, that makes the relationship with one’s co-nationals a more conscious act. Public passion must also be distinguished from the more basic social component constitutive of any emotional phenomenon. A number of commentators recognize that despite certain features of emotional experience that clearly reside within individuals, the intentional aspects of emotion (i.e., emotion is not only about something but about something in relation to how others are acting or feeling or expected to act or feel) structure a great deal of what it is to feel an emotion. This is captured by Solomon in his description of emotion as a strategy through which individuals seek to attain something or to move other people to act in certain ways; de Rivera goes further to locate emotion between, rather than inside, people.71 Rimé analyzes the ways in which emotional experience draws people to express and communicate it to others.72 These characterizations point to a fundamental way in which most, if not all, emotions are political. Along this line of thinking, Ann Cvetkovich has acknowledged that “political identities are implicit within structures of feeling, sensibilities, everyday forms of cultural expression and affiliation that may not take the form of recognizable organizations or institutions.”73 Cvetkovich has been spearheading the Public Feelings project, with an activist agenda based on an analysis that brings the insights of feminism and queer studies to bear on a reimagination and extension of our traditional sense of the boundaries of political life. In particular, she suggests that traditional liberal public discourse has been ineffective in managing and healing the traumas of history and that a deeper understanding of the circuitry of affect in both public and traditionally private spheres is essential for harnessing emotion to a project of political justice.74 In somewhat similar terms, Daniel Gross develops his notion of most passions being “social passions” insofar as they are only possible in the context of comparisons and contrasts with the other. Gross, via Judith Butler, suggests that the whole vocabulary and meaning of emotion in the West is evocative of significant power relations, and in particular regarding

71 Solomon, “The Politics of Emotion,” 198–200; de Rivera, “The Structure of Emotional Relationships,” 116–45. See also Fischer et al., Emotion in Social Relations, chap. 7. 72 Rimé, Le partage social des emotions. 73 Cvetkovich, “Public Feelings,” 461. 74 Cvetkovich and Pellegrini, “Introduction: Public Sentiments.”

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which status can be afforded a wide breadth of emotional expression and which people of a certain status are expected to deny them.75 For Gross, then, the significance of social passions is that they are inherently constituted by power relations, and thereby are spread throughout societies in uneven and differential ways that reflect an unequal distribution of power. While this may be a feature of a great deal of emotional expression historically, I would like to argue that the arena of the public also allows for some space in which people are said to share in a common emotional experience. In contrast to the phenomena of social passions as developed by Cvetkovich and Gross, my own understanding of public passion seeks to preserve a more traditional distinction between public and private spheres (despite all the complex challenges this carries) and to highlight what I take to be a phenomenon that can and in many instances does transcend, or at least is pervasive in, unequal relations of power through common ownership in and articulation of an emotion shared by all vis-à-vis a matter or matters of public importance. To further the understanding of public passion and to consider the possibility of a more positive assessment of this phenomenon in political life, I identify here five principal features or axes of analysis. These features manifest themselves somewhat differently according to particular historical, social, and cultural circumstances. the first feature The first feature of the idea of public passion is that in broad terms a shared emotional disposition can be said to characterize populations living under differing forms of regime. This feature flows in part from the long-standing recognition in political theory that institutions do matter and that power structures do have an impact on people’s development and basic sense of being. Despite this long-standing truism in the field of Western political theory, it is nonetheless curious that even for those modern thinkers who did recognize the importance of affect for politics, the defined sphere for the significance of emotional outlook has generally been cast in either civilizational terms (as in the work of Tocqueville and Mill – for example, as when Mill speaks of the importance of women’s affect in the constitution of the medieval moral code of chivalry) or in more narrow cultural terms (such as those inspired by Burke).76 I wish to take seriously the idea that institutions matter and suggest that they have a distinct impact on the patterns of affect related to politics, 75 Gross, The Secret History of Emotion. 76 Mill, The Subjection of Women, 42–4.



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analytically separate – though perhaps not always phenomenally separable from – those derived from either civilization or cultural factors. I am not suggesting that all people living under a certain regime will at all times sense the same subjective experience and physiological indicators of anger or fear, and so on, and through this be at all times disposed to act in accordance with these feelings.77 The phenomenon is more diffuse. Two important factors help to constitute public passion. On the one hand, institutions help to shape social systems through material support and/or through an appeal to normative principles (such as honour, equality, or freedom) and the vision of what constitutes a “decent public culture.” On the other hand, sometimes these institutional efforts are corrupt, misguided, or ineffective, and in reaction citizens will themselves develop a set of dispositions that reflect an aspiration to decent public culture in the face of oppression and persecution. So when subjects or citizens come to reflect on public matters, or in their dealings with institutions and other subjects in a public way, they tend toward similar patterns of an underlying disposition or emotional response based on a number of factors related to the nature of the regime. In authoritarian regimes, for example, pervasive uncertainty with regards to the responsible wielding of power often generates patterns of broad suspicion and fear. This suspicion and fear tends to characterize not only the interaction of subjects with public officials but often the interaction of subjects among themselves. In this context, the contestation will rarely be public, unless either violently or covertly so. In some regimes, institutional structure and practice may inform the emotional patterns of citizens in subtle ways. A modern liberal democracy is characterized by a certain deference to popular legitimacy, along with overriding normative claims about the centrality of human rights and individual dignity. Within a robust model of this regime, the couching of political claims in terms of equality and freedom tends to be accompanied by a demand for greater acts of empathy and compassion from rulers toward constituents and from one citizen or group of citizens toward another, or toward those who aspire to be full members of the political community. Eustace has traced the development of the norm of caring for the feelings of constituents as a prerequisite for the exercise of power in the pre-revolutionary period in the United States. It was such a development that helped to pave the way for later liberal democratic practice.78 While not all liberal democrats will practise empathy, 77 This characterization draws on Nico Frijda’s preliminary discussion of the nature of emotions in the introduction to his classic work The Emotions. 78 Eustace, Passion Is the Gale, 232–3.

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or practise it in the same way, the dominant presumption is still that liberal democratic norms cannot end at the door of tolerance, and that liberal democratic citizens should learn to appreciate differences and cultivate their sensibilities so as to feel well disposed toward diverse manifestations of humanity. And some can acknowledge the legitimacy of this presumption as a description of democratic expectations while still contesting it. For previously dominant groups, it may involve some public burden of guilt for past injustices (for example, residential schooling in Canada was the focus of a public apology). For all citizens it implies the conscious cultivation of a desire that one be both subject to equal recognition as well as respected as someone who does indeed practice empathy and democratic reciprocity in the treatment and in the appreciation of others. Sometimes these demands of a general liberal democratic public passion can clash with individual character traits – leading to charges of hypocrisy – or with general cultural traits (including what Ervin Staub calls a group self-concept) – leading to a form of cognitive dissonance.79 The degree or intensity to which these dispositions are manifest, best characterized by a distinction between “thick” and “thin,” can differ by regime and within each regime category. An evident intuitive connection among populations within regimes may have existed in the past in ways that would be inconceivable in many modern liberal democratic societies, so that in ancient times, such as in classical Greece, when populations were quite homogeneous, or in what Peter Laslett has described as the “face-to-face society,” public passion can be considered to have been an ongoing and widely articulated basis of regime identity.80 This is what we can consider to be a “thick” manifestation, but these instances are not fully anachronistic. Contemporary examples might include the atmosphere of generalized fear in a threatened and repressive regime such as Burma or a weak and threatened regime such as contemporary Iraq, or the expression of political hope and defiance that characterized the Ukrainian Orange Revolution, or indeed the Middle East spring of 2011 when collective fear in a number of authoritarian regimes turned to collective anger and then, with political action, collective hope. In 79 Staub, The Psychology of Good and Evil, 504. Many thanks to my friend Sara King for recommending Staub’s work to me. For a concrete discussion of some of these precise emotional demands for citizens in a well-functioning liberal democracy, see Nussbaum, The Clash Within. For Nussbaum, well-functioning democratic citizenship requires in addition the proto-Protestant introspective capacity to recognize the ongoing clash or dissonance within, particularly with regard to both an acknowledgment and taming of an inner passion for domination (79). 80 Laslett, “The Face to Face Society,” 157–84.



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other times and places, the shared emotional outlook may be thinner, such as in a number of contemporary liberal democracies where often the politics of policy differences and deliberation can overshadow certain emotional norms bred by the institutional structure.81 In the case of a “thinner” passion, such as the melancholia that Jane Flax invokes as a general feature shared by liberal democratic citizens of contemporary America, the shared feeling may be implicit in (compulsive) political behaviour.82 (In the case of implicit emotion, the agents could readily come to acknowledge that emotional underpinning of their behaviour even if they have not in the past fully articulated it themselves. In this matter I make no claim about the relevance of the subconscious for political life, for which the agents do not or need not accept that explanation or characterization of their actions.) It may exist as an aspiration informing the rhetoric of leaders and citizens, such as the “bonds of affection” appealed to by a number of America’s statesmen.83 It also can be seen in the shared attachment to very basic public feelings such as the worthiness of all individual lives and the need for all capable individuals to have the power and responsibility to help shape their own lives.84 Additionally, in the case of relative institutional and social breakdown, it can be manifested as a sense of despair in the failure of institutions to live up to the aspirations of their founders.85 Even in the case of very complex societies and regimes such as that of modern Iran, one can find a basis for some form of public passion. Theocratic rule in 1979 imposed standards of decorum that brought heightened awareness of the public/private divide, resulting in quite

81 This will be the focus of discussion in chapter 3. 82 See Flax, “Shadow at the Heart.” Flax explains the notion of melancholia in America as an unacknowledged and repressed inability to come to terms with the recognition that the country does not live up to the ideals it set out for itself at the time of founding, particularly with regard to the injustice of racial and gender oppression and their legacies. I am building on her observations on melancholia without necessarily endorsing the Freudian analysis that underlies the explanation for that state. By steering clear of psychoanalytical frameworks, I also distinguish my approach to the emotions in politics from that of George Marcus who seeks to integrate a consideration of the unconscious into public analysis. See in particular Mackuen, Marcus, and Neumann, Affective Intelligence and Political Judgement. 83 See, for example, Holland, Bonds of Affection. 84 This articulation is based on Dworkin’s expression of common ground in U.S. public opinion in Is Democracy Possible Here? 85 I am thinking here of cases like the 2002 Gujarat riots as discussed by Nussbaum in The Clash Within. In terms of the basic public creed of modern Indian democracy, these riots represented a stark failure of the principles of democracy and the dispositional requirements of citizenship.

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different intersubjective dynamics within each realm. Religious dress codes for both men and women in public have helped to structure interactions with a mixed degree of public piety (in part through pride in Shia socialism), daring, and playfulness. At the same time, the public symbols of strict equality create a strong norm of outward conformity that in turn gives rise to levels of interpersonal curiosity and suspicion rarely experienced in more open regimes, so that it requires subtle care to safely negotiate the distance between what individuals appear to be and what they are.86 Still, in some regimes divisions among groups are so great, polarized, and antagonistic, sometimes to the point of violence, that in social terms we can hardly speak of a single regime at all, and here it is clear that groups may have their own very different emotional dynamics.87 So while in many instances the idea of a public passion can be used to refer to regimes as a whole, this will not always be the case. the second feature The second feature of the idea of public passion is that it can be shaped by a complex mix of what we might call horizontal and vertical dynamics. Horizontal dynamics are those that capture the way in which emotion can spread among groups of people by a process of mirroring and adaptation (through various mechanisms that range from empathy, a psychological need for belonging, to more purely biological or phenomenological dynamics). Jeffrey Goldfarb recounts a key moment in December 1989 during a televised rally led by Ceausescu in Romania when people in the back of the crowd began to boo, a reaction that then spread more generally. The dictator was forced to retreat from the scene, marking the beginning of the end of his rule.88 This horizontal dimension is reflected in some of the metaphors used to describe public emotion, such as “climate,” “undercurrents,” “waves,” “surges,” and “contagion.” The process of emotional contagion has been studied by a number of contemporary psychologists, although in general these studies have been limited to smaller social groups.89 Still, if the process is recognized to work in 86 Majd, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ. 87 Examples of this sort of polarizing politics have been closely studied by Ervin Staub, who looks at the process whereby certain groups are used as scapegoats to bolster another group’s deep sense of vulnerability or insecurity. This situation can form the backdrop for a genocidal culture. See his The Psychology of Good and Evil, chap. 27, “Individual and Group Identities in Genocide and Mass Killing.” 88 Goldfarb, The Politics of Small Things, 38. 89 See, for example, Cacioppo, Hatfield, and Rapson, Emotional Contagion. Contagion (understood as either mimicry or complementary behaviour) in this text is viewed as multiply



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c­ ircumscribed social settings for purposes of measurement, there is no reason to suppose that the dynamic does not continue to have relevance in a more diffuse way for a larger political community. In addition, as Cacioppo et al. maintain with reference to events such as the great fear of 1789 and the New York City riots of 1863, there is “historical evidence to suggest that the dissemination of emotions does not always require direct physical contact or proximity.”90 Vertical dynamics refer to the way in which leaders and institutions, including, of course, the media, can help to shape public emotions, either by direct inspiration and cultivation or in a reactive (or complementary) way, as when publics respond to perceived unjust policies with suspicion and fear, or when publics seek other ways of regulating conduct in the face of inefficient or ineffective institutions. As an example of the latter, Cohen and Nisbett have shown that in societies where law enforcement has historically been poor, people have often developed systems or networks based on honour.91 Of course, horizontal and vertical dynamics can work in tandem, and there is no one paradigm for how public passions are generated. Nonetheless, insofar as the types of public passion can be loosely differentiated by regime type, clearly the vertical dynamics have priority. the third feature The third feature of public passion is that it is not fully static. Politics is about change. I do not wish to suggest that political emotions always tend to perpetuate themselves through time. Indeed, the sharing of similar dispositions is quite compatible with ongoing political dispute, and disputes always carry the potential to bring vast changes in assessment of position and surroundings. As cognitive theorists have argued, political assessment is directly linked to political emotion, and thus changes in assessment, as they are the core of politics, can often be expressed in and through changes in emotion. We need only think of how some military campaigns, begun with great popular support, can often lead to the fall of  leaders and their governments. How these broad changes in assessment and public feeling occur is a complex question that others have attempted to address elsewhere.92 I only seek to highlight the pervasive determined, meaning that the causes for contagion can be physical, psychological, and social (4). The authors break down the phenomenon of contagion in the following way: “People tend to mimic others … emotional experience is affected by such feedback … people therefore tend to ‘catch’ others’ emotions” (47). 90 Ibid., 126. 91 Cohen and Nisbett, “Self-Protection and the Culture of Honor”; Cohen and Nisbett, Culture of Honor. 92 See, for example, Eustace, Passion Is the Gale.

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and public nature of a large number of political assessments through emotion and to suggest subsequently how they might play a role in a theory of justice. the fourth feature A fourth feature of public passion is that the intensity and quality of shared emotion can change over time and within a particular regime in reaction to particular events. A political community will feel a common emotional outlook more intensely on some occasions than others. So, for example, 9/11 triggered for Americans an intensity of emotions shaped by varying combinations of sympathy, shock, and anger. The depth of emotion felt in the wake of 9/11 faded as subsequent events, especially the war in Iraq, captured the public attention and concern. Similarly in Great Britain the unexpected death of Diana, Princess of Wales, gave rise to a massive public outpouring of grief that took the queen by surprise. While I suggest that there is an ongoing “thin” manifestation of public emotion of a particular type in contemporary large liberal democracies such as the United States and Great Britain, this manifestation can be combined with instances of intense and shared emotional reaction in reaction to events as they unfold in their contingency. Furthermore, such instances can modify to some degree the looser set of emotions that help to constitute the regime. So while I develop the idea of public passion that corresponds to regime types, the form it takes will often be modified to some degree in practice by the history and specific features of the country in question. There are both similarities and differences among the underlying public emotional dynamics in the liberal democracies of Canada, the United States, and Great Britain, but for my purposes I concentrate on the similarities. the fifth feature Fifth, public passion, as a form of shared political experience, can be seen as fully compatible with competing ideological principles and political projects. In her discussion of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, Susan Sontag acknowledges the naïve judgments of interwar and postwar progressives who placed a great deal of faith in the power of images and believed that the greater dissemination of images of the horrors of war would win the public over to the anti-war camp.93 Instead, these images, provoking horror and shock, gave rise to competing reflective reactions, 93 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 4.



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with some strengthening their patriotism, and others acknowledging the tragedy and foolishness of patriotism. In a similar way, a shared emotional reaction does not necessarily lead to a shared sense of its significance or place within a larger political narrative. As I show at a number of junctures in this work, there is room for pluralism in combination with the notion of public passion. In general, this study of the idea of public passion highlights – in order to better understand – the dynamic of emotional adaptation that may take the form of mirroring the dispositions of others with regard to public matters, sometimes in a weak and diffuse way and sometimes more strongly. It is meant as a somewhat naturalistic account of politics and political difference by regime to offset the overly rationalist understandings of politics that have been dominant in political theory in recent times. Public passion can be regarded as a feeling of sharing political space in a certain way, without ruling out the possibility of arguing with one’s peers. As political communities differ in character, so does public emotion differ. In that sense, no one generic manifestation of public emotion can be articulated; rather, there are competing types of public emotion that can be found, and these types, though most often specific to regime types, can change throughout the course of history with the interplay of deeper cultural and social forces. It may be objected that, in many contemporary societies, communities rarely share a public display of emotion or a common disposition on an ongoing basis in the deep way described in classical literature. Still, I would argue that the idea of public passion is still of relevance in understanding politics, and that contemporary theory tends to ignore or overshadow the manner in which emotion and passion can play an important role in constituting the identity of a regime. The very patterns of contestation and opposition in political life often reveal unstated public norms regarding both what is acceptable and not acceptable to raise as a matter of public discussion, as well as the methods by which these questions are raised. These rules may manifest themselves in terms of collective desires determining what is considered to be more pressing as an issue in public life, priorities that are open to changing emphasis but that provide an important basis from which to elicit public praise and anger in the judging of political actors. Such rules also can manifest themselves as public feelings of support and relative confidence (or lack thereof and hence a general sense of frustration, anger, or fear) in the constraints set by established institutions and/or in the relative integrity of major leaders within the political class, feelings that affect how transitions of power are carried out and demands for government action are expressed. What is new about this way of conceiving

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features of political psychology is that it highlights an aspect of an emotional disposition toward public institutions and issues that is not only shared but consciously shared with at least the potential of being articulated and acknowledged. In the face of arguments for the emotional lacunae, if not deficiencies, in traditional approaches to conceptualizing liberal democratic politics, the challenges are enormous. I do not intend to discuss them all here. My response to some of the inadequacies noted in the first chapter is a partial one; in the first instance, I do not claim here to spell out all the ways in which emotion is relevant to politics. Nor do I wish to map out all the ways in which emotion can be seen to be relevant to political theory. My contribution in this work is self-consciously intended to fill what I perceive to be a small but important gap. My focus on the idea of public passion highlights what regimes share in common in this regard – perhaps at the cost of neglecting the central way in which the emotions of individuals can and do clash in politics. My intention is to explore one concept that is missing from these accounts – that is, the idea of public passion – and to see how it might deepen our understanding and normative vision of political life. Throughout this exploration a fundamental question helping to shape the contours of the inquiry is whether in politics we should accept the idea that some emotions are perennially “bad” and others are perennially “good.” Some theorists (e.g., Nussbaum) argue that fear and shame are emotions that are destructive of good politics and should be minimized if not eliminated in any positive vision of political life; they view the emotions of compassion and empathy as essentially positive, a central part of the good political life and to be cultivated by public institutions of education.94 This distinction between good and bad emotions is sometimes called the idea of a negative-positive polarity. An alternative view suggests that some emotions traditionally viewed as negative can actually have an important function to play within good political order. So, for example, other theorists argue that some forms of shame and fear can be helpful in regulating behaviour in a positive way.95 In this second perspective, we should not place normative value on the emotions themselves but rather only on the associations or the role played by the emotions in a broader social and political context.

94 This argument is found in a number of Nussbaum’s writings, but perhaps most evidently in The Clash Within. 95 For examples of an articulation of this position see Sokolon, Political Emotions, as well as Tarnopolsky, “Plato on Shame and Frank Speech in Democratic Athens,” 40–59.



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The implications of this debate are important to highlight. The merit of the idea of a negative-positive polarity is that it allows emotional disposition to at times supplement, stand in for, and perform a function similar to a rational commitment to basic positive norms of political life, and indeed to do these things at times more effectively than those principles alone. The cultivation of compassion, for example, can be seen as a shortcut to the formation of a deeper commitment to democracy and its principles. In contrast, the notion that no emotion quae emotion can be regarded as normatively charged requires us to judge and regulate emotional life according to some pre-established standard of what makes for a “better” functional manifestation of emotion and what makes for a “worse” one; that is, the manifestation of emotion is always to be judged as instrumental to some more fundamental political principle. While both positions require some underlying normative framework, in practical terms the difference between the two is that the latter must always be decided on a case-by-case basis, meaning that a practice of “good” politics requires a constant articulation of those principles and a constant practice of judgment as to which manifestation of emotion is functional and constructive and which is dysfunctional. For some, it can be easy to see that the latter position may be a replay of where we already stand with regard to what is fundamental in political theory, namely the articulation of proper principles of governance and their justification in public terms. For the latter position, then, attention to the emotions may help for purposes of political rhetoric, or understanding political motivation, but it cannot ever substitute for the conceptual and normative work of traditional political theory. Thus a great deal of importance rests on the question of a negativepositive polarity with regard to political emotions as it affects the degree of centrality that the emotions can have in a normative account of politics. Of course, this question is also separate from the issue of which emotions one chooses to highlight as either “good” or “bad” in political terms. In my analysis I try to develop an alternative to the above two approaches. In particular, I argue that the political passions studied here (love, honour, and fear), at least insofar as they are considered to be public passions and reflecting states of mind that are cultivated, deemed desirable, or in reality shared among citizens, have some manifestations or forms that are good for politics and some that are dysfunctional. This points to a negative-positive polarity within each distinct emotional category. What principle distinguishes one polarity from the other? While such questions are complex, I suggest for the sake of simplicity and parsimony that these emotions can become negative when they are combined with an insensitivity to the deep suffering of others.

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The implication of my argument is that emotions as public passions in politics do not always have to stand in a secondary position and be judged in all circumstances in relation to principles conceived, debated, and justified independently. We reject the cultivation of collective manifestations of honour, love, and fear that serve only the cause of political order and political efficiency; but we recognize the benefit of forms of political love or compassion as well as fear if and when they generate both a sense of solidarity and a willingness to leave the principled basis for solidarity open for deliberation and discussion. For political theorists, perhaps the most pressing questions relate to the implications of public passion in multicultural contexts. In my concluding chapter I show how this idea of public emotion can be better harnessed to a theory of social justice. Before addressing these normative issues, I turn to the history of this idea. In the next chapter I look to the work of Plato and Aristotle to examine how the concept was first developed. Then, through a brief study of the idea in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries I turn to Montesquieu to explore a more modern articulation of this idea. I hope that this historical exposition will provide further depth of understanding of the nature and possible variants of this idea. Finally, I explore the meaning of this idea in the work of Montesquieu as it relates to his tripartite schema of governments, that is, republics, monarchies, and despotisms. In those chapters devoted to a study of a more specific manifestation of public emotion, I begin to explore some of the questions raised here. I then devote the conclusion to an articulation of how in more specific terms this idea can be applied to an understanding of politics today.

3

Cities and Public Passion in Plato and Aristotle in the previous chapter I explored new understandings of the nature of emotion in relation to reason as discussed in developments in the philosophy of mind. In addition, in chapter 1, I showed how both utilitarian and deontological approaches to liberal theory can in general be considered deficient with regard to their treatment of collective emotion in political life. With this background, this chapter and the next begin an exploration in the history of political thought to see how previous thinkers have conceptualized and incorporated an understanding of emotion into their political theory. The exploration starts from the assumptions that our contemporary theoretical accounts may not be improvements upon the past, and that if we look again to our intellectual history, especially with a new understanding of the possibilities for shared manifestations of emotion, we may find more positive examples of the place of emotion in political theory. It would be too cumbersome to do a fully thorough exploration of the history of political thought with this new understanding of emotion in mind. Because of their significance, I have chosen to concentrate on three key moments in the history of political thought, moments that reflect important junctures in the conceptualization of that manifestation of political emotion that I call public passion. I argue that the work of Plato and Aristotle offers us the first conceptualization of public passion in the history of political thought. Because of the foundational place that both have for this tradition, their work merits particularly close attention here. In addition, as we will see, the importance of these two thinkers for this tradition also requires that we pay closer attention to aspects of their texts that sometimes have been overlooked, or at least not examined in as great detail as others. The analysis each thinker brings to the understanding of deficient regimes is particularly important in this regard.

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The study of Plato and Aristotle offered in this chapter is significant, then, for two reasons. First, in light of the foundational importance of their work vis-à-vis public passion, a study of their ideas helps us to identify some core features of the tradition. Second, study of these classical texts allows us to see more value in parts that have often been disregarded because of associations with negative normative judgments on the part of their authors. I am seeking to demonstrate through this study that the work of Plato and Aristotle may be significant for the tradition of political thought not only for the “ideal” models of political organization and institutions that they offer (such as the kallipolis of The Republic, or the polity of Aristotle’s Politics) but also for their analyses of the dynamics of what they consider to be corrupt or less than ideal regimes. While I continue to recognize Plato’s and Aristotle’s respective repudiation of those “corrupt” models of democracy, oligarchy, and the like, I show that in the very practice of conceptualizing these models, they focus on a significant aspect of the nature of politics in their contemporary setting. I do not invoke the contours of the idea of public passion as found in Plato’s and Aristotle’s work so as to recover it wholesale, so to speak, from the past. While I am searching for the features that constitute this core idea in the history of political thinking, I will also need to be sensitive to the particular ways in which historical and intellectual context help to inform its articulation at various times. We will see that while the idea of a public passion has some core elements, such as the idea of a shared emotional disposition among members of a particular political community, the versions offered by Plato and Aristotle will be modified when invoked in other contexts. I focus on books VIII and IX of Plato’s Republic as well as the middle books of Aristotle’s Politics and parts of On Rhetoric to show how both thinkers saw a central place for passion in the public sphere. While there are important differences between them, especially with regard to how they thought about the place of emotion in the soul, for my purposes I highlight their similarities with regard to the collective working of emotion in political life. These similarities constitute what I call the classical view of the place of emotion in the public sphere.1 In both Plato and Aristotle we find a general understanding that regimes can be identified in part through collective patterns of emotion; in other words, a population who live according to common constitutional provisions share many common

1 In identifying this as “the classical view,” I do not wish to have it inferred that all thinkers of the classical era can be deemed to subscribe to this view. Rather, the term is a short form for suggesting that it was a position that can be attributed to important thinkers of this period in the history of political thought, though not exclusively so.



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outlooks and emotional tendencies. While this pattern can be seen in Plato’s and Aristotle’s respective visions of the ideal regime as based in part on a common love of virtue, it becomes most apparent in their understandings of the cycle of regimes and through those political systems considered to be deviant or corrupt. Such a psychological understanding of questions of citizenship is rarely invoked in the modern context.2 At the very foundations of the Western tradition of political theory is a robust tradition of reflection on the place of the emotions in public life, not just as the motivation of individual political actors in public actions but rather as a distinctly public phenomenon. It was an ethos shared by a people living within a single regime, an ethos that informed their emotional lives with regard to matters of public importance and that constituted their political identity fashioned by the political institutions and educational forces of their community. Furthermore, we will see in both Plato and Aristotle important distinctions between the public shape of citizen identity and individual or personal character formation. Awareness of this distinction reinforces the idea of a passion that is specifically public, that is, one that manifests itself as a shared emotional experience among citizens and in the relations between citizens and rulers, as emotions that are distinct from those associated with unique personal histories. 2 It may be suggested that one of the conditions underlying the possibility of this classical view is the small size of the states Plato and Aristotle had in mind, a condition that helped to ensure the virtual homogeneity of populations, that is, a quality of mindset shared by virtually all citizens. This mindset is fuelled in part by an assumption in much contemporary political discourse that there was a lack of adequate attention to human diversity in the ancient world and thereby that ancient theories are of limited relevance in conceptualizing a modern liberal republican regime. No doubt the views of politics of both Plato and Aristotle were partly shaped by this characteristic of ancient communities. Nonetheless, for both of these thinkers, the unity and unique identities of political communities were not taken for granted. Indeed, both Plato and Aristotle conceive the forging of political community as a construction of unity in the face of the basic facts of sociological diversity. This diversity was recognized through the acknowledged importance of a variety of professions making up a self-sufficient community in material terms, as well as the recognition that people living in a city would have varied capacities and moral outlooks. So, contrary to a certain topos in the history of political thought that goes back at least to Constant’s famous lecture on the liberty of the ancients as compared to the moderns, ancient thinkers did not presume broad homogeneity. As we will see, there may be reasons for seeking a paradigm of the place of the emotions in public life that is modified from that suggested by the classical view, but these reasons do not include a lack of attention to diversity. I will nonetheless concede that the recognition of diversity found in Plato and Aristotle did not attain the degree of moral diversity acknowledged in most accounts of liberalism today; I am merely arguing that it would be wrong to construe their theories as in principle not incorporating some recognition of deep diversity. The recognition of a valuing of diversity in Aristotle’s thought in particular was first forcefully argued in contemporary times by Bernard Yack, The Problems of a Political Animal.

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previous attempts to harness plato and aristotle to the cause of political emotion Other theorists have looked to Plato and Aristotle as a means of retrieving a better sense of the importance of the emotions in political life, but for different reasons. Cheryl Hall, for example, looks to the Platonic idea of eros as a defining feature of all “political” emotion seen as the striving and longing for a political project of either conservation or reform.3 In this sense, for Hall, all political emotion is constituted by the attachment to some envisioned good relevant to the community as a whole. This idea has the merit of helping to account for the strength of commitment that must underpin any proper understanding of the potential fierceness of political dialogue. In addition, it can provide us with a framework to explain deeper commitments that are recognized as essential to the project of liberal democracy. These commitments have been variously described in competing frameworks of liberalism as a passion for justice or as a desire for deepening and widening our practices constitutive of liberty and equality. Still, this appropriation of Platonic eros as the basis for political emotion becomes more problematic with competing understandings of liberal democracy that incorporate emotion but with no substantive positive attachment. Shklar’s invocation of a fear of cruelty as the basis for liberal democracy, or Berlin’s idea of negative liberty, permits no erosdriven underpinning or explanation.4 In addition, the politics of liberal democratic regimes include a number of “ugly” emotions in addition to fear, such as spite, indifference, and even hatred, that may not be driven in any real sense by a vision of the good and that therefore cannot be captured in any direct way by this Platonic framework.5 Hall, perhaps, seeks to do too much in searching in Plato for a genre or type of emotional experience that could account for all politically relevant dispositions. Her vision of liberal democracy is one in which there are a number of competing visions of the good, and she thereby does not wish to ascribe any one substantive commitment to all. Her appropriation of eros is voided of all its original metaphysical content and

3 Hall, The Trouble with Passion. 4 Some may argue that Shklar’s idea of liberalism does not really count as an incorporation of emotion insofar as her argument is based more on a need to avoid cruelty than an emphasis on “fear” (see Shklar, “Liberalism of Fear”). Nonetheless, she does base her understanding in part on the supposition (drawn, she argues, from Montesquieu) that there is no definite positive political attachment underlying a commitment to liberalism, but rather both a reasoned and visceral rejection of the other political alternatives. For Berlin, see “Two Concepts of Liberty.” 5 On the question of the appropriateness of making a distinction between good and negative emotions in politics, see Sokolon, Political Emotions.



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read as a synonym of political motivation in general. But this belies political reality in that the diversity of citizen motivation may be too wide to be captured by the idea of eros alone. In a somewhat different way, Barbara Koziak has tried to resuscitate the Aristotelian notion of thumos as a basis for bringing the emotions to the centre of our understanding of politics.6 She argues that, contrary to Plato, Aristotle had a vision of politics that was grounded on a certain understanding of thumos, reconstrued as the capacity for emotion in general (rather than its more prevalent scholarly translation and appropriation as political anger).7 The feeling of appropriate anger, fear, affection, and pity toward other citizens was a central feature of good citizenship and provided a basis for, and not a supplement to, institutional arrangements and constitutional norms.8 It involved the turning away from domination as an end in politics and the cultivation of dispositions through law, rhetoric, and cultural production to develop social relations and to increase mutual benefaction. While Koziak’s analysis provides an impressive demonstration of the importance of emotional disposition for Aristotle’s idea of political life, it offers too much emphasis for our purposes on the ideal and normative vision of politics that informs Aristotle’s analysis. In other words, the portrait that she draws of the nature of good citizenship in Aristotle is convincing, but it is not clear, apart from as a project of citizen education, how this understanding of good citizenship should work in exploring political life in regimes Aristotle would regard as defective. A third project to harness the work of the ancients, and in particular Plato, for making better sense of the place of emotion in politics is found in the recent work of Christina Tarnopolsky. She argues that the complex workings of shame in the Gorgias can provide us with lessons regarding both the useful and harmful workings of shame in democratic settings.9 I am particularly sympathetic to her sensitivity to the multiple ways in which one emotion can play out in terms of both meaning and action in an interpersonal setting, and indeed it is an idea that I take up in chapter 6 in relation to the theme of love. Still, while Tarnopolsky offers an interpretation that provides great insight into aspects of our contemporary political life, she explicitly steers away from the specific manifestation of public emotion that I emphasize here.10

6 Koziak, Retrieving Political Emotion. 7 Ibid.,110. 8 Ibid., 115. 9 Tarnopolsky, Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants. 10 Ibid., 1.

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So, I would like to return in this chapter to a reading of Plato of the middle period, that is, in particular as the author of The Republic, and of Aristotle in Nichomachean Ethics, The Politics, and On Rhetoric, with a focus on what they have to say about the role of emotion in the politics of corrupt regimes – that is, regimes that are not structured according to their respective highest metaphysical conceptions of the good. I believe that in exploring their works from this new angle we can find reflections of importance for us in trying to make sense of the place of emotions in our political life. While clearly Plato and Aristotle recognized that the emotions driving citizens and rulers in corrupt regimes were not to be admired, they saw that emotions did play an important role in the public sphere and helped indeed to define differences among various regimes. It is this sense of public passion and the differing patterns of emotional life found in competing regimes that I seek to retrieve. the nature of emotion for plato and aristotle Before addressing the question of public emotion in these two thinkers, it is necessary to pause briefly to consider how they conceptualized emotion more generally as a capacity of the soul. Despite the rather graphic analogies about the divisions within the soul that Plato offered in his works, the nature of the emotions is a topic rarely addressed in commentary on his texts, at least until recently.11 This may have to do in part with the difficulty of mapping our contemporary understandings of the working of the soul onto classical understandings, as well as the fact that Plato’s depiction of the soul changes through the course of his dialogues. Because of my focus on public emotion, I will restrict my analysis to those questions of the meaning and place of emotion in the soul for Plato as is relevant for the most part to his depiction of the soul/city presented in The Republic. There is a stereotypic view that Plato subscribed to the view that emotions are “involuntary, disordering processes that distract people from their proper concerns and activities” and that they derive directly from the body and bodily sensations as opposed to cognition, or that, from the famous analogy of The Republic, they belong fully and wholly to the domain of the appetite or the lowest region of the soul and reside alongside the capacity for digestion.12 Certainly the division of the soul into the two parts (as found in the Phaedrus) or three parts (as in The Republic) 11 Exceptions to this include Palumbo, Eros, Phobos, Epithymia, and Williams, Shame and Necessity. 12 Barbalet, “Emotion.”



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might lend itself to the interpretation that reason and emotion are quite distinct categories and capacities of the soul. There are others who suggest that the capacity for emotion is most readily associated with the middle category of Plato’s soul, that of thumos.13 It is through the shaping of this part of the soul that, for Plato, more lasting features of the character are formed. However, as more recent interpreters have convincingly argued, these surface divisions of the soul as described by Plato hide a much more complex psychology.14 For one, it is evident that desire cannot be fully associated with the appetitive part of the soul, given that all the soul’s parts have their own particular desire and set of satisfactions: that is, the thinking part (to logistikon) with a desire for knowledge; the spirited part (to thumoeides) with desires for honour and good reputation as well as desires for power and pre-eminence; and the appetitive part (to epithumetikon) with desires for pleasure.15 Similarly, even the philosopher in Plato should be motivated by a “love of philosophy,” that is, a form of desire or eros.16 It is true that desire in its most basic manifestation is not synonymous with emotion, given that desire as a phenomenon on its own is generally regarded as a form of primal, more manifestly physical motivation.17 However, it can be argued that as a form of desire becomes more conscious for the feeling subject and takes on significance to the point of being a constitutive part of the subject’s sense of self and identity, then desire can form the basis for an attachment that helps to ground what we 13 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 193–5 and Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 134, 141. On this question, see also Koziak’s excellent discussion in Retrieving Political Emotion, 63. 14 Cooper, in “Plato’s Theory of Human Motivation,” suggests that while thumos should be seen as the seat of emotions motivating bold action, other forms of emotion can be ascribed to other parts. One contemporary dissenter from the more complex view is Moravcsik in “Inner Harmony and the Human Ideal in Republic IV and IX.” 15 Thyssen, “The Socratic Paradoxes and the Tripartite Soul,” 62. 16 “Then, won’t it be reasonable for us to plead in his defence that it is the nature of the real lover of learning to struggle toward what is, not to remain with any of the many things that are believed to be, that, as he moves on, he neither loses nor lessens his erotic love until he grasps the being of each nature itself with the part of his soul that is fitted to grasp it, because of its kinship with it, and that, once getting near what really is and having intercourse with it and having begotten understanding and truth, he knows, truly lives, is nourished, and – at that point, but not before – is relieved from the pains of giving birth?” (490b). I use here the George Grube translation as revised by C.D. Reeve. See also Koziak, Retrieving Political Emotion, 77. 17 We might invoke here Plato’s characterization of appetite or desire in The Republic as a general push for non-specific satiation, such as basic desire for drink or for food in general (437e). By contrast, a more conscious and differentiated judgment concerning what better conforms to one’s tastes within those general categories points to a terrain more closely affiliated with the emotions.

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call the emotional life. In Aristotle’s terms, the difference between a desire and an emotion is that the latter involves some form of judgment and can be argued to be reasonably, or unreasonably, founded in a way that desires cannot.18 Plato suggests in The Republic that the non-rational parts of the soul have their own thinking attributes, and this in turn can be considered as the basis for knowledge, emotional response, and dispositional qualities. As Thyssen notes, courage is defined as the right opinion about things to be feared (429c), and temperance is defined as the opinion about who must rule, a cognitive evaluation present in both rulers and ruled.19 The character Socrates emphasizes in 432a how this must be found in all parts and not just in one – which means that even the appetitive part can be associated with the forming of judgment. While suspicious of the poets, Plato still recognizes the possibility of knowledge and insight through intuition, perhaps the most famous instance being Socrates’ own daemon.20 In consequence it would be wrong to suggest that capacities for either emotion or cognition be associated with only one particular part of the soul. We need to acknowledge emotion as something for which each part of the soul may play its part. Similarly, the good functioning of each aspect of the soul can be linked to particular emotional dynamics. Despite Plato and Aristotle’s association of virtue with distinct forms of rational thinking, this perspective does not necessarily entail hostility to emotional life in the way often assumed. Of course, one can find many passages in The Politics where Aristotle echoes Plato and appears to suggest that the most desirable form of politics is one in which emotion is overcome and mastered. In the opening book, where Aristotle explores and justifies the natural hierarchies in the household, he notes that it is natural and expedient for the emotional part of our natures to be ruled by the mind, the part that possesses reason (I, v; 1254b2). In his commentary in book II on the kallipolis, Aristotle agrees in principle with the ends of political community posited by Plato, such as a need for certain unity and shared sense of identity, but disputes the means by which these ends are to be achieved – that is, a rejection of communalism of goods and family (II, iv). Similarly, in his famous defence of kingship, Aristotle suggests that if a community were to find an individual of “pre-eminent” virtue (understood as outstanding rational discernment in practical and theoretical matters as argued in Nichomachean Ethics), the community could do no better than to submit 18 See Leighton, “Aristotle and the Emotions,” 224. 19 Thyssen, “The Socratic Paradoxes and the Tripartite Soul,” 64. 20 On this point, see Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational.



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to that individual’s rule and judgment (III, xiii). Barring the possibility of the absolutely wise ruler, or the philosopher king, Aristotle states in his discussion regarding the rule of law, “He who asks law to rule is asking God and intelligence and no others to rule; while he who asks for the rule of a human being is importing a wild beast too; for desire is like a wild beast, and anger perverts rulers and the very best of men. Hence law is intelligence without appetition” (III, xvi; 1287a1). So in general terms Aristotle, like Plato, seems to advocate a regime guided by the judgments of uncommon wisdom and distinct from emotion. However, there is much evidence in Aristotle of a more complex story to be told. It is important to acknowledge Aristotle’s understanding of the essential work of the emotions in even the most virtuous soul. In Nichomachean Ethics he provides two characterizations of the soul, one as a collection of four features – the nutritive, the desirative, the calculative, and the scientific – and the other as a division between the rational (logon) and the arational (alogon).21 As various interpreters have argued, Aristotle does not hold to these divisions dogmatically, and indeed in his treatment of emotions (pathe) suggests that they are associated with both the arational feelings of pleasure and pain and with rational aspects of cognitive perception and often compelling cognitive evaluation.22 The attribute of thumos (suggested by Kosiak to be capacity for emotional life in general in Aristotle), while initially identified in Nichomachean Ethics as a type of desire, takes on broader significance in Aristotle’s later writing but it is in all instances regarded as subject to education and habitual transformation.23 Like Plato, Aristotle recognizes that the place of emotion in the soul cannot be easily located, and that there is a complex interplay among the rational and arational facets of the soul. Nichomachean Ethics provides a clear portrait of a proper emotional balance, according to the principle of the mean, by which the sensitive and rational parts of the soul are in harmony: “Since excellence of character is a disposition issuing in decisions, and decision is a desire informed by deliberation, in consequence both what issues from reason must be true and the desire must be correct for the decision to be a good one, and reason must assert and desire pursue the same things.”24 As Aristotle explains in The Politics, the rule of intelligence over desire in the virtuous

21 See Nicomachean Ethics (hereafter ne ), 1144a9, 1102a20, and 1139a4, as well as The Politics, 1333a17 and 1334b18–19. 22 In particular, see Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue, 57–61, and Sokolon, Political Emotions. 23 Koziak, Retrieving Political Emotion, chaps. 3 and 4. 24 Aristotle, ne , VI.2, 177.

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soul is to be considered akin to the rule of a statesman or king rather than a tyrant: that is, according to principles of persuasion, rather than command (I, v; 1254b2). Aristotle is no Stoic, and even in his most refined understanding of virtue as the best manifestation of theoretical and practical wisdom, he does not rule out the importance of an emotional life. Indeed, as is often acknowledged, a righteous anger is a necessary capacity of the virtuous Aristotelian soul. Aristotle acknowledges emotions as an important feature of the human soul, and for him the attainment of virtue involves not the eradication of emotion but its careful management. He advocates, in the words of a recent Aristotle scholar, the “symphony of reason and emotion” in the excellent, happy soul.25 Yet we might go even further still to suggest that for Aristotle, the capacity for certain forms of rational thought itself depends on emotional capacity. One close reading of On Rhetoric in conjunction with Nichomachean Ethics has suggested that the exercise of practical wisdom (phronesis) and the work of political deliberation for Aristotle requires important emotional input as a precondition for proper judgment.26 To add further support to this view, Aristotle maintains in book I of Nichomachean Ethics that the aspect of the soul that possesses reason can be seen as “double” in nature: “One element of it will have it in the proper sense and in itself, another as something capable of listening as if to one’s father [or loved ones].”27 He acknowledges here that in addition to rational thought that is deductive or that works out proper solutions by the force of logic alone, there also can be rational thought that is more passive and receptive. Yet, with regard to the latter and as its most important feature, its receptivity to reason depends less on the content of the message than on the emotional nature of the relation between the individual giving advice and the individual hearing it. Of course, one not need always take the advice of a father or loved one, or indeed always conceive of that relation in a fully pleasant way. Aristotle is suggesting here that it is rather the fact of a personal relationship based on feelings of certain loyalty and attachment that provides the necessary precondition for receptivity to reasonable judgment. Emotional ties to others make it possible to take account of advice and be receptive to and possibly accepting of the rational judgment of others as guidance in one’s 25 Sokolon, Political Emotions. 26 See Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue. This also is argued by Abizadeh, although from a different perspective. See his “The Passions of the Wise.” There is certainly an affinity between this reading of Aristotle and de Sousa’s more general argument that all uses of  rational capacity depend on a more basic capacity for emotion (see de Sousa’s The Rationality of Emotion). 27 Aristotle, ne , 110.



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own judgment. Similarly, in the soul itself there is a capacity for recognizing reason that can be based on emotional receptivity. So emotion is relevant to the proper exercise of dialogue deliberation and judgment in Aristotle in at least two possible ways. In the first instance, emotion provides a mechanism for quick identification of relevant particulars needed for appropriate judgment; second, as argued immediately above, emotion can manifest itself as a “feeling” of rightness in one proposed solution from among many possible solutions as generated within the process of calculation and deliberation.28 So for Aristotle, some of the workings of human reason do require a prior embeddedness in emotional ties and an exercise of affective capacities in particular. Indeed, it is because of the important links between emotion and deliberation and judgment that rhetoric plays such a prominent role in Aristotle’s theory of politics.29 the public face of emotions in plato and aristotle As we move from an analysis of internal dynamics of the soul to that of a soul in context, we see that Plato and Aristotle share two fundamental principles in their analyses of the emotions. First, they recognize that the differing causes or objects of emotions, such as the love of honour versus love of money versus love of truth, are more significant in understanding the nature of the soul and the individual than are the physiology and the effects of emotion within the soul. For both Plato and Aristotle it is the moral worth of the cause or object of the emotion that determines the moral worth of the feeling itself. In addition, there is a deep understanding of the emotions as ways of experiencing the world. Cooper and Kahn have suggested that interpreters of Plato have often been misled by reading Descartes and Hobbes into Plato’s discussions (particularly those of his middle period) of the parts of the soul. For both Plato and Aristotle, appetite and spirit are distinguished not by the essential mechanics of motivation (for all parts are recognized to have their own kinds of pleasure) but rather by the objects of their impulses, whether they be truth, honour, or bodily pleasure.30 As Plato himself writes in The Republic, “When someone’s desires incline strongly for one thing, they are thereby weakened for others … when someone’s desires flow towards learning and everything of that sort, he’d be concerned … with the

28 See Abizadeh, “Passions of the Wise”; Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue. 29 On Aristotle’s approach to rhetoric, see in particular Garsten, Saving Persuasion, chap. 4. 30 See Cooper, “Plato’s Theory of Motivation,” 189–90; Kahn, “Plato’s Theory of Desire.”

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pleasures of the soul itself by itself, and he’d abandon those pleasures that come through the body – if indeed he is a true philosopher and not merely a counterfeit one” (485d). Similarly for Aristotle the ethical life involves the proper training of the emotions toward the appropriate objects or appropriate actions, such as an attraction to “the pleasures that are characteristic of moderation,” and with the recognition that “the chief good will be a kind of pleasure.”31 His interest in rhetoric stems from an awareness of the central importance of speech in shaping our perceptions and feelings with regard to various persons and events in the world around us. So for both Plato and Aristotle (in contrast, as we will see, to most seventeenth and eighteenth century reflections on the emotions), the causes of emotions are more significant than the effects, and it is through an assessment of the worthiness of those causes in and of themselves (rather than a comparison with the hypothetical impacts of the same situations on one’s own soul) that one can judge the reactions of others. The second principle shared by Plato and Aristotle is the idea that the emotions can have a strongly collective component. In other words, both recognize that the movement of souls toward (or away from) certain objects or situations helps to differentiate not only individuals but also whole communities or regimes. For these classical thinkers, the causes or objects of emotional life worked on populations as a whole. This view can in part be attributed to the Greek term for regime or constitution, politeia, which in one of its various connotations refers not mainly to the legal structure of a state but rather to the way of life through which a community identifies itself. The way of life includes the manner in which citizens relate to each other in affect. The public relationship among citizens – a relationship that is constitutive of that regime’s identity – has an emotional component. As Aristotle acknowledges in book VII of The Politics, it is with our friends and associates that we share the most intense emotional life (1327b40). This aspect of emotional life is not only social, understood as constituted by social life, but more importantly, political, because it is both an active and a regulative principle of collective identity the nature of the public passion in plato To demonstrate more clearly this idea in Plato of public passion, we turn to book VIII of The Republic. In discussing the decline of the kallipolis, Plato outlines the four imperfect constitutions, from that of the honour-loving timocracy through the money-loving oligarchy to the freedom-loving 31 Aristotle, ne , VII.13, 1153b36, 205, and 1153b13, 206.



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democracy and then to the tyrannical regime characterized by the pursuit of the lowest pleasures (544c-d). Of course, he purports to show not only the dynamic of decline within the philosophic city itself but also the nature of decline in the individual soul that turns away from the love of truth and attachment to the Form of the Good. Two key questions must be raised in relation to these passages. First, what is the exact status of the city-soul analogy, and what does it reveal to us about the nature of the corrupted city and its citizens and rulers in particular? Second, what are its lessons for the place of emotions in politics? Many commentators have taken for granted that Plato considered there was a clear correspondence between the nature of regime and the individual soul of the same type. Nonetheless, the issue of the exact nature of this correspondence would seem crucial. Traditional commentators such as Koyré take the analogy at face value and suggest that Plato is saying as much about the courage- and honour-based nature of timocracies as he is about timocratic man.32 It is also suggested that the principles that inform the timocratic, oligarchic, democratic, and tyrannic types of soul also inform the politics of the corresponding types of regimes. More recent commentators, however, have raised questions about the city-soul analogy. While Williams maintains that the analogy is a failure because of its inability to account for the complexity of soul of individuals within regimes, and in particular within the ideal regime, Annas takes the position that the political side of the analogy is meant to be illustrative rather than to carry any deep significance for the study of politics.33 More recently, Ferrari has claimed that the analogy of city and soul should be conceptualized as a loose metaphor in the sense that both city and soul illustrate the same general pattern of internal harmony and/ or discord, but that there is no intended correspondence between parts of one and parts of another. To take any stance at all on the lessons of book VIII, one must first resolve the issue of the nature and status of its city-soul metaphor. Is it possible that the political rhetoric of books VIII and IX in which Plato discusses the cycle of regimes and the descent from the justice of kallipolis through timocracy, oligarchy, and democracy to tyranny is purely instrumental and is meant to do nothing more than to present us with equally discredited variants of individual injustice? A positive response to this question as suggested by Annas and others seems puzzling. While one could argue that the dialogue as a whole has more to do with 32 Koyré, Introduction à la lecture de Platon. 33 Williams, “The Analogy of City and Soul in Plato’s Republic,” and Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s “Republic.”

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the individual soul than the justice of the city, the amount of detail devoted to the peculiar institutional setting of the regime throughout the work, complete with eugenic practices and gender considerations, is completely superfluous if no political message or meaning is intended behind the dialogue beyond that meant for the cultivation of the self. This is not to say that a political message need be a full endorsement of the just city as a practical political project. Furthermore, by book VIII Plato has no need to carry on with the citysoul analogy if merely for purposes of illustrating individual soul formation. In books VI and VII he has already abandoned the analogy to embark on his famous metaphors of the sun, the line, and the cave and thereby to provide his readers with a more solid illustration of the nature of his principles of education and truth. One of the main lessons of books VI and VII is to show us that we should not be content with the rule of reason in the soul as a sufficient condition for justice (as argued in book IV), but that there are exacting epistemic conditions that require the just individual to grasp the underlying foundations of value – that is, that the study and mastery of philosophy as the knowledge of the Forms will suffice for the understanding and hence the practice of true justice.34 From this account, it can only be deduced that all individuals who do not love true wisdom must be corrupt, deficient, and thereby unworthy of philosophic interest and attention. So why return to an analogy that was no longer necessary for Plato to talk about the capacities of the individual soul? The unhappiness of the unjust soul can be clearly deduced by the lack of harmony it exemplifies. Still, in book VII, it is precisely to the politics of these deficient and corrupt souls and the regimes they inhabit, and indeed to a certain hierarchy of corruption among them, to which our attention is drawn. What does Plato mean by this? The cycle of corruption can only make sense if one takes the political side of the analogy with greater seriousness than just an illustration writ large. Indeed, on closer inspection, a logic unique to communities and states is evident from the start of The Republic. Despite the analogy between the individual and the city on which most of the text’s argument is based, we are presented with two different frameworks for making sense of the place and need for concord in the city and the soul. The dichotomy between the just soul of the philosopher who alone can see the truth and the equally unjust souls of those who are not philosophers is not matched by a similar dichotomy in the realm of politics. In the closing passages of the Gorgias Socrates provides us with a contrast between a good and corrupt model of politics. The former he 34 Bobonich, Plato’s Utopia Recast, chap. 1.



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describes as analogous to the practice of medicine in which the statesman “confronts” the Athenian people and “struggles” to ensure their perfection. The latter is analogous to the role of servants who make pleasure “the point of the operation.” However, we find a very different representation in The Republic. Instead of a good politics that is formed by the struggle of leaders with their constituency, justice requires and sustains the virtue of moderation whereby all classes agree on who should rule. In addition, whereas the corrupt regime of the Gorgias is one in which the wishes of the people are indulged, whatever they may be, in the Republic Plato provides us with a more nuanced view. He recognizes the mixture of virtue and vice in the maintaining of any political community as well as vast differences among the objects of politics in competing regimes, differences that allow us to ascribe a hierarchy of moral worth among them. As early as book I Socrates leads Thrasymachus to acknowledge that even the most corrupt association requires a modicum of morality in order to act “effectively,” and he notes that these corrupt associations can be “a community or an army or pirates or thieves.”35 Similarly, despite the aura of timelessness that tinges his depiction of the aristocratic kallipolis, it is evident in book VIII that there are seeds of its degeneration embedded in the very structure of the just regime and that there is indeed a certain degree of inevitability of its fall, as if complete justice was really foreign to the nature of political community: “It is hard for a city composed in this way to change, but everything that comes into being must decay. Not even a constitution such as this will last for ever. It, too, must face dissolution” (546a). While at the level of the soul there is clearly an absolute moral divide between just and unjust souls identical to the division between philosophers and non-philosophers, such that once wisdom is attained, it cannot fail the individual, in the realm of politics and communities there is a more subtle continuum and the possibility of measured degrees of corruption. The further the regime moves away from the structure of kallipolis, the more corrupt it becomes. So the cycle of corruption presented here makes better sense if one takes the political side of the analogy with greater seriousness than just as a metaphor for the individual soul. Why is it the specific nature of political community that it is subject to nuanced judgments of varying degrees of justice in ways that are impossible on the level of the individual soul? One possible answer is that while environments cannot be seen as fully determining of human behaviour, they can, almost despite themselves, help in the development of justice within the soul of the individual. 35 Plato’s Republic, 351c–d. Subsequent references to the text are incorporated in the body of my chapter.

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Lear’s suggestion is that Plato illustrates here, as well as in his earlier discussion of the education of the guardians, the principle that regimes can nurture a type of soul but also reflect a soul’s priorities.36 Undoubtedly Plato saw a link between the character of individual souls and the broader political context in which these souls find themselves. Socrates asks, “And do you realize that of necessity there are as many forms of human character as there are of constitutions? Or do you think that constitutions are born “from oak or rock” and not from the characters of the people who live in the cities governed by them, which tip the scales, so to speak, and drag the rest along with them?” (544d). His queries suggest an important collective dimension in the formation of character and in the ordering of desires in the soul. From this perspective, book VIII can be best understood as an analysis of this process through which the souls of all are transformed by the character of those who govern. What this means in part is that one cannot easily deride Plato for focusing on the ruling class without regard for the moral outlook of the lower classes. Instead we will see that in his view the ruling class establishes the central good of the regime, and the lower classes, and factions of the ruling class, can sometimes seek to redefine or reappropriate that good to serve their own ends. In the case of the kallipolis, whose constitution is established by the philosopher kings as structured around the principles of love of truth and justice, the classes of guardians and producers can feel an attachment to the truth and its reign, through which they are said to exercise the virtue of moderation, without fully knowing what the truth is (442d). The lesser goods of certain pleasure and discipline that the lower classes pursue should be regarded not as distinct goods but rather subordinate goods necessary to, or instrumental to, sustaining a deeper love of truth and justice. They are lesser and weaker manifestations of the same principle by virtue of the social and political context and the limitations of human souls. In the case of the timocratic state, described by Plato as a “mixture of good and bad” (548c), we see the promotion of war as the dominant object of politics, as well as a secret love of money (548a). We are told that the community will prefer a “passionate” ruler who is more suited for “war than for peace.” The love of philosophy and truth that characterized the kallipolis is now replaced by “competitiveness and ambition” (548c) – that is, a love of competition and of success as mastery over others through a display of physical and cultural excellences.

36 Lear, Open Minded. In passing, I owe a huge intellectual debt to Jonathan Lear who has been a continual inspiration for me in my work.



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Ferrari is certainly correct to note independent class dynamics in the making of these corrupt regimes – dynamics that make their internal politics difficult to reduce to an aggregation of identical personalities, which Lear appears to adopt as an accurate articulation of how these cities are constituted.37 As Plato notes, the timocratic regime is born of a compromise between the bronze class, who incline toward business and want to enrich themselves, and the gold and silver classes, who still shun money and wealth (547b). Nonetheless, despite the class dynamics, each regime has a particular character that emerges from the conflicts through a generalized love of competition and success or in short, ambition. In other words, while it may be too much to say, as Lear does, that each regime produces one type of individual, there is a certain, even if short-lived, consensus around what is politically desirable that emerges from these political associations, even given the varying backgrounds and conditions of their members. The next type of community Plato presents in book VIII is oligarchy. The rise of envy as a dominant passion tips the balance toward a greater regard for material wealth (550d–e). The greater the involvement in the exercise of accumulating wealth, the more dominant the passion for money becomes. Wealth alone becomes the standard by which access to political power is regulated (551b). The ensuing class antagonism makes security and self-defence very difficult (551e), but more significantly, it leads to the excessive impoverishment of certain individuals, some of whom are likely to pursue money through begging and others through criminal behaviour (552c–d). While the type of individuals living in an oligarchic regime may differ quite significantly in terms of their way of life and even fundamental character (i.e., law-abiding or not), the dominant passion (i.e., love of material gain) shared by community members means that many of their choices and activities will be motivated by this same shared passion. In his depiction of corrupt regimes, Plato can recognize both a shared motivational force and a plurality of behaviours. Despite his depiction of the origin of this regime in the decline from timocracy, he is clear to acknowledge that the most important factor in making acquisitiveness its defining passion is the law prescribing property value as a criterion for rulership (553a). While social friction may help to explain the evolution from one regime to the next, it is the political infrastructure and the goods that it embodies and exemplifies that largely set the tone for the society and help to determine the passions around which its citizens’ activities are oriented.

37 Ferrari, City and Soul in Plato’s “Republic.”

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For Plato, the instauration of democracy is the result of revolutionary desires among the poor who in victory distribute equal social and political rights (557a). Through a growing lack of self-discipline bred by an excessive love of luxury and class resentment, the population develops in multiple ways (557c). As Plato states, democracy “contains all kinds of constitutions on account of the license it gives its citizens” (557d). Indeed, he expresses a certain admiration for this system in the variety it allows to flourish and calls it “the finest or most beautiful of the constitutions” (557c). Given the deep plurality that characterizes this regime, can it be said that there is any corresponding shared emotion? The one dominant principle of behaviour here is the treatment of everyone as equal, that is, as the same, with the related passions of love of freedom as individual autonomy. While the corresponding individual in Plato’s picture is highly conflicted and erratic in behaviour (560c–561e), the citizen of the democratic regime that he depicts is largely set on one desire and shown to be able to pursue that desire with a certain constancy in parallel with the varied desires of others. Despite the greater stability of the democratic regime as opposed to the individual, its weakness, as described by Plato, lies in an “insatiable desire” for freedom (562c) to the neglect of all else. Plato famously depicts the encroachments of freedom in the redefining of relations within the household (including the insubordination of pets) and the classroom and the spread of equal rights to resident aliens and visitors (562e–563c). These encroachments will grow into a general disrespect for law and indeed for governance in general. Still, the catalyst for the advance of tyranny becomes the corrupt classes or drones who in such an environment seek to advance themselves both by milking the rich of their assets and catering to the sympathies of the poor. The worsening state of class conflict gives rise to ruthless political leaders, who in a state of political confusion may end up by seizing power and instituting a form of direct rule (566b–d). Tyranny is characterized as the rule of one through various duplicitous means that ensure the leader’s hold on power. One means is to provoke warfare “so that the people will continue to feel the need of a leader” (566e) and meanwhile to eliminate those, usually the bravest, who will criticize what is going on (567b–c). Plato does not offer us much of a glimpse of the population of a tyranny, other than to suggest that there will be a division of sympathies between those who benefit from the tyrant’s rule, most notably the drones, and those who may object to the rule of the tyrant but are either too afraid or too preoccupied to speak out. On the surface, one sees in Plato’s depiction a complete disjuncture between the political tyrant and the individual of a tyrannical



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disposition. While the former is calculating and duplicitous in his means to maintain power, the latter is merely driven by lust with complete lack of self-discipline (574d). Still, as Plato tells us near the close of this discussion, the tyrannical disposition is that which leads to criminal behaviour, and “when such people become numerous and conscious of their numbers, it is they – aided by the foolishness of the people – who create a tyrant. And he, more than any of them, has in his soul the greatest and strongest tyrant of all” (575c–d). The ultimate means of meeting the desires of a tyrannical personality is through the enslavement of a noncompliant population, that is, through the political manifestation of the tyrant’s drive for control and complete licence (575d). In his treatment of tyranny, Plato is inconsistent in terms of elucidating the societal grounds for political rule. The foundations of power are no longer directly rooted in a particular and shared social sentiment, such as the ambition or acquisitiveness that grounded timocracy and oligarchy. Indeed, Plato notes that the population under the tyrannical regime can have very distinct dispositions toward the holder of power, some highly flattering and supportive, and others very critical. It is the character of the tyrant that clearly is the focus of his attention and concern. Nonetheless, he also recognizes that the tyrannical regime can only be possible in a social climate where political power is open to all and where the paradox of a love of freedom in excess can lead to the undermining of freedom. In this sense, there is no positive principle informing the institutions of tyranny, but merely a negative one: a growing lack of common identity and a lack of shared sense of the limits of justifiable public behaviour. In tyranny there is no common sense of purpose or community in affect, which makes it much easier for the tyrant to impose a sense of his own necessity through multiple strategies. Still, it is noteworthy, though curious, that Plato does not appeal to the idea of a community identified by the shared affect of fear, a feature of modern tyrannies often appealed to in modern times. Through this study of Plato’s analysis of corrupt regimes we have seen the lack of direct correspondence between the regime and the individual type associated with it. Indeed, as we have seen, each of Plato’s regime types is inhabited by a diversity of individual characters. This suggests to us that the use of the city-state analogy does more in this part of the text than merely elucidate the state of the individual soul. We see emerging from this view Plato’s recognition of a dominant emotional force in all regimes except tyranny, an emotional quality that is shared by a general population and shaped in large part by the political institutions that define the community. So in the first instance it may be that Plato is alerting us to an important feature of ourselves as social

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beings. In other words, the development of a desire for truth and wisdom that he seeks to instil in his readers must also be accompanied by an acute sense of the force that generalized social norms have over us. Still, this generalized emotional quality does not result in a homogeneity of situation and character. As we see in all the various regimes, the generalized emotional predisposition allows for a plurality of responses. Thus, while those individuals who set their sights on something other than philosophy become by that very fact corrupt and unworthy of any commendation, the regime devoted to less than philosophy is somewhat salvaged in Plato’s eyes by the varying possibilities it allows for individual goodness. The analogy of books VIII and IX thus serves a double movement in the development of Plato’s text. On the one hand, through its use he reinforces his argument for the need of worthy individuals to devote their lives to the study of philosophy so as to be assured of goodness and true moral worth by showing the corrupt nature of any other form of individual life. On the other hand, he shows the mixed moral potentialities in any number of regimes devoted to essentially unjust objectives. The argument serves to show in the end that the reign of philosophers is not a necessary condition for some form of justice, but also that the possibilities for justice will be limited by the realities of politics. Many people have criticized Plato’s depiction of corrupt political regimes because of its lack of resonance with his own political reality, as well as a rather inaccurate understanding of the ways in which revolutionary change actually occurs. It is said that Aristotle with his more empirical approach had a more sensitive and thus more accurate understanding of the actual working of political institutions in his day. Nonetheless, one cannot read books VIII and IX without some appreciation for the perspicacity of Plato’s remarks as they relate to the description of varying types of political regimes. It may be that revolutionary or evolutionary change does not readily follow the cycle that he envisaged; but the idea that political regimes set priorities and thereby have an impact on the way in which communities come to understand themselves cannot be denied. Indeed, what is said to be Aristotle’s more “empirical” approach carried over this important insight of Plato. aristotle and public passion Aristotle defines a regime or constitution (politeia) as “the arrangement which a state adopts for the distribution of offices, and for the determination of sovereignty in the constitution and of the end which the particular association aims at realizing” (IV, i; 1289a11), or more basically



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“the constitution of a state is in a sense the way it lives” (IV, xi; 1295a34).38 Flowing from this definition, the question of the place of emotion and reason in political life is a complex one for Aristotle. His view of the place of emotion in collective life carries over certain Platonic elements with further emphasis on the essential plurality with which politics must come to terms. We have seen the way in which affective capacities are not only instrumental to but indeed constitutive of good rational judgment in matters of deliberation and political judgment. We now explore the way in which these affective capacities are manifested in broader social and political contexts, and in particular in competing regime types. Flowing from Aristotle’s recognition of the importance of emotion for rational discernment, it is evident that the emotional life of individuals and societies is central to a proper understanding of politics in all its forms, but in addition, that the political life of communities had relevance not to the full gamut of possible emotions but to a set that were understood as distinctly political, especially the passions of thumos.39 On Rhetoric acknowledges the central importance that pathos – that is, the emotional state of the audience as well as that projected by the speaker – along with logos and ethos, plays as part of an assessment of the means of persuasion.40 This characterization in On Rhetoric suggests that whatever differences can be discerned within a community, and despite diverging political stances with regard to key issues of debate, there is a certain emotional tone to the self-conscious understanding of the group as constituting a political community. This emotional character, according to Aristotle, can be identified and articulated by an astute political speaker as a basis for determining the structure of a persuasive political argument. 41 38 Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T.A. Sinclair, revised by T.R. Saunders. All subsequent citations of this text are taken from this edition and include a note of the book and chapter number as well as the line number of the start of the paragraph from which the citation is taken. These are noted in parentheses directly after the relevant citation. 39 Garsten, Saving Persuasion, 136–7. 40 Aristotle famously defines rhetoric as “an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion” (On Rhetoric, I, 1). 41 This is more than just an idea of a “social” passion, as recently argued by Gross in The Secret History of Emotion. Gross suggests that the force of Aristotle’s message, carried over into a broader tradition of humanism, was the understanding that emotions were significant as reflecting differentiations of power within a community. The fact of unequal distribution of the goods of life helped to differentiate those who could experience certain emotional states, such as pride and ambition, in contrast to those who could not, or whose emotional lives were expected and thereby constituted as being emotionless or invisible. Now, it is certainly true that there is a strong theme of hierarchy and that the distribution

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Similarly, in book VIII of Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle speaks of cities as keeping together through a type of like-mindedness that he equates with friendship.42 Furthermore, while friendship can be of three different kinds – for the love of the useful, for the love of pleasure, and for the love of the good – he recognizes one common feature to all forms of friendship, namely, a reciprocal awareness of the basis or the type of friendship through which friends associate. As he states, “There are, then, three kinds of friendship, equal in number to the objects of love; for there corresponds to each of these objects a reciprocal loving of which both parties are aware.”43 The experience of citizenship, then, is emotional insofar as association involves attachment to a particular group through a common set of desires; and it is public because not only is it shared but there is a mutual awareness that it is partly constitutive of the identity of the community. Furthermore, as he notes in book VII of The Politics, it is in relation to our friends and associates in political community that we will experience the most intense forms of emotion (1327b40). What, then, is the particular nature of citizenship in Aristotle? In much of the commentary on Aristotle’s notion of politics as friendship, there is a question as to the sort of friendship that is implied here, in particular whether citizens relate as friends of use or of pleasure.44 The of political power in Aristotle is directly related to judgments regarding differences of character, including emotional disposition. However, it is also the case that in the category of those deemed to be citizens, Aristotle makes a general supposition of a greater homogeneity of capacity and emotional disposition. It is this relative homogeneity of disposition, a homogeneity that in a more conscious way serves as a shared principle of identity, that I am focusing on in this work. 42 Aristotle, ne , VIII.1, 1155a24, 209. He discusses the like-mindedness of citizens further in IX.6: “A city is said to be like-minded when its citizens share judgments about what is advantageous, reach the same decisions, and do what has seemed to them jointly to be best. Their ‘like-mindedness’, then, is about projects for action, and of these, ones that have a certain magnitude, and can be engaged in by both parties, or by everyone, e.g., when it seems a good thing to a whole city that offices should be elective, or that an alliance be made with the Spartans, or that Pittacus should rule (during the period when he was willing to do so). When each of two parties wishes power for himself, as in Euripides’ Phoenician Women, then there are contending factions; for being like-minded is not a matter of each side’s being of the same mind about whatever it may be but of being of the same mind in the same particular set of circumstances, e.g., when both the masses and decent people think the best should rule; for in that way everyone gets what they are aiming for. Like-mindedness, then, appears to be a friendship between citizens, as indeed it is said to be; for it has to do with what is advantageous, and what affects people’s lives” (IX.6, 1167a26–b4, 232). 43 Ibid., VIII.3, 1156a7–9, 210. 44 Höffe suggests that friendship, and hence political friendship, can occur between unequals. See his Aristotle, 170–3. Other discussions and interpretations of Aristotelian political friendship include Frank, A Democracy of Distinction; Pangle, Aristotle and the



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question is complicated by some political regimes being based expressly on the inequality of rulers and ruled and others on the equality of citizens, although it may be that only in the latter can the full attributes of friendship apply. Still, given the recognized diversity of human associations, it may well be that for Aristotle no one form of friendship can typify all forms of citizenship. While friendship based on use, or love of the useful (such as in oligarchic or democratic regimes based on pursuit of profit), may be the most common basis of citizenship, other forms of citizenship may be more clearly centred around a love of the pleasure that political association brings (as may be the case in regimes based on a strong sense of patriotism).45 Because of the demanding terms of the highest form of friendship, which Aristotle acknowledges as rare and only possible between the most virtuous of individuals, it could not form the basis for any political community or association. From this emerges a key distinction between ethics and politics in Aristotle: namely, that even though politics is considered to be the “architectonic” discipline insofar as “the end of this expertise will contain those of the rest; so that this end will be the human good,” and despite the longer-term perspective inherent in politics, the social conditions for even the best practice of politics will always fall qualitatively short of the most excellent forms of personal ­attachment based on mutual admiration of good character.46 Our

Philosophy of Friendship; Schollmeier, Other Selves: Aristotle on Personal and Political Friendship; and Irrera, “Between Advantage and Virtue.” 45 “Corresponding to each kind of constitution there is evidently a friendship, to the extent that there is also justice. There is, first, that of a king for his subjects, based on the excess of benefits bestowed; for he benefits his subjects, if indeed, as a person of excellence, he takes care that they do well, as a shepherd takes care of his sheep … Next, the friendship of husband for wife is the same as that in an aristocracy; for it is based on excellence, assigning more of what is good to the better, and what is fitting to each; and in this way what is just is achieved too. The friendship of brothers, for its part, resembles that between comrades, since they are equals, and of an age, and people like that are for the most part in sympathy with one another, and have a similar character; and the friendship involved in timocracy, too, resembles this one, for being citizens in a timocracy means being equals, and decent in character, so that they rule in turn, and on a basis of equality; so too, then, is the friendship between them. As for the deviations, just as there is little in the way of justice in them, so there is little friendship, and least in the worst deviation...there seems to be a kind of justice that obtains for any human being in relation to anyone capable of sharing in law and taking part in agreements, and so there can be friendship too, to the extent that the other is a human being. There is little, then, by way of friendships or of justice in tyrannies either, but more in democracies; for with those who are equals the things in common are many” (Aristotle, ne , VIII.11, 1161a10–b10, 220–1). 46 Ibid., I.3, 1094b6, 96. Also, “the political community does not seek the advantage of the moment but takes regard to the whole of life” (ibid., VIII.9, 1160a23–24, 218).

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political relationships will always have a degree of instrumentality that we may not always find in our personal ones. This disjuncture raises the prospect of the greater fragility of these political relationships insofar as they will involve individuals of a wide spectrum of capacities for proper moral judgment and therefore offer greater likelihood of conflicting interpretations of the exact end of the political association (be it in use or in pleasure) as well as its appropriate distributive principle. Aristotle acknowledges this potential conflict with regard to friendships of use in particular: “The friendship that exists because of the useful … is prone to accusations; for since their having to do with each other is conditional on its bringing them benefit, they always want the larger share, think they have less than they ought, and complain that they are not getting as much as they want even though they deserve it; meanwhile those conferring the benefits are not able to supply the demands of those receiving them.”47 From fragility comes also a greater chance of personal disappointments from these relations and hence anger, spite, and the like. Politics as friendship, as Aristotle conceives it, does not minimize opportunities for emotional distress and civil conflict.48 What of the place of emotion in working through the demands of political justice? In Aristotle’s famous depiction of political life as an “association” (kononia) in book I of The Politics, he suggests that the fundamental reason for collective life is the human capacity for logos (I, i; 1253a7). Most commentators have underlined the double meaning of logos as both “reason” and “speech.” This capacity extends beyond that of the communication of pains and pleasure – the communication of pains and pleasures being something Aristotle suggests does not distinguish human beings as it is a capacity humans share with animals. To paraphrase, it is the distinction between the useful and the harmful and the just and unjust and the use of collective deliberation in attempts to build a common view on these matters that for Aristotle distinguish a political state from a mere aggregation. But is the process of deliberation – and indeed the ethical distinctions themselves as well – merely a matter of reason and speech? Clearly the emotional needs of human beings are part of the impetus that ground human community in the first instance. As Aristotle states, “Men have a desire for life together, even when they have no need to seek each other’s help” (III, vi; 1278b15). So while the chief end of political life in Aristotelian terms is the good life or happiness, the lesser goods of 47 Ibid., VIII.13, 1162b17–21, 223. 48 On this point, see also Yack, The Problems of a Political Animal, esp. chap. 7.



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self-interest and emotional well-being do play a role in helping to maintain the institutions of political community. Indeed, pursuit of the goods of profit and honour may define the regime’s sense of itself, as in the case of democracies and oligarchies. So while the articulation and subsequent ongoing deliberation on the nature and application of these lesser political goods in the structure and laws of these regimes may be a matter of logos as reason and speech, we can see that the content of the goods of justice as conceived here involves attachment for substantively emotional causes to material well-being and/or love of good reputation. It is important to recognize Aristotle’s distinction between correct or deviant regimes. For Aristotle, regimes or constitutions can be classified as correct or deviant in two ways. As he notes in Nichomachean Ethics, “lawgivers make the citizens good through habituation, and this is what every lawgiver aims at, but those who do it badly miss their mark; and this is what makes one constitution different from another, a good one from a bad one.”49 In The Politics, Aristotle raises another way of regarding the distinction as related to the degree to which the rulers seek the widest possible distribution of the goods or ends of political community, however they may be defined (III, vii). Because all regimes have some understanding of the good they seek and the distributive principle for that good, all regimes in some sense are motivated by a corresponding principle of justice. Political deliberation requires the articulation and discussion of what the community considers to be good and of how to implement it. However, the dominant conception of the good in a community can initially be the outcome of both unreflective attachment and reflective judgment. Indeed, insofar as the goods pursued by a regime will, in most instances, involve minimally some level of material well-being as well as a desire for partially fulfilling human interaction, it could be said that natural human desires will always in some sense help to constitute the content of justice in any constitution. While logos as reason/speech is the means by which these attachments are made explicit, implemented, and possibly adjudicated in the political realm, according to Aristotle, the content of justice, as signifying what goods will be honoured and distributed in political community as well as according to what principle, will always in part be constituted by the appetitive as well as the emotional attachments and desires of human beings. Indeed, Aristotle can be seen as going even further than Plato insofar as he provides a distinct individual character to each of the existing regimes. It is related to his view of the link between the conditioning of 49 Aristotle, ne , II.1, 1103b5, 111.

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desire in the soul and the broader social and political context. As he suggests in book I, chapter 8, of On Rhetoric: [A deliberative speaker] should not forget the “end” of each constitution; for choices are based on the “end.” The “end” of democracy is freedom, of oligarchy wealth, of aristocracy things related to education and the traditions of law, of tyranny self-preservation. Clearly, then, one should distinguish customs and legal usages and benefits on the basis of the “end” of each, since choices are made in reference to this. Now, since pisteis [means of persuasion] not only comes from logical demonstration but from speech that reveals character (for we believe the speaker through his being a certain kind of person and this is the case if he seems to be good or well disposed to us or both), we should be acquainted with the kinds of character distinctive of each form of constitution; for the character distinctive of each is necessarily most persuasive to each.50

If we remember that for Aristotle character is as much as matter of feeling as it is of judgment, we will acknowledge that these communities of character or ethos are largely distinguished by a form of collective emotional consensus on what is to be desired and what is to be feared. The development of this consensus, as argued by Aristotle here, is not always the product of rational deliberation but, as we have seen, works in conjunction with affect, and indeed in a community of affect or shared emotional response. Let us look more closely at the most common types of regimes identified by Aristotle. While the answer to the question of the ideal regime in Aristotle can waver from monarchy to aristocracy to polity, there is no interpretative difficulty in identifying that for him tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy constitute the most corrupt regimes. What is most characteristic of their corruption or deviance, according to Aristotle, is the difficulty with which rulers of such states submit to reason, in part determined by their economic circumstances. As he states: “Following reason is just what is difficult both for the exceedingly rich, handsome, strong and well-born, and for their opposites, the extremely poor, the weak, and those grossly deprived of honour … where one set of people possess a great deal and the other nothing, the result is either extreme democracy or unmixed oligarchy, or a tyranny due to the excesses of either. For tyranny often emerges from an over-enthusiastic democracy or from an oligarchy” (IV, xi; 1295b1–34). Despite Aristotle’s attempt to defend a scheme for the more practical “ideal” of polity, as the “best constitution” and “best life for the majority of states and the majority of men” (IV, xi, 50 Aristotle, On Rhetoric, 77.



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1295a25), he tells us that most states are either democratic or oligarchic, “for the middle being frequently small, whichever of the two extremes is on top, those with possessions or the common people, abandons the middle and conducts the constitution according to its own notions, and so the result is either democracy or oligarchy” (IV, 1296a22). So the vast majority of states, according to Aristotle, while not obedient to the dictates of reason in the quality of their rule, nonetheless instantiate a certain conception of justice. In the case of democracies, a conception of justice is derived in part from the assumption that those who are equal in any respect are equal absolutely. Because all are alike in their claims to freedom, democrats will consider all equal in absolute terms and thereby will hold that all have an equally just claim to participation in public matters (V, i; 1301a25). In the case of oligarchies, the corresponding conception of justice flows from the assumption that those who are unequal in one respect are completely unequal. Given inequalities in wealth, the ruling citizens in this regime hold that the wealthy should also have a larger share of political rights (V, i; 1301a25). In later passages Aristotle advances his description of the general characteristics of these two regimes based in part on a critique of Plato. He suggests that Plato was misguided in characterizing an oligarchy as devoted to the making of money: “It is … an odd notion that change into oligarchy is due to the fact that those who hold office are fond of money and makers of money, and not rather to the fact that those with vast possessions think it unjust that those who do not have property should participate in the state on equal terms with those who do. And in many oligarchies it is not possible to make money: there are laws to prevent it. On the other hand, in democratic Carthage they do make money and have not yet changed their constitution” (V, xii; 1316a39). Instead, an oligarchy is distinguished by both a continued sociological distinction between classes (V, ix; 1309b14) and a shared sense among the members of the wealthier classes that wealth is a basis for privilege and greater political power. This sense of and desire for distinction that fuels the oligarchic practice of distributing honours and political office on the basis of existing wealth is a reflection of the oligarchic conception of justice. It is also the embodiment of a desire for honour above all, though sometimes allied with a desire for profit (V, ii; 1302a22, and VI, vii; 1321a5). Because of the smaller power base for the oligarchic constitution and the greater threat of faction both between the oligarchs and the people as well as internally, it is important that the regime enforce good order to sustain itself (VI, vi; 1321a1). As Aristotle tells us at the opening of Nichomachean Ethics, “it is possible to desire honour both more than one should and less than one should. The person who is excessive in his

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desires in this case is said to be honour-loving.”51 So the broad character of the regime of oligarchy features a desire for honour (rather than a desire for acquisition, as argued by Plato). In contrast, a democracy is formed by a generalized sense of injustice, given a broad exclusion from the spoils of power. For Aristotle, a desire for gain or profit constitutes a large part of the democratic drive, not in the sense of a strictly individual need but as the due of all those who should be considered as equals (V, ii; 1302a22, and VI, vii; 1321a5). Democrats extend this commitment to equality to entail the sovereignty of the multitude and the justice of the decisions of the majority as well as the liberty to live as one likes and not to be dominated by others (VI, ii; 1317a40). These are the principles Aristotle identifies as giving rise to the various legislative and constitutional possibilities in the regime. The tyrannical potentialities in democracy in the temptation of the majority to use their power to abuse the rich leads him to argue for various mechanisms by which a democracy can be preserved that keep the majority of the poor from actually exercising their political power and that institute some recognition and protection for the wealthy (IV, iv, and V, xii; 1313b32). Still, insofar as there is less potential of internal faction in a democracy than in oligarchy, democracy is generally safer and more stable (V, i; 1302a2). It may be said that the democratic drive for profit and gain at the expense of others is for Aristotle a manifestation of a drive to avariciousness, something that demonstrates a state of character beyond the mean of open-handedness or moderation as it relates to money:52 “The avaricious … are scavengers for profit – [they] ply their trades, and put up with being called names, for what they can get in the way of profit … making a profit out of their friends, to whom they should be giving.”53 Of course, Aristotle recognizes that the forms of democracy and oligarchy are theoretical constructs and that the characteristics of actual states will be more complex, given the diversity of the elements making up a state. As he states, “There are plenty of instances of a constitution which according to its law is not democratic, but which owing to custom and training is democratic in its workings; conversely, there are in other places constitutions which according to law incline toward democracy, but by reason of their customs and training operate more like oligarchies” (IV, v; 1292b11). Along with recognizing and advocating various versions of mixed forms of oligarchy and democracy, he also acknowledges 51 Aristotle, ne , II.7, 1107b25, 119. 52 Ibid., II.7, 1107b5, 118. 53 Ibid., IV.1, 1122a7–11, 145.



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the vastly different sociological composition of states, and in particular the balance of professions and social classes, that will have an enormous impact on the character of the regime and its potential for political stability (VI). So, for example, a democracy that is not dominated by an agrarian or pastoral people will not last long as it will more than likely give rise to deep resentment on the part of the wealthy who will form a faction and push for a change of constitution (VI, iv; 1319a24). In contrast, as is evident from the history of Athens itself, an oligarchy that relies on the navy and light-armed infantry for its military power will most certainly flirt with the temptation of democracy given the tendency of those who bear arms for the regime to demand in turn their share of political power (VI, vii; 1321a5). Yet despite the corrupt nature of these two regimes of oligarchy and democracy, it is precisely a combination of these two constitutions that Aristotle posits as the most practical ideal for a majority of regimes.54 The combination of laws and balance of principles, along with the cultivation of a large middle class, allows for a moderation of policy that accords with a more rational standard that can more readily further the common good of all. In this way, a certain mixture of poorly balanced dispositions, while not achieving a good of individual character excellence, nonetheless can achieve limited political goods. Aristotle’s conception of public passion, then, is fully evident in his conceptions of the corrupt regimes of democracy and oligarchy whose rulers pursue a partial view of justice, identical to the interests of the dominant class and characterized by the drive for profit and honour, respectively. For Aristotle, it is not necessary that all citizens in these regimes see themselves as driven in their individual responses by the regime’s defining principle. Rather, for him the dominant principle manifests itself in the various institutions and laws through which citizens are educated, but it also can serve as a catalyst for dissension and rebellion for groups who find themselves in a minority or oppressed; and it serves as a major axis of argument through which justice claims are often addressed. Thus, while the dominant desire can serve as a principle of identity, it can do so in both positive and negative ways. While he conceptualizes them somewhat differently from Plato, Aristotle also makes room for various forms of response and character formation against the background of a singular regime and its dominant emotional principle.

54 For an excellent discussion of Aristotle’s practical ideal regimes, but with a different reading than mine, see Jill Frank, A Democracy of Distinction.

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conclusion In this chapter we have seen how Plato and Aristotle both seek to characterize regimes, and corrupt regimes in particular, by a particular emotional disposition on the part of the rulers or dominant class. At the same time, neither wishes to deny a certain inescapable plurality of the social body, and so in various ways they combine their idea of a dominant motivational force in each corrupt regime with an analysis of diverse social groupings and in particular social catalysts for change. In addition, we have seen how this idea of a dominant emotional characteristic associated with each regime type takes on a particularly “public” quality insofar as it manifests itself in key institutions and practices of the regime, while at the same time it allows for diverse personal appropriations and responses. Although I do not concern myself with the origins of this thinking here, it may be that this vision of politics and public life was itself shaped by both an evolution of language and institutional practice in the ancient Greek context. As Balot has shown, at least in relation to greed, the excessive desire for material goods sometimes used to analyze the problems of political order within Athens at the time of Solon was extended by Herodotus and Thucydides and came to be perceived as a shared civic trait of all Athenians and projected outward. This shared greed then became an important underlying feature of ongoing debates concerning imperial expansion.55 The general characteristics of this view of politics found in Plato and Aristotle constitute what I call “the classical view” of the place of the emotions in politics. It involves an acknowledgment that the majority of individuals will live in political communities that are not perfect and not organized to maximize the highest possible human goods. Instead, the groups who hold most power in any given political community will define the dominant qualities of the regime. In addition, despite their normative dismissals of corrupt regimes as working largely contrary to the highest ideals of rationality and humanity, it is significant that within these regimes both thinkers can find some room to acknowledge a striving for justice, however misconceived. Thus, politics has a dual edge. On the one hand, one can only demand of politics the same high standard of generalized human happiness that one demands in the individual and

55 Balot, Greed and Injustice in Classical Athens, 121–3 and 176–7. In Balot’s reading of Thucycides, the Athenians outwardly projected greed through their practice of imperialism, and this served as an antidote to the problems of stasis; however, the shared underlying motive for expansion did not eliminate debate and deliberation, as Thucycides clearly demonstrates.



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the philosopher, and in that light all political experiments come up short. On the other hand, there appears to be a more tempered reaction to the inevitable failures of politics. Both Plato and Aristotle find redeeming features in many of these experiments, in ways that do not fully correspond to their low regard for individuals (most/all) who do not attain their high ideals of fulfilment.

4

The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Debate on Passions and Public Life while the classical era provided us with a particular expression of the positive functions of public passion in politics, the debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, as in so many other matters, helped to establish the parameters through which our modern perspectives developed. This second important moment in the intellectual history of public passion is one in which the idea of public passion was demoted and attacked. The developments of this period set in motion a trend of intellectual thinking that grounded the rationalist presumptions colouring much of Anglo-American political theory today. The analysis of this second moment stands also as a prelude to the third moment in intellectual history that I later explore. The third moment is the attempt by Montesquieu in the mid-eighteenth century to resuscitate the classical idea within a modern framework. His attempt to revive this idea for mainstream political theory was not fully successful. From an analytic perspective, the success of the rational normative ideal that dominates contemporary liberalism in the Anglo-American world could only be possible on the foundations of prior suppositions about the political relevance of the passions. Indeed, there have been at least three major moves in our tradition that help to account for the current situation: first, the effacing or problematizing of the idea of a passion whose cause and object is political life and shared collectively by a political community; second, a greater tendency to ascribe the causes of all passion to physiology; and third, a modern emphasis on Kantian-like rational norms as solely regulative for an acceptable framework for political science. Indeed, the rise of the latter move in intellectual history was made possible largely through the success of the first, against the background of the second. The purpose of this chapter is to explore some of the intellectual dynamic behind the first two of these.



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As we will see, by the time of Adam Smith, the reorienting of the discourse of the passions toward a consideration of their social causes was done in a language and conceptual framework that drained this discourse of its previous important positive, collective, and public implications, thereby helping to cement what I regard as the marginalization of the passions vis-à-vis matters of collective importance and political life. I argue that an intellectual trajectory leading to the denial of the political relevance of the passions was a necessary condition for the subsequent developments of liberal theory. What I mean by political relevance is not only that there is a matter of public importance that is the object of emotion from one individual to the next, but that there are discernible patterns of the type and quality of emotional reaction or disposition toward objects deemed of public importance shared by citizens or participants in a political community.1 A “public emotion” or “public passion” is one that is largely shared by members of a political community with regard to matters of importance to the whole community and on which often hinge questions of their collective identity, such as the public shock, fear, and anger felt by Americans in response to 9/11, or the public jubilation at the time of the Orange Revolution, or the public sorrow regarding the loss of lives of military personnel in the course of war. These emotions can be shared despite varying and diverse positions in regard to public policy on these matters.2 With the fall of the notion of the “public passion” in our intellectual history and political vocabulary, the passions became regarded as mere projections of largely internal individual and idiosyncratic causes. This view made them a challenge, rather than a contributing factor, to our ideas of political community. The chapter is divided into two sections. In the first, I discuss Descartes’s Les Passions de l’âme as an important text for reframing contemporary understandings of the passions and show how the text differs in its basic premises from what in the last chapter I called “the classical view” regarding the political and public relevance of the passions. In particular, Descartes’ discussion of emotional life narrowed the focus on the 1 In this sense this chapter goes much further than many contemporary accounts within social and cultural theories of emotion, for I suggest that not only can social and political causes work to explain a possible spectrum of emotional responses, such as suggested by Rorty in “Explaining Emotions,” but that in certain instances particular types of emotional disposition can be associated with particular political arrangements. 2 One notable recent example is the different policy preferences in Canada and the United States issuing from similar experiences of grief with the loss of military personnel in zones of combat. This has been charted empirically by Fletcher, Bastedo, and Hove in “Losing Heart.”

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individual person, as body and soul, as the central locus for explaining both the causes and effects of various emotions. The consequence of this approach was that emotions were to be more and more regarded as mere reflections of individualized states of affairs. This view serves as an important backdrop for the decline of the idea of public passion in the history of ideas. In the second section of the chapter I sketch this decline in general terms through comparisons of Hobbes and Adam Smith on the political relevancy of the passions. the political significance of descartes’ les passions de l ’ âme Hirschman has given political theorists a well-known narrative on the taming of the passions during the Enlightenment.3 In revisiting the period covered by his analysis, we can see a parallel, and perhaps more significant, development in the realm of emotions than that of the rise of the language of interest and the more varied consideration of sentiment.4 In particular, we see a clearly discernible change of focus away from the public causes and objects of the passions toward an analysis centred on the manifestation of emotion within the individual soul. Perhaps the best expression of this new orientation in early modern thought is Descartes’ work Les Passions de l’âme. The idea of exploring the political significance of Descartes’ treatise on the passions (written in the final years of his life) may seem puzzling, given that there is little or no mention in the treatise of matters of public significance. Indeed, Descartes seems to take great pains to disassociate his discussion from general matters of jurisprudence by insisting that he is exploring passions as a matter of science (en physicien) rather than as a matter of moral philosophy.5 Yet it is precisely this analytical disposition, as well as the analysis that flows from it, that sowed the idea that passions can be thought of as separate from reason and that it is the passions that are idiosyncratic, unique to each particular individual and thereby not suitable as a subject for broader social analysis.

3 Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests. 4 For the view that cultural expression demonstrated a shift away from a uniformly negative notion of passion, to a more ambivalent and complicated idea of sentiment, see Stewart’s L’Invention du sentiment. This is an idea that is also demonstrated through a wider historical study by Dixon, From Passions to Emotions. 5 “The discourse … is so simple and so brief that it will reveal that my purpose has not been to explain the Passions as an Orator, or even as a moral Philosopher, but only as a Physicist” (Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, 17).



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In the opening articles of his treatise, Descartes takes on the ancient philosophers by challenging their understanding of the animating soul as the basis for human psychology. He provides us with an alternative idea of the soul, one that is conceptually distinct from the body, though clearly functionally in union with it.6 In Article 2 he foreshadows the main contribution of his treatise, which is to suggest that we must look to the agitation of the animal spirits as the most proximate and external source of passionate motivation, rather than the soul itself as argued by ancient and medieval thinkers and their early modern heirs.7 In article 29 he emphasizes the distinction between passions and will, namely in the fact that while volitions are also excitations of the soul, they are

6 As Descartes states in his correspondence with Elizabeth, “Je remarque une grande différence entre ces trois sortes de notions, en ce que l’âme ne se conçoit que par l’entendement pur; le corps, c’est-à-dire l’extension, les figures et le mouvements, se peuvent aussi connaître par l’entendement seul, mais beaucoup mieux par l’entendement aidé de l’imagination; en enfin, les choses qui appartiennent à l’union de l’âme et le corps, ne se connaissent qu’obscurément par l’entendement seul, ni même par l’entendement aidé de l’imagination; mais elles se connaissent très clairement par les sens. D’où vient que ceux qui ne philosophent jamais, et qui ne se servent que de leurs sens, ne doutent point que l’âme ne meuve le corps, et que le corps n’agisse sur l’âme; mais ils considèrent l’un et l’autre comme une seule chose, c’est-à-dire, ils conçoivent leur union; car concevoir l’union qui est entre deux choses, c’est les concevoir comme une seule” (Descartes, Correspondance avec Elisabeth et autres lettres, 73–4). So while we might say that for Descartes the soul and body considered in themselves have different properties, an element of common sense dictates that in functional terms they are not to be considered as separate, so Descartes cannot be said to subscribe to a doctrine of a strict separation of soul and body. Still, he no longer ascribes to the soul any vegetative or appetitive functions (as found in Plato and Aristotle, for example). 7 “I also take into consideration that we notice no subject that acts more immediately upon our soul than the body it is joined to, and that consequently we ought to think that what is a Passion in the former is commonly an Action in the latter. So there is no better path for arriving at an understanding of our Passions than to examine the difference between the soul and the body, in order to understand to which of the two each of the functions within us should be attributed” (Descartes, Passions, part I, art. 2, 19. See also part I, art. 47, 44–6). Stephen Gaukroger argues that in more immediate terms it was the growing confusion in attempts to amalgamate elements of the scholastic and Stoic traditions in a theory of the passions that led Descartes to write his treatise (see his “Descartes’ Theory of the Passions,” 211–24). According to Dixon, the shift in the history of ideas from the ancient idea that we can be deemed responsible for at least a portion of our own emotional life to the modern idea that our emotions are of one general sort and open to “management” but not to control given their origin in physiological causes and their generalized irrational nature, marks an important impoverishment of our understanding of the life of the soul. However, Dixon traces this shift to the early nineteenth century in Anglo-American thought and does not explore its roots in earlier Continental philosophy (see From Passions to Emotions).

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caused within the soul itself in contrast to passions that remain within the broader category of sensations – that is, things received into the soul. That said, it is sometimes possible to cause a passion by conceiving of a certain object, but in this instance the object and its effects on the senses are of most importance, rather than the means by which the object is brought to the senses (article 51). This understanding of the strong physiological component of passionate feeling is why Descartes, despite his Stoic sympathies, recognizes the impossibility of human beings attaining full self-command and eradication of passions (articles 45–46 and 212). This recognition leads to the almost inevitable conclusion that while one set of passions remains common to humankind, the varying disposition of the bodies within which the animal spirits operate dictates varying responses to the same occasion: “The same impression that the presence of a frightful object forms on the gland which causes fear in some men may excite courage and boldness in others. The reason for this is that all brains are not disposed in the same manner, and that the same movement of the gland which in some excites fear, in others makes the spirits enter the brain’s pores that guide part of them into the nerves that move the hands for self-defense, and part of them into those that agitate the blood and drive it toward the heart in the manner needed to produce spirits suitable to continue this defense and sustain the volition for it.”8 Factors such as social standing, emotional predispositions, effects of maturation, and education will also ensure that both our susceptibility to passion in terms of its emotional force as well as the particular passion felt in any given situation will differ exceedingly from one individual to the next.9 Still, while passions are not to be considered as caused by the soul, they are in some sense “attributed” to it insofar as we cannot be mistaken about emotional feelings in the way that we can about other sensations. That is, we are angry when we feel angry (though this may impair our judgment in other ways), but we can think we perceive some external object when we are merely dreaming.10 Desmond Clarke has argued convincingly that the main impetus behind Descartes’ new depiction of the human mind and the emotions was his radical attempt to apply a standard seventeenth-century model of scientific explanation, up to now applied to the natural world, to the very centre of concerns in moral philosophy and the philosophy of mind.11

8 Descartes, Passions, part I, art. 39, 40; see also article 36, 39. 9 James, “Explaining the Passions,” 21. 10 Clarke, Descartes’ Theory of Mind, 117. 11 Ibid., esp. chapter 4.



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The dualism attributed to Descartes in this view is less an endorsement of a doctrine of two substances in the human person than his attempt to articulate the clear limits to his efforts to provide a fully naturalistic account of human thinking and feeling. From this perspective, it was concern over the inadequacy of traditional scholastic accounts in providing a convincing explanation for human experience and a conviction that the new science was equipped with a better model of explanation that were primarily responsible for ushering in a radically new and influential understanding of the nature of passion.12 What is the consequence of Descartes’ framework for the early modern understanding of the nature of human passion? On the one hand, it is clear that for Descartes there is something unique about human beings as opposed to animals, in that humans are alone subject to both reason and passion.13 In this text he does not explore what intrinsic connection, if any, there is between these two capacities, although by his neo-Stoic recognition of the need to manage passions through a form of cognitive defence (though, as mentioned, they can never be fully eradicated as in the classic Stoic ideal), he does acknowledge a form of judgment linked to passion insofar as we can assent or not to the appraisals that passion delivers ready made, as it were, to us. Still, it is also clear that Descartes conceived the capacities for passion and reason as quite distinct, given the rootedness of passion in something other than the human soul (in this he was quite un-Stoic).14 There is a connection 12 As Clarke succinctly states in the closing lines of his work, “‘Cartesian dualism’ is not a theory of human beings but a provisional acknowledgement of failure, an index of the work that remains to be done before a viable theory of the human mind becomes available” (ibid., 258). 13 “The same thing can be observed in beasts, for even though they have no reason and perhaps no thought either, all the movements of the spirits and the gland that excite the passions in us still exist in them, and serve in them to maintain and strengthen, not the passions as in us, but the nerve and muscle movements that usually accompany them” (Descartes, Passions, art. 50, 48). Also, “though this use of the passions is the most natural one they can have, and though animals that lack reason all direct their lives entirely by bodily movements like those which usually follow them in us” (Descartes, Passions, part II, art. 138, 93). 14 “Il me semble que la différence qui est entre les plus grandes âmes et celles qui sont basses et vulgaires, consiste, principalement, en ce que les âmes vulgaires se laissent aller à leurs passions, et ne sont heureuses ou malheureuses, que selon que les choses qui leur surviennent sont agréables ou déplaisantes ; au lieu que les autres ont des raisonnements si forts et si puissants que, bien qu’elles aient aussi des passions, et même souvent de plus violentes que celles du commun, leur raison demeure néanmoins toujours la maîtresse, et fait que les afflictions même leur servent, et contribuent à la parfaite félicité dont elles jouissent dès cette vie” (Descartes, Correspondance avec Elisabeth, 96). With reference to the Stoics, see, for example, Sorabji’s Emotion and Peace of Mind, chap.10. This idea is

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between this use of reason to manage passion autonomously, and the exercise of free will – that is, what Descartes identified in part I, article 17, of his treatise as the actions, or active principle, of the soul. By his understanding of the will as a force distinct from the passions that can move us to act, Descartes was in a sense upholding a traditional view.15 However, because of his view that passions were motivated by forces outside the soul, the consequence was to obliterate the possibility of rational affection – that is, the uniting of reason and passion in reasonable emotion.16 Passion and reason were now not only different phenomena but ones stemming from wholly different features of the person. Only the assent of the rational will could make them coexist, but never could they be seen as synonymous.17 While it is also true that scholastic thinkers were very much concerned with the question of the internal workings of the soul and the relative influence of will, reason, and desire, all these thinkers in the end shared the notion of an important connection between the objects and events in the world and the emotional reactions human beings were subject to. The more radical vision of Descartes engendered more scepticism regarding how objects and events in the world might affect us and thereby made the possibility of broad patterns of emotional response more difficult to conceive. It was a first important step in fashioning a theory of politics that paid no heed to the public force of the emotions.

reinforced by Brad Inwood, who has suggested that the Stoics had a rather idiosyncratic understanding of the phenomenon of emotion, which by necessity related to those movements of the soul that were directly affected by our judgments and thereby did not include many of the forms of agitation we would commonly associate today with our emotional experience: “A pathos, if you ask Chrysippus or any of his followers, is an excessive horme or drive to act. And a horme is the paradigmatic causal starting point for an action. Hormai occur in humans and in non-rational animals, but in rational agents (essentially, all and only adult humans) these impulses are fully determined by cognitive events in the mind: consciously or unconsciously, we give our consent to propositions and thereby act. Pathe, then, are excessive and therefore erroneous active behaviours and each one is caused by a mental act which commits us to the truth of certain claims about the world and the value of various things in it” (Inwood, “The Incommensurability of Emotions: Lessons from Classical Philosophy,” unpublished paper written for the symposium Emotions under Siege, held at the University of Toronto, May 2010). See also Inwood’s Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism, chap. 5. 15 James, “Explaining the Passions,” 30. 16 See Ferry, “Troubling Business,” 78–107. 17 This divergence from the classical idea of rational affection is perhaps best illustrated by the closing statement of Descartes’ work: “Wisdom is useful here above all: it teaches us to render ourselves such masters of them, and to manage them with such ingenuity, that the evils they cause can be easily borne, and we even derive Joy from them all” (article 212, 135).



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The contribution of Descartes to the early modern discussion on the passions played an important role in the subsequent demise of the idea of public passion. As a consequence of Descartes’ analysis, the categories and concepts through which the passions became conceived made the notion of public passion more difficult, thereby dismantling a powerful tool of social and political analysis and self-understanding. In the first instance, Descartes posits a method of rigorous internal introspection as a new basis for knowledge about the passions. The foundation for his self-proclaimed new science of passions is an exploration of the internal dynamics of feeling, both in terms of bodily reaction and patterns of thought. Questions of the objects giving rise to a passionate response are reconceived as matters to be filtered through perception, and the external occasions for emotional response are considered less important than the individual perceptions themselves, as well as the individual’s ability to manage and possibly modify those perceptions. Thus, the method for this new science limits the scope for considering the importance of passions as an integral component of public life, both in terms of a factor shared collectively by a community and playing a role in the shaping of social and political life, and as a product of the same. In the second instance, Descartes’ claim that passions are largely shaped by bodily disposition, personal habits, and individual strength of soul renders the possibility of a shared common passion among citizens as less likely. The public is divided into those who have the strength of soul to manage their passions wisely for their own well-being (with varying degrees of success based on a myriad of factors) and those who through ignorance, stupidity, or dullness of soul will have no need of or inclination to self-management. Individuals are left as solely responsible for their own emotional states and the life of passions as a mere projection of individual characteristics. Still, this approach did not rule out completely the possi­ bility of managing patterns of shared emotional dispositions across broad populations for public purposes. from hobbes to the late eighteenth century: terrain and the last rites for political emotion in adam smith The idea of public passion was of course not something limited to the classical philosophers. The idea that there were patterns of emotional reaction in populations and that these patterns were directly related to the type of political regime was also taken up in various ways by thinkers such as Augustine and Machiavelli.18 Even for Hobbes, whom we can 18 See Ansart, Les Cliniciens des passions politiques.

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a­ ssociate with the early roots of liberalism and who also shares an affinity with the individualism of the Cartesian approach, we see, at least from one perspective, a continuation of a classical sensibility in the central preoccupation with defining a regime by a shared emotional disposition on the part of the subjects. We can see in Hobbes’s work a recognition of the importance of collective responses to public matters that elicit similar emotional responses and that lead communities to engage collectively in actions of fundamental public importance and scope. The workings of the covenant in Leviathan can be read as largely a psychological manipulation through which the fears motivating each individual in the state of nature are transposed into a shared and collective fear of the Leviathan itself. Without the workings of this public passion, the collective agreement to submit would be impossible. The underlying psychological basis of regime legitimacy in Hobbes – that is, the principle of fear – became a focus of criticism for many, including Locke, and helped to discredit Hobbes’s solution to the challenge of political order.19 Indeed, one modern commentator has sought to resuscitate Hobbes’s understanding of the manipulation of fear, not as a constitutional solution to the current problems of liberal democracy but as the basis for a more sophisticated analytical weaponry of the citizenry – to make citizens more aware of the means by which political and economic elites seek to shape their emotional lives for the end of greater political control.20 In the late eighteenth century Adam Smith made a very different attempt to come to terms with the way in which shared emotional responses play a role in our understanding of politics. His initial impulse to appropriate and preserve aspects of the classical view ends up in a further repudiation of the older paradigm and its replacement by a new model through which to seek to understand social and political life. I focus here on chapters 3 and 4 of part I, section I, of The Theory of Moral Sentiments.21 Smith sets up his analysis by suggesting the perspective we must take in exploring the nature of the emotions and by stating how his analysis relates to his inherited tradition of philosophic reflection. He tells us that

19 As Locke famously comments, “To ask how you may be guarded from harm, or injury, on that side where the strongest hand is to do it, is presently the voice of faction and rebellion: as if when men quitting the state of nature entered into society, they agreed that all of them but one, should be under the restraint of laws, but that he should still retain all the liberty of the state of nature, increased with power, and made licentious by impunity. This is to think, that men are so foolish, that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done them by pole-cats, or foxes; but are content, nay, think it safety, to be devoured by lions” (in Second Treatise of Government, s. 93, 50). 20 Robin, Fear. 21 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 16–19.



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sentiments can be understood in terms of either the cause that excites them or the end or effect they tend to produce. He also states that we tend to judge sentiments in two ways: firstly, in terms of the appropriateness of the affection in relation to the cause (by which we judge sentiments in terms of their relative propriety and decency), and secondly, in terms of the nature of the effects the sentiment aims or tends to produce, whether hurtful or beneficial. 22 He goes on to suggest that philosophers of his time have chiefly considered sentiments in the second aspect and have ignored the first, despite the fact that, according to him, most people consider them under both these aspects.23 As he states, “When we blame in another man the excesses of love, or grief, of resentment, we not only consider the ruinous effects which they tend to produce, but the little occasion which was given for them. The merit of his favourite, we say, is not so great, his misfortune is not so dreadful, his provocation is not so extraordinary, as to justify so violent a passion. We should have indulged, we say, perhaps, have approved of the violence of his emotion, had the cause been in any respect proportioned to it.”24 So Smith’s evident intent in this discussion is to provide his readers with a fuller account of the passions – that is, to complete the modern account of the effects of the passions on the individual soul and their social utility with an account of how we can ascertain their appropriate connection with concrete circumstances. It would seem at first glance, then, that Smith would have sympathy for those ancient accounts that depicted the passions and emotions as having an intrinsic connection with the objects of the feelings – feelings that could be shared among social and political communities. However, he approaches this question with an underlying scepticism that ultimately undermines the classical view. Smith is right when he says that philosophers of his time tended to focus on the effects of the passions. Whom does he refer to when he invokes philosophers of his time? Clearly among them, or standing as a primary influence among them, is Descartes, who looked to physiology and to the effects of the passions on the body and soul. The valuable and painstaking study of Susan James to reconstruct the seventeenth-century debate on the passions shows how this general orientation was carried through in the work of Malebranche, Hobbes, and Spinoza.25 Still, James

22 Ibid., 18. 23 This ties in with Forman-Barzilai’s idea that Smith was first and foremost engaged in a descriptive (rather than normative) exercise in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. See her “Sympathy in Space(s),” 191. 24 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 18. 25 James, Passion and Action.

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places these thinkers in a narrative emphasizing a continuity of reflection with the ancients on the passions. While she strives to show the degree to which the seventeenth-century thinkers departed from traditional Aristotelian and Thomistic ways of thinking, she does so with a continued emphasis that both ancients and moderns were primarily concerned with the idea of passion as it had an effect on the soul. Smith suggests another reading of this history, one I think is useful in terms of exploring the political consequences of these debates. Indeed, Smith sought a fuller account of the passions, and in this sense sought to chart new territory in modern debates about the passions, by exploring the causes of sentiment. Smith’s doctrine of sympathy stands as an important grounding for his broader theory of moral judgment. For him, the first rule of thumb in the process by which any person judges the appropriateness of a sentiment is to compare it with the corresponding affection in ourselves. In other words, it is through an imaginative appropriation of the situation of the person being judged that we arrive at our own response: “If upon bringing the case home to our own breast, we find that the sentiments which it gives occasion to, coincide and tally with our own, we necessarily approve of them as proportioned and suitable to their objects; if otherwise, we necessarily disapprove of them, as extravagant and out of proportion.”26 Through our own faculties of sentiment or capacity for emotional response, we come to have a basis for judging both the emotional appropriateness and the worthiness of the reactions of our compatriots: “I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my resentment, or your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them.”27 By this move, Smith reconceptualizes what was at the basis of the classical view. As Plato saw it, a shared moral outlook, in part shaped by the character of political authority itself, gives rise to shared aspirations and shared evaluations on the part of the public. In other words, judgments that are already set through a common moral framework and instilled through education engender a common psychological outlook and thereby a shared emotional life with regard to matters of public importance. In contrast, while Smith is cognizant of the possibility of some degree of shared evaluation, for him it is developed between individuals rather than across large numbers in a community, and it is a process in which participation in the sentiment precedes the development of moral 26 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 18–19. 27 Ibid., 19.



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judgment. For Smith, despite the possibility of sympathy, it is not inevitable that a shared moral outlook will be the result. Smith took great pains to assure that this self-referential character of judgment had some ultimate grounding that differentiated it from a simple moral egotism. Indeed, because of his understanding of the social embeddedness of individual moral judgment, some regard him as on the more ancient line of the divide. According to Glenn Morrow, Smith provides a more radical rendition of Humean sympathy that, in contrast to the methodological individualism characteristic of his age, grounded an inherently social ethics.28 This view is advanced through the idea that Smith’s concept of the internalized norm for individual behaviour (or the infamous “impartial spectator”) was in fact a social construct, that is, based on the individual’s sense of concrete others.29 Smith provides further evidence of the impartial spectator as a social construct in part V, chapter 2, where he speaks of the effects of custom on the content of the moral sentiment: “The different situations of different ages and countries are apt, in the same manner, to give different characters to the generality of those who live in them, and their sentiments concerning the particular degree of each quality, that is either blameable or praiseworthy, vary, according to that degree which is usual in their own country, and in their own times.”30 Accordingly, one should not interpret the impartial spectator as merely a projection of subjective standards into a fictitious personality, but rather one must understand it as a distillation from the acting and real principle of sympathy that exists among all individuals: “The impartial spectator is the personification of that which is permanent, universal,

28 Morrow, “The Significance of the Doctrine of Sympathy in Hume and Adam Smith,” 60–78. 29 Another defence of Smithian sympathy, as a foundation for his idea of the impartial spectator, is offered by Nicholas Phillipson. As he states, “What is curious and distinctive about Smith’s theory is that he does not think that we simply put ourselves in another man’s shoes in order to see whether, were we him, we would approve of what he was doing. That would have introduced an element of egotism into the theory which he was particularly anxious to avoid. In his account we exercise our imaginative curiosity quite hard in order to achieve what we judge to be a genuinely critical detachment in our understanding of another man’s behaviour. Thus, to take a particularly graphic Smithian example, a man does not ask what he would suffer if he were a woman in labour; he tries to imagine what it would be like to be a woman in labour. Only after we have undergone this demanding imaginative and critical exercise and acquired what we feel is a satisfactory degree of detachment, do we decide whether or not to bring the encounter to a close by offering our sympathetic approval of the other man’s behaviour” (Phillipson, “Adam Smith as Civic Moralist,” 183). 30 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, V, 2, s. 7, 204.

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rational, natural in the phenomena of sympathy. Since sympathy is the principle which makes life in society possible, the normal sympathies which the impartial spectator personifies can only be those sympathies which best further the existence of men [sic] together in society … As the guardian of these rules of morality, the impartial spectator is in a sense representative of the welfare of society; hence to appeal to the sympathies of the impartial spectator is by no means to abandon the social reference.”31 But Smith begins the second chapter of part V by asserting that the influence of custom on the moral sentiments is limited. One could argue that this limitation is at least threefold: first, by the issue of proximity (in other words, one’s sympathy, not to say one’s approbation, will most often be greater with one’s closest circle of family and friends); second, by Smith’s adoption of the view that the enlightened disposition of modern commercial times should tend to resist bending to shared patterns of behaviour, as recently highlighted by Emma Rothschild; and third, by the nature of the moral sentiment itself that poses limits to what can be consented to (“the characters and conduct of a Nero, or a Claudius, are what no custom will ever reconcile us to, what no fashion will ever render agreeable”).32 While Smith may adhere to the idea of a social ethics in principle, it is largely divorced from actual custom and indeed is seen as a device by which custom can be judged;33 it is also adjudicated privately. The impartial spectator for Smith is a means to ground social and political judgment in the context of modern societies where sympathies are unequally distributed and passionate responses quite diverse. This spectator represents an idealized or internally normative ideal of social interaction (though derived from concrete experiences) and remains a means for disengagement from existing custom and shared patterns of judgment and emotional response.34 It is meant to be not plainly or 31 Morrow, “The Significance of the Doctrine of Sympathy in Hume and Adam Smith,” 72–3. 32 Rothschild, Economic Sentiments. Thanks to Amélie Rorty for alerting me to this text. These limits on custom as found in Smith can be compared with those detailed by Hume as argued by Sharon Krause. 33 As D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie assert, “It is nature that teaches us to put family, friends and nation first, while also providing us with the judgments of the impartial spectator to check any excessive attachment.” See their introduction to Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 10. In this sense, the impartial spectator can be seen as a constant regulative presence for these otherwise natural inclinations. 34 Raphael and Macfie, introduction to Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and Martha Nussbaum, talk presented at the annual meeting of the Hume Society, Toronto, 2005. This position is reinforced by Smith’s call for the reader to be wary of the fury of “the mob” in part I, section 2, chapter 3, 35, and in his description in the next chapter of



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merely a social reference but indeed in many ways an alternative one, as is implied in Smith’s invocation of the notion of impartiality.35 Thus, his analysis of sentiment, while in principle trying to reincorporate the ancient understanding of the social causes of emotion, does so in a way that transforms its political potential and significance. For Frazer, Smith’s articulation of the interaction of sympathy and judgment provides a sophisticated rendition of a more general Enlightenment project to factor in the emotions to a process of reflective autonomy – a process that stands as an ideal moral stance.36 Indeed for Frazer, the more space for individual adjudication of the workings of sympathy the better. However, with Smith, something important is lost from the perspective I develop here. Smith’s emphasis on localized face-to-face encounters and the importance of self-command makes it more difficult to conceptualize and appreciate shared patterns of emotional response to matters of public relevance. The idea that communities can be distinguished by a common ordering of desires in a potentially positive way is absent. Of course, Smith does invoke the term “public passion,” but through the intellectual legacy of Shaftesbury, it is no longer the idea of shared affect among members of a political community but rather is confined to unique and rare examples of when an individual is driven by a sense of the greatness and glory of the country, perhaps like ancient (and some modern) invocations of the feeling of honour.37 In other words, passions now must be distinguished by their object as in Smith’s view they can rarely be associated with more than a single individual, and when they can, it is a matter in need of psychological and philosophical explanation. The full significance of this conception is that while Smith claims to be providing a fuller account of the passions than his contemporaries offer, and one that indeed gestures to more ancient ideas by incorporating a strong sense of the social embeddedness of ethical judgment, he puts this idea to the service of discriminating among behaviours and a certain disengagement from custom. While the dynamic of sympathy may account for some communication of sentiment among citizens, its force

the “social passions” such as “generosity, humanity, kindness, compassion, mutual friendship and esteem,” he focuses on examples from the intimate lives of friends and the family. These “social passions,” though regarded with affection, can often invoke pity when they are considered to be excessive: “There is a helplessness in the character of extreme humanity which more than any thing interests our pity.” These descriptions render political mobilization on the basis of “unsocial passions” as naturally abhorrent to us and on the basis of “social passions” as improbable. 35 Forman-Barzilai, “Sympathy in Space(s),” 204. 36 Frazer, The Enlightenment of Sympathy. 37 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, IV, 1.11, 185–7.

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depends on close proximity and the serendipity of personal encounter. Indeed, the very workings of sympathy suggest that despite common subjection to similar principles of public authority and historical tradition, there is very little else that identifies or holds communities together in terms of emotion. And once the idea of public passion has been laid to rest, it is only a matter of time before shared rational norms have become the only possible basis for understanding the creation and shaping of political community. The contrast between Hobbes and Smith helps to illuminate the intellectual space in which we find Montesquieu. Like Hobbes and those who admired the classics, Montesquieu was not ready to abandon the idea or possibility of public passion. Still, in many ways he was more of a sceptic than Hobbes. He disputed the possibility of any one fundamental and primal emotion that could be relied upon as the basis for political motivation. He was more sympathetic to the power of social context to define emotional life. This, however, provided him with a great dilemma. To reject any classical or modern rendition of a fundamental nature for human beings while still regarding the emotions as a central component of political life lent itself to relativist conclusions. The challenge for Montesquieu, then, was to develop a viable theory of politics that took into account the fullness of human experience while still providing standards through which varying forms of life could be judged.

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this chapter explores a third moment in intellectual ­history relevant to the idea of public passion. As we have seen, the first moment refers to the classical articulation of the idea found within the work of Plato and Aristotle. While this idea of public passion was not without its critics, Plato and Aristotle among them, as it was ascribed to be a characteristic of regimes judged to be deviant, the classical idea nonetheless did provide some sense of how this collective emotion could work in positive ways and serve as a binding force of solidarity among a regime’s citizens. This classical articulation is particularly important as it demonstrates that the notion of citizen solidarity around the experience of public passion did not have as its necessary condition either ongoing political consensus or intense citizen homogeneity. The idea that citizens in a regime could be in some ways bound together through shared emotion took a beating in the early modern period. The rise of different accounts of human physiology gave rise to new theories of the emotions that made the conceptualization of shared emotion much more problematic. As we saw in the last chapter, the second moment of importance in the development of this story of public passion is the series of intellectual moves in the seventeenth and eighteenth century that led to the concept’s decline. Still, at the time of its waning, the idea had its defenders, and Montesquieu can be considered foremost among them. He sought to revive the notion of public passion in a way, like the ancients, that could help account for the diversity of regimes and their behaviour. Montesquieu did not adopt the classical idea without some adaptation to his own context. In this chapter I analyze his attempt to resuscitate this idea of public passion through his novel notion of the “principle” that underlies politics in each of the regimes he identifies. I also explore the reasons for the relative failure of this attempt. Montesquieu’s “failure”

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consolidated the outlook forged in the early modern period and helps to explain why the notion of public passion has received minimal attention in modern times. After a discussion of Montesquieu’s approach to the idea of public passion, I turn in the subsequent three chapters to broad explorations of the dynamics of the particular principles he singles out, namely love, honour, and fear. This chapter involves first an exploration of Montesquieu’s basic understanding of emotion and its place in his general theory of human development. This analysis serves as a foundation for understanding the way in which emotion in his theory works collectively and helps to define a political regime. the importance of montesquieu’s notion of the “principle” When Montesquieu invoked the idea of the “principle” as a sort of emotional engine and as one of the defining features of a regime, what did he have in mind? Within the liberal tradition with which he is associated, it is often taken for granted that the task of political philosophers is to seek rationalist foundations for regimes, explicitly separate from the potential vicissitudes of emotional concerns.1 This perhaps explains why interpreters of Montesquieu’s work have largely avoided or ignored this aspect of his analysis. Early constitutionalist interpreters skirted the issue by suggesting that Montesquieu’s solution was one of a mixed constitution, that is, one that would mix competing structures and thereby impose a rationalist constitutional solution to contain the conflicting passions of the people.2 More recent and historically sensitive interpreters have recognized that Montesquieu was more sceptical of universal constitutional solutions than was generally supposed, and that he was certainly not advocating the importation of the English model as a basis for reform everywhere.3 It is now acknowledged that while he was advocating the virtues of political freedom and tolerance, he saw that these could be instituted in differing forms in light of differing political and social contexts. Still, these interpretations have tended to focus on functional constitutional or more generally procedural equivalents within a plurality of regimes that all work toward the restraint of executive and legislative powers, again sidelining Montesquieu’s concept of the “principle.”

1 See Holmes, Passions and Constraint. 2 For example, Hampson, Will and Circumstance; M.J.C. Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers; Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism. 3 See, in particular, Mosher, “Monarchy’s Paradox.”



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While Montesquieu can be recognized as acknowledging the predominant power of institutions in politics overall, his inspiration for the discipline of sociology must also be acknowledged.4 The legacies of power are complicated, and it is not the case that a mere change at the top will promptly and effectively bring about change. Institutions may give a certain independence and a strength to social contexts that can sometimes make them more enduring than the institutions themselves.5 Perhaps this is what Montesquieu means when he tells us in the opening chapters of the work that the sentiments of the citizens can be considered as one of the most important factors in the defining of a particular regime. From traditional liberal perspectives, this position will be regarded as problematic. How is it possible that the sentiments and passions of a people serve as a basis for political identification, given, at best, their acknowledged idiosyncratic nature, or at worst, their obvious capacity to extend popular prejudice and to precipitate enmity and bloody discord? Why, given the course of European history, would Montesquieu seek to develop a theory of politics that looked to the passions as constituting political life? Does this notion of the centrality of the passions in politics not appear to be the very repudiation of the liberal and constitutionalist tradition with which he is so often associated? We have seen in chapter 1 how traditional accounts of liberalism, both utilitarian and deontological, have often regarded the emotions with scepticism if not disdain. This tendency, as we also have seen, implied a view of the passions as largely distinct from reason and not amenable to real control. Nonetheless, throughout history and today in philosophy, this is not the dominant view of the passions. It is now possible to think about how passions might play a more positive role in political life, a role that could (though will not always) be more compatible with traditional accounts of a politics of equality and freedom, and might also provide grounds for political unity. As Martha Nussbaum has shown, even with her strongly cognitive understanding of the emotions, the fact that emotions often incorporate forms of judgment does not imply that these judgments are always correct or in line with our own ideals. There is an important distinction to be retained between emotions as cognitive, incorporating judgments, and emotions as rational or incorporating what might be considered as proper 4 Authors associated with this interpretation include, most famously, Durkheim, in Montesquieu et Rousseau comme précurseurs de la sociologie, and Aron, in Les Etapes de la pensée sociologique. 5 For further analysis of this dynamic in relation to an understanding of the concept of civil society in Montesquieu’s work, see the introductory chapter of Spector’s Montesquieu: Pouvoirs, richesses et sociétés. A revised and translated version of this chapter is found in my Montesquieu and His Legacy, 49–79.

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judgments, according to some predetermined standard. Still, as she explores in the case of compassion, judgments that can be regarded as proper cannot in themselves constitute an emotion. The phenomena of emotional feeling requires that we see these judgments coupled with an extra motivational force that is missing from pure judgment alone.6 In line with some of these new understandings of the nature of the passions and their implications for politics, we need to explore how Montesquieu conceives of the positive work of emotions in relation to desirable goals in public and political life. To do so, we will have to explore the collective judgments or suppositions that lie beneath the collective emotional expressions differing by regime as portrayed in De l’esprit des lois, as well as the importance or significance of the extra motivational force that comes with the idea of a collective passion as opposed to just a public creed. In this chapter I explore Montesquieu’s conception of the passions in general, a conception that proves to be much closer to nuanced cognitive views than previously acknowledged. I then focus on how the dynamic of collective passion works, both from within the state of nature and in political society. This focus highlights the degree of flexibility built into Montesquieu’s notion of public passion, a flexibility that distinguishes him from many earlier political theorists. The analysis will allow us to develop a better understanding of how regimes can be distinguished by the very passions that animate them – an understanding that will serve as a foun­ dation for the next three chapters, each exploring in greater detail one of these collective passions, respectively, love, honour, and fear. The chapter’s final section restates the basic features of public passion and then discusses how we might consider Montesquieu as failing in his project to bring the passions back to the mainstream of political analysis in a positive way. Still, by focusing on his discussion of the particular working of the various principles of regimes, as we do in chapters 6 to 8, we should be in a position to provide a more solid contemporary rearticulation of this feature of politics, allowing us in the concluding chapter to consider its appropriate place within contemporary normative theory. montesquieu’s understanding of the emotions For Montesquieu “the passions” represent a human capacity at the centre of his political philosophy. His understanding of the relationship ­between the passions and judgment gestures toward that of cognitivist and contextualist theories of a much later era. 6 Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, especially chapters 6 to 8.



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In broad terms, Montesquieu, like his contemporaries, saw the passions as an independent faculty of the soul having a distinct nature from the faculty of reason. In the first book of De l’esprit des lois, he describes human nature according to a conventional tripartite division, the physical being associated with the appetite and other biological functions, the intelligent being associated with the intellectual faculties, and the sensitive being associated with sentiments and passions.7 This synchronic distinction is reinforced by a diachronic one, as is also found in the work of Rousseau. Indeed, as we will see, Montesquieu prefigures Rousseau as a  defender of the passions as a source of understanding, although Montesquieu’s ideas on this matter have been largely neglected, given that they were not presented with his disciple’s rhetorical flourish. Montesquieu describes the initial state of human existence as one in which the intellect is in a potential rather than active form. In this state the human being has more in common with the animals who, as Montesquieu states, are driven uniquely by “sentiment.” The terms of the tripartite division would imply that the physical and sensitive faculties are the most immediate, if not the most fundamental, faculties of human nature. Montesquieu tells us that humans in this primordial condition have passions, as animals do: “Comme créature sensible, il devient sujet à mille passions.”8 Still, also as is the case for animals, human beings make better use of their passions at this stage than at later ones. What distinguishes humans from animals along the road is the development of the intellectual faculty. It would appear that, according to Montesquieu, the acquisition of knowledge transforms the passions in two important ways. At the outset the greater intellectual horizon expands the possible number of subjects and experiences that can serve as objects of our emotions. As he states, “[Les animaux] n’ont pas nos espérances, mais elles n’ont pas nos craintes; elles subissent comme nous la mort, mais c’est sans la connaître.”9 The distinction he draws here between humans and animals with regard to the emotions is not only quantitative (that is, humans have a greater consciousness of the world and therefore the possibility of being moved by more things) but also qualitative (that is, humans have the capacity for intellectual activity and knowledge, which increases their intensity of feeling in comparison with that of animals).10 The accumulation of

7 Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, I, i, 125. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Montesquieu notes in his Pensées, “Je disais: ‘Il faut avoir des opinions, des passions: on est pour lors à l’unisson de tout le monde. Tout homme qui a des sentiments modérés

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knowledge actually brings to human beings the capacity to feel in more intense ways. This dynamic is again illustrated in Montesquieu’s depiction of the origins of society. At this critical juncture in human development when the family is formed and knowledge begins to be acquired, the natural pleasure that in Montesquieu’s view comes with the experience of sociability (something animals and human beings share) becomes uniquely for humans a more intense desire to live in society.11 Thus the first transformation brought by the development of the rational faculty is to deepen an initial sentiment and thereby to expand the emotional horizon, and the social one as well. So in De l’esprit des lois Montesquieu was conscious of a deep connection between the faculties of reason and passion. The natural sentiments that bring human beings together provide a necessary condition for the acquisition of knowledge; this knowledge in turn grounds the development of the more intense quality of emotional life particular to human beings, including the desire to live in society, which is identified by Montesquieu as the fourth natural law. In general terms, he sketches a diachronic portrait of the simultaneous and indeed symbiotic development of the faculties of reason and passion. Precisely this same symbiotic dynamic, including reference to the uniquely human recognition of death, brings a qualitatively new experience of emotional life, as related by Rousseau in his Second Discourse: Whatever the moralists may say about it, human understanding owes much to the passions, which, by common consensus, also owe a great deal to it. It is by their activity that our reason is perfected. We seek to know only because we desire to find enjoyment; and it is impossible to conceive why someone who had neither desires nor fears would go to the bother of reasoning. The passions in turn take their origin from our needs and their progress from our knowledge. For one can desire or fear things only by virtue of the ideas one can have of them, or from the simple impulse of nature; and savage man, deprived of every sort of enlightenment, feels only the passion of this latter sort. His desires do not go beyond his physical needs. The only goods he knows in the universe are nourishment, a woman and rest; the only evils he fears are pain and hunger. I say pain and not death because an animal will never know what it is to die; and knowledge of death and its terrors is one of the first acquisitions that man has made in withdrawing from the animal condition.12

n’est [ordinairement] à l’unisson de personne.’” He shows here that not only are human beings generally subject to strong passions but that this situation serves as a cause of social unity (Montesquieu, Pensées, Le Spicilège, edited by Louis Desgraves, art. 1360, 468). 11 This is what Montesquieu calls the fourth natural law (I, ii, 11). 12 Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,” 45–6.



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While Rousseau would not suggest, as Montesquieu does, that the desire to live in society has the status of natural law, it is clear that once human capacities and needs catapult individuals into the inexorable development that is social life, their emotional development follows quite closely the dynamic initially sketched by Montesquieu. Similarly, both Montesquieu and Rousseau diverge from a pure cognitivist position (such as that associated with Robert Solomon) by their recognition of the central role of feeling and the body in the emotional experience of human beings. In his Pensées Montesquieu makes a distinction between the material and formal causes of the passions. He recognizes a dual nature of emotion, as a bodily experience and yet as a focus for reflexivity that itself contributes to the emotion and may modify it: “Cette complaisance que l’âme sent à suivre les mouvements de sa machine, par la douceur qu’elle y trouve.”13 He criticizes those whom he calls “moral” authors who insist too strongly on the place of the soul in their explanations of the passions; but he also criticizes the “doctors” (and by this we may also infer those philosophers, like Descartes, who purport to treat the subject of the passions through the eyes of a doctor) who place too much attention on the role of the body and give to emotional life the impression of an overly mechanical dynamic. As he states, “Mais l’homme est également composé des deux substances, qui, chacune, comme par un flux et reflux, exercent et souffrent l’empire.”14 Montesquieu appears to be seeking a novel formulation of the dynamic of the passions in the soul. While they have a link to corporal dynamics, they cannot always be fully explained by them or be seen as the product of them alone. In addition, the relationship between the spirit and the body can change over the course of one’s life so that, for example, in time of illness, it is possible that bodily causes predominate or seem to more fully determine emotional life. While Montesquieu does not provide us with any treatise-length account of his understanding of the workings of the soul, in his Pensées (a personal work that was not intended for publication and therefore was not written with the same considerations about the possibilities of censorship) he still appears to be dismissive of a crudely materialist position.15 He suggests that the body can be considered a material but not a 13 Montesquieu, Pensées, art. 2035, 625–6. 14 Ibid., 626. 15 It is nonetheless curious that Montesquieu did not develop his analysis of emotion further, given the vigorous intellectual debate on the issue during his lifetime. One might be tempted to suggest that Montesquieu is deliberately vague on the question in order to protect himself from possible religious criticism. From this perspective, it would not be difficult to infer that he considered himself in the camp of the most rigorous critics of religious doctrine on these questions; that is to say, he leans to an endorsement of the

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formal cause of emotion and that there are only limited instances when the bodily disposition can be said to have a direct and immediate link to an emotional state – that is, in times of sickness, “qui nous prouve[nt] que nous sommes tombés d’un état plus parfait.”16 He admits that the position of the moralists is more convincing, while not ruling out occasions when a materialist or determinist explanation may be operative. Montesquieu thus provides in these fragments three main contributions in his discussion of the emotions. In the first instance, through a diachronic framework of individual moral development, he provides a suggestion that there cannot be one single framework of explanation, but that different conditions of the body are associated with different capacities of the moral faculties to direct and effect emotional life. Second, in cases where the moral causes are predominant, he does not rule out corresponding material causes, thereby recognizing that there may be a distinct “feeling” component to emotion that is not reducible to its moral causes. So, in the terms of contemporary debates on the philosophy of mind, we might identify Montesquieu’s theory to be one of an attenuated cognitivism. Third, distinct from contemporary theories of sympathy (and most famously those of Shaftesbury and Adam Smith), Montesquieu does not bring in the social aspect of emotion and its transferral to others subsequent to the formation of the individual; rather, he acknowledges the social dynamic underlying the very constitution of human life in both its rational and emotional expressions. One could suggest that in some ways he offers a phenomenological critique of those theories by acknowledging the embeddedness of individual consciousness in a social context even prior to the development of basic

materialism of the Hobbesians and Spinozists. See, for example, Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism. Still, as I suggest here, his position appears to be more nuanced. 16 “Comme les vices et les vertus humaines sont ordinairement l’effet des passions, et les passions l’effet d’un certain état de la machine – je parle du matériel des passions, et non pas du formel, c’est-à-dire de cette complaisance que l’âme sent à suivre les mouvements de sa machine par la douceur qu’elle y trouve – il y a des maladies qui peuvent nous mettre dans la situation où l’on est lors de la passion même. Celles qui donneront à notre sang la disposition où est celui d’un homme hardi nous rendront courageux; celles qui nous mettront dans un état contraire nous rendrons timides. Les médecins savent que de certaines maladies rendent un homme bizarre, inquiet et emporté: état déplorable, qui nous prouve que nous sommes tombés d’un état plus parfait.  “Lorsque les médecins et les auteurs moraux traitent des passions, ils ne parlent jamais la même langue: les moraux mette trop sur le compte de l’âme; les autres, trop sur celui du corps; les uns regardent plus l’homme comme un esprit; les autres, plus comme la machine d’un artisan. Mais l’homme est également compose des deux substances, qui, chacune, comme par un flux et reflux, exercent et souffrent l’empire” (Pensées, art. 2035, 626).



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human faculties. He thus acknowledges a social grounding for the interior life of individuals that is much more radical than those generally offered by defenders of the theory of natural human sympathy. passions in society The opening passages of De l’esprit des lois demonstrate a strong resemblance to contemporary theories of what, in chapter 2, I have called contextualism, itself an outgrowth of a general cognitivist stance. In the first book, second chapter of De l’esprit des lois, Montesquieu acknowledges the existence of basic natural sentiments from which he derives fundamental natural laws (a sense of vulnerability, a sense of need, sexual desire, and a desire to live in society). We have seen that the particularly intense emotional life experienced by human beings is linked to their faculty for knowledge, something that in turn both derives from and further drives humanity’s social existence. But how exactly, according to Montesquieu, does the development of social life affect the emotional life of human beings? One clue can be found in book 1, chapter 3, where the descent of the state of nature into a state of war sheds further light on how Montesquieu conceived of the passions. It is sometimes noted that the state of war in Montesquieu’s opening chapters may pose a problem for his initial assertion regarding the peaceful tendencies of humans in their natural state. Some suggest that his rejection of Hobbes is a rhetorical flourish designed to hide what is deep down an underlying affinity.17 Others suggest that Montesquieu is following here a general convention of the natural law tradition as can be found in Locke where a state of war emerges eventually from a state of essential peace and is a condition necessary for explaining the need for more formal political institutions. So how does this war come about? First of all (contrary to Hobbes), equality does not serve to institute a state of war; instead we are shown that war emerges from a shared perception of a lack of equality: “Sitôt que les hommes sont en société, ils perdent le sentiment de leur faiblesse; l’égalité, qui était entre eux, cesse, et l’état de guerre commence” (book 1, chap. 3, 11). What is also of importance is that war develops through an awareness of the relative strength of one group vis-à-vis another, whether it be one nation against another, or a group of individuals within a particular society: “Chaque société particulière vient à sentir sa force; ce qui produit un état de guerre de nation à nation. Les particuliers, dans chaque société, commencent à sentir leur force; ils cherchent à tourner 17 See, for example, Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism.

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en leur faveur les principaux avantages de cette société; ce qui fait entre eux un état de guerre” (book 1, chap. 3, 11). So the possibility of war, as Shaftesbury stated before Montesquieu, does not contradict the idea of the fundamental sociability of human beings but indeed confirms it, because war is fought by and in the name of particular social groupings, and it serves as an instrument to preserve varied benefits of a social existence.18 What is the place of passions in this account? In the initial natural state, each human being is said by Montesquieu to have the same natural sentiments and to be drawn to roughly the same types of things. So the initial state of equality corresponds to a general uniformity of human beings. According to Montesquieu’s account, the first instances of more intense emotional experience particular to human beings occur in the founding of families and the onset of war – that is, they occur at the very 18 “How the wit of man should so puzzle this cause as to make civil government and society appear a kind of invention and creature of art, I know not. For my own part, methinks, this herding principle and associating inclination is seen so natural and strong in most men, that one might readily affirm it was even from the violence of this passion that so much disorder arose in the general society of mankind. “Universal good, or the interest of the world in general, is a kind of remote philosophical object. That greater community falls not easily under the eye. Nor is a national interest or that of a whole people or body politic so readily apprehended. In less parties, men may be intimately conversant and acquainted with one another. They can there better taste society and enjoy the common good and interest of a more contracted public. They view the whole compass and extent of their community, and see and know particularly whom they serve and to what end they associate and conspire. All men have naturally their share of this combining principle, and they who are of the sprightliest and most active faculties have so large a share of it that, unless it be happily directed by right reason, it can never find exercise for itself in so remote a sphere as that of the body politic at large. For here perhaps the thousandth part of those whose interests are concerned are scarce so much as known by sight. No visible band is formed, no strict alliance, but the conjunction is made with different persons, orders and ranks of men, not sensibly, but in idea, according to that general view or notion of a state or commonwealth. “Thus the social aim is disturbed for want of certain scope. The close sympathy and conspiring virtue is apt to lose itself for want of direction in so wide a field. Nor is the passion anywhere so strongly felt or vigorously exerted as in actual conspiracy or war in which the highest geniuses are often known the forwardest to employ themselves. For the most generous spirits are the most combining. They delight most to move in concert and feel, if I may say, in the strongest manner the force of the confederating charm. “It is strange to imagine that war, which of all things appears the most savage, should be the passion of the most heroic spirits. But it is in war that the knot of fellowship is closest drawn. It is in war that mutual succour is most given, mutual danger run, and common affection most exerted and employed. For heroism and philanthropy are almost one and the same. Yet by a small misguidance of the affection, a lover of mankind becomes a ravager; a hero and deliverer becomes an oppressor and destroyer. “Hence, other divisions among men. Hence, in the way of peace and civil government, that love of party and subdivision by cabal” (Shaftesbury, “ ‘Sensus communis,’” 52).



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time of the heightening of varied forms of group consciousness. As social groups including families and nations are formed, they begin to develop a sense of their particular needs, desires, and entitlements in contrast to others. So while passions certainly can differ from one individual to another, Montesquieu reminds us in his opening passages of De l’esprit des lois of the social character of the passions – social, because they require a social context to develop and become uniquely and intensely human, and because they reflect not only aspects of individual identity but aspects of our shared identities as well. Passions associated with war such as hate, fear, and the desire to dominate are the most primordial passions that human beings can have, but they are also the most social because they call us back to a sense of our particular collective needs. There is a definite kinship between this implicit theory in the first book of De l’esprit des lois and contextualism. Insofar as emotion is a complex mix of beliefs, judgments, and desires that depend fundamentally on values and dispositions inherited through cultural transmission, then it can be said that emotion is a social product.19 In the somewhat attenuated version implied by Montesquieu, some natural feelings or sentiments clearly remain outside this dynamic (those from which he derives his “natural laws”). Still, he shares with the mainstream of this approach the idea that the most important factors for understanding human emotion are the attitudes and expectations that a society comes to share. They constitute the most important context insofar as they inform individual judgments that underlie emotional reactions and they help to determine the function and meaning of emotional expression. In the guise of the traditional trope of the social contract used to mark the transition between a state of war and civil society, Montesquieu shows his readers how the complex emotional life of human beings can be tied to the recognition of particular group needs and the struggles that may ensue from this recognition. This is not to say that a system of values is fixed and will always precede the institution of governments. Rather, this dynamic can show how there is a crucial connection among politics, needs, and a basic sense of justice as issuing from a recognition of those needs. Acknowledgment of the connections among a sense of group identity, emotions, a sense of justice, and claims advanced by political communities also helps to explain why Montesquieu can speak at all about the idea of a political principle informing the constitutional nature of government types.20

19 See Armon-Jones, “The Thesis of Constructionism.” 20 See Spector, Pouvoirs, Richesses, Sociétés, 23.

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So in the first instance we can see how Montesquieu’s basic conception of the nature of emotions and the way in which human beings develop relies on unarticulated assumptions about their mainly cognitive nature and about how the human capacity for emotional experience is strongly linked to social factors. How does this view of human development relate more broadly to his political theory? To answer this question, we need to explore his account of the foundation of the legal order and of the principle of government. Montesquieu tells us that the necessarily limited nature of human knowledge will lead to errors in judgment: “Les êtres particuliers intelligents sont bornés par leur nature, et par conséquent, sujets à l’erreur.”21 Human passions can be applied in counterproductive ways, something that is much rarer in animals: “[Les bêtes] même se conservent mieux que nous, et ne font pas un aussi mauvais usage de leurs passions.”22 The weakness of human intelligence and the intensity of human passions (“il est sujet à l’ignorance et à l’erreur,” and  “il devient sujet à mille passions”) lead to a need for laws.23 What brings about this transformation or translates this basic need into a political reality? In the first instance Montesquieu points to the legislators who are said to remind human beings of their basic duties through an invocation of rational judgment. (“Fait d’abord pour vivre dans la société, il y pouvait oublier les autres; les législateurs l’ont rendu à ses devoirs par les lois politiques et civiles”;24 “La loi, en général, est la raison humain, en tant qu’elle gouverne tous les peuples de la terre; et les lois politiques et civiles de chaque nation ne doivent être que les cas particuliers où s’applique cette raison humaine.”25) He also recognizes that the solution will not be universally uniform: “Il vaut mieux dire que le gouvernement le plus conforme à la nature est celui dont la disposition particulière se rapporte mieux à la disposition du peuple pour lequel il est établi.”26 The legislative solution (in the domain of positive law) appears on the face of it as a simple reaction to perceived deficiencies in human capabilities at the level of society; in reality, however, it is much more complicated.27 Legislators cannot be regarded as isolated or immune from the imperfect reason and particular passions that characterize each society. Indeed, political communities are formed in the very process of political conflict. The legislator invoked by Montesquieu 21 Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, I, i, 124. 22 Ibid., I, i, 125. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., I, iii, 128. 26 Ibid. 27 Here I diverge from my analysis in Montesquieu and the Parlement of Bordeaux.



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c­ annot be regarded as a neutral arbiter or someone who can evoke a universal rationality. Law (as reasonableness) is constituted not only against passion but also through passion. It might be helpful here to highlight two competing approaches within seventeenth-century philosophy of mind regarding management of the soul: the Stoic and Augustinian.28 From the beginning of De l’esprit des lois and despite his expressed admiration for the Stoics, we can clearly see Montesquieu’s divergence from their general perspective.29 For the Stoics, passions are the effect of bad judgment, as issuing from an incorrect application of reason. The remedy is right reason.30 In contrast, Montesquieu judges “the uses” that the passions serve. He shares the general Augustinian outlook that human beings are largely driven by passion and that furthermore this is not necessarily a bad thing.31 The passions of the legislators themselves can serve good ends and play an important and positive role in politics. Indeed he expresses his wariness about a possible “excess of reason.”32 For Montesquieu, it is not passion in itself that is denigrated or seen as in dire need of correction. As he states in his Pensées: “Les vices et les vertus humaines sont ordinairement l’effet des passions” (my emphasis).33 So can it really be the case that Montesquieu falls in line with a tradition of thinking inherited from Descartes that individuals can be said to exercise their freedom through independent regulation of the passions in view of standards of social propriety, as recently argued by Kelly?34 I  don’t think so. What I am suggesting by this interpretation of Montesquieu’s work is that the passions went much deeper (or higher) in the human soul and emanated in part from a condition of social

28 See for example James, Reason and Passion, as well as Gaukroger, “Descartes’ Theory of Passions.” 29 He states in XXIV, x: “Il n’y a jamais eu dont les principes fussent plus dignes de l’homme, et plus propres à former des gens de bien, que celle des stoïciens; et, si je ne pouvais un moment cesser de penser que je suis Chrétien, je ne pourrais m’empêcher de mettre la destruction de la secte de Zénon au nombre des malheurs du genre humain” (146). 30 See Cicero, Cicero on the Emotions, 39–70. 31 See, for example, V, xiv, where he tells us that it is a part of the nature of people to be motivated by passion (190). 32 “L’excès même de la raison n’est pas toujours désirable” (XI, vi, 304). 33 Montesquieu, Pensées, art. 2035, 626. 34 See Kelly, The Propriety of Liberty, chap 2. As Kelly states, “Alongside Descartes, Montesquieu thought the soul was clearly affected by its perception of natural, external objects, but that it also nevertheless acts as a mediator to our initial perceptions and the passions that they provoke. This allows us both to retain some independency of judgement through the use of our limited reason, and to allow the soul time to redirect our passions towards those things that are good for us” (90–1).

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connectedness that Descartes remained blind if not hostile to. In line with Montesquieu’s views on the limited usefulness of introspection as a necessary starting point for self-regulation and moral self-improvement, he was more inclined to suggest that the first line in thinking about justice was at the level of the political community itself where practices and inclinations could more readily be shaped by institutions.35 There is an important distinction to be made here between matters of private importance and matters of public importance. In fully private matters, there remains for Montesquieu a great spectrum of possibility for individual agency. In matters of public importance, given the agent’s embeddedness in institutions and networks of affect that precede the agent, the room for self-regulation is minimized to a suitable harnessing and distillation of more positive manifestations of the shared affective outlook. Montesquieu’s notion of the “principle” of government remains fundamentally the counterpart of an institutional or constitutional choice, and by this there will always be a number of policies and laws destined to favour and preserve the appropriate principle through the legislators and positive law. However, there also is an independent dynamic through which the individual, as part of a social group, can contribute to the tone and nuances of that “principle,” in part through a practice of intersubjective encounter with others in tandem with ongoing dialogue concerning the norms and values the group seeks to uphold. All three of these forces contribute to the fashioning of public passion. Is this a case of accepting the fallacy, laid out many years ago by Peter Laslett, of developing a model for analyzing modern politics based on the anachronism of the face-to-face society – that is, relying on ”the assumption that the quality of the psychological relationships between the directive group and society at large is the same as it is within the directive group itself”?36 This is the same fallacy that Laslett applies to followers of Rousseau who continue to think of modern politics through the lens of the general will (or what more modern commentators in a similar but more radical vein might label the mistake of assuming a Derridean “metaphysics of presence” in politics assuming a binary of inclusion and exclusion invoking fundamental features of collective identity).37 I think that Montesquieu’s position is quite immune from these criticisms. As I have demonstrated, I recognize that in a modern context the depth or

35 See Montesquieu, “Eloge de la sincerité,” in Oeuvres complètes de Montesquieu, vol. 8, 133–45. 36 Laslett, “The Face to Face Society,” 170. 37 For a classic critique of the political appropriation of a metaphysics of presence, see Young, “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference.”



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strength of a unifying passion will often be much less intense than what can be predicated of ancient political societies, or indeed of inside ruling committees. Furthermore, I have shown how, in both ancient and more modern applications, the idea does not extend to substantive features of cultural identity and thereby does not eradicate the possibility of plurality or contested politics. Still, regime-based analysis must also allow for more conscious understanding of the affective features of citizenship, both as a better means to understand the nature of politics and as a means to help transform politics, by allowing citizens to understand the degree to which their belonging to a political community has an impact on their character and general outlook. the status of the principle of government as a concept in montesquieu’s theory of politics We have seen how Montesquieu recognized that emotions can be partly cognitive, and that emotions can be linked closely to the development of communities. For Montesquieu the most distinctive trait of different regimes is their underlying collective sentiment: love in a republic, honour in a monarchy, and fear in a despotism. At this juncture it may be helpful to provide a second articulation of the five basic features of public passion I introduced in the second chapter of this book. The first feature, as we have seen in Montesquieu, is that regimes can be in part identified and categorized by the underlying tone of relations among citizens as well as between citizens and their government. Montesquieu distinguishes three main regime types based on this notion: the republic (divided into the subtypes of democracy and aristocracy), the monarchy, and the despotism. There is a slight rupture in Montesquieu’s account of how this feature works. As we have seen, the commentary concerning the origins of government in the first book of De l’esprit des lois focuses on the intersubjective dynamic among individuals and how this dynamic leads to the development of human potentialities, the founding of human communities, and ultimately the animus precipitating a state of war that issues in the setting up of formal government institutions. Once Montesquieu comes to discuss the working of the principles in a functioning political system, however, he tends to ignore the intersubjective dynamic of the principle in terms of how citizens relate to one another (with perhaps a few exceptions in his discussion of the workings of the principle of honour, as we will see in chapter 7), and instead focuses on the relation between citizens and their government. His emphasis in the work is how the principle can animate the nature of government, or, in other words, how public

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passions of citizens contribute to the effectiveness of rule. While this may be one feature of how public passions can operate, in an era of liberal democratic politics we need to modify this focus and consider instead as a higher priority the dynamic and qualities of citizen interaction – just one way in which we will need to go beyond Montesquieu’s analysis to retrieve a viable notion of public passion for contemporary times. Moreover, we will need to reject the typology of three simple types of passion in favour of something more complex. Public passion cannot be reduced to just one emotional quality. Given that citizen interactions at the public level are shaped by multiple factors including the legal structure, the practices of those in power, and the various forms for public dialogues, the quality and tone of these interactions and the expectations they give rise to will be multifaceted. So, for example, a republican regime may cultivate a love for equality in the public realm but still acknowledge a place for honour and differential status among individuals by virtue of their public contributions. So public passion cannot be exhausted by the invocation of one simple emotion, but indeed necessitates a much more finely tuned analysis of what is shared. In a modern liberal democratic regime such as Canada, we may interact with fellow citizens with regard to matters of public importance with general expectations of civil-mindedness, including openness to discussion, goodwill, and a demonstration of a certain love of equality (in that all should get their say and be treated fairly). Still, these expectations could be said to be combined with a slight sense of humility and shame that our political history has many times demonstrated a betrayal of our public principles and may do so again. This point will be further clarified in my concluding chapter but the general thrust here is that public passion as it manifests itself in the contemporary era cannot be reduced to a simple formula of shared love, or shared honour, as suggested by Montesquieu. The broad intersubjective horizon relevant to public matters includes a multiplicity of emotional components combined in a complex way. The second feature of public passion is that it can be driven by what I call both vertical and horizontal dynamics – in other words, shaped from above and through the mutual influence of citizens. While connected to the first feature, this second feature concerns most importantly how public passion is generated, sustained, and transformed. For Montesquieu as for the ancients, this tone of interrelations in a political community was determined largely by both leaders and institutions, though we will see how this idea of ongoing and pervasive elite influence can be challenged in more recent times. As we also will see, however, Montesquieu recognized that the perpetuation of a principle required very different types of action and leadership depending on the principle. In republican



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states, leaders had a great need to regulate actions closely and regularly, whereas the perpetuation of honour in a monarchical regime was often largely a matter of attention to institutional power dynamics rather than the policing of mores. A great number of sociological and technological factors come into play when we consider how political communities in the modern era are shaped. We might suggest that it is now more difficult for political leaders to shape the mores of a society, though perhaps easier for economic elites. In general, however, the shaping of public passion in the contemporary era is a process that occurs more independently of political elites than was considered by Montesquieu or indeed the ancients. There is today (at least in many contemporary liberal democracies) a stronger appreciation of how the work of ordinary citizens and heroes can have a more transformative impact on the public ethos.38 The third feature of public passion is that it is not fully static. It is open to historical evolution as it is shaped by a number of features that themselves are not constant. In De l’esprit des lois Montesquieu suggests that moderate regimes will head eventually toward a path of decline and more authoritarian rule, in part due to a certain level of complacency among citizens and subjects. The principles animating political communities are also open to change through the changing force of other motivating factors such as religion. In contrast to Montesquieu’s analysis, we might suggest that today the most important historical factors impacting our relations with other citizens include the global economy and the leaps and bounds of technology that have changed the face of traditional modes of communication. The fourth feature of public passion is that it may undergo changing intensity as it can be affected by ordinary political vicissitudes. So, for example, in times of war both leaders and citizens may call upon all to renew their love of community and deepen their patriotic fervour to see their homeland triumph. Similarly, as Montesquieu notes, the force of religion in a despotism can attenuate the force of fear. There will be events of public significance that will weaken or strengthen the dominant principle, though not always equally for all. This feature is less readily acknowledged by Montesquieu, except in his discussion of the distinction between republics and aristocracies where he notes that the forces of political evolution will also have an impact on the strength of the principle, thereby having an effect on the tone of citizen interactions. The fifth and final feature of public passion is that it does not rule out the possibility of political conflict and struggle. In a republic, warriors 38 Mongoven, Just Love.

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will compete in battle for the most glory, just as Spartan youth were trained in competition, and the potential for conflict is clear in climates of pervasive political fear as well as widespread interest and ambition. In chapters 6, 7, and 8, I provide a brief overview of some of the features of each motivating principle that Montesquieu singles out as particularly important for political life. These chapters also allow me to deepen the analysis of the five features presented above. However, before turning to the particular passions, it is important to shed light more deeply on the general status of these principles. What role does this feature of political life play in Montesquieu’s theory? Is he making a purely empirical claim, that societies tend to be bound by these collective sentiments, a feature that it is important for rulers to understand in order to govern effectively? Or is he suggesting that the content of these differing collective sentiments has a more fundamental and normative significance? Like many of those who support a more positive recognition of the emotions in politics, Montesquieu is certainly aware of the role that emotions can play in making political motivation stronger. This is particularly important in the case of republics where a great deal of sacrifice is required on the part of the citizen. Without the full force of love of the republic, it is doubtful that the strength or even the possibility of republican political practice could be sustained. In this sense, Montesquieu is providing his reader with a more convincing form of political analysis or explanation than would be possible in more strictly rational accounts, such as those of theorists in the tradition of modern natural law (for example, Grotius or Pufendorf) who sought to explain the working of all regimes solely on the basis of individual rational consent. But it is also clear that Montesquieu is seeking to do more than just offer a convincing description of the workings of regimes. He offers a principle of collective sentiment even in those cases, such as in despotic regimes, where there is no need for an explanation of political motivation on the part of the general population. For Nussbaum, the normative component of a political theory acknowledging the importance of the emotions includes the need for a more thorough account of education to ensure proper development of disposition and character from a young age.39 Montesquieu, like Nussbaum, certainly acknowledges the centrality of education and links it directly to the need to sustain the varying principles. But to what extent do these principles merely sustain existing institutions in a legitimating capacity alone, as opposed to harnessing an ethical vision? 39 Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought.



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Let us look closer at the principle of fear. As has been recognized, people can express both knowledge and evaluation through their emotions, even when shared. The expression of shared fear in the case of despotisms can be seen to say three things. First, it indicates a relatively narrow ground of support for the government from a population, given that a more easily managed relationship of free consent does not or no longer applies. Second, it serves as a recognition of one’s potential vulnerability in the face of power. Finally, it involves an implied collective negative evaluation regarding the appropriateness of the use, or threatened use, of power. A general atmosphere of fear, as opposed to mere disapproval, suggests a lived margin at which the possible future application of power is judged likely to be highly unacceptable and indeed incapacitating in some way. This dynamic, then, points beyond a mere empirical categorization to an overtly normative one. Just as the establishing of political institutions, as discussed by Montesquieu in book 1 of his work, is driven by a need to escape a generalized sense of vulnerability, so political dysfunction is measured in his work largely by how political institutions can avoid a return to that emotional condition of fear and an excessive sense of vulnerability. One measure of the normative status of politics in De l’esprit des lois is the extent to which a regime can fulfill the purposes for which it was instituted as a system of power. Once a political regime becomes debilitating for its citizens, it is judged to be ethically compromised. A significant point in this analysis of Montesquieu’s work is the implication that the measure of the good and evil in politics is not to be determined in many instances through a focus on the rules governing particular actions or decisions, but rather through a consideration of the accumulation of effects of decisions and actions on a particular population. This provides some clues to reflecting on how the idea of public passion can serve a normative theory of politics, a theme that I treat more thoroughly in the concluding chapter of the book. Montesquieu failed in his attempt to bring back a version of the classical account of public passion. Part of this may be due just to the contingencies of history. In particular, the timing of the French Revolution had a significant impact in minimizing receptiveness to normative political theory with a focus on passion. As Reddy argues, many people regarded the Revolution and the Reign of Terror as an outgrowth of eighteenthcentury sentimentalism and resisted a political outlook that elevated emotion over reason.40 40 Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling.

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However, as I have suggested here, Montesquieu’s failure is also due to internal deficiencies in his theory. His analysis is often too simplistic to take into account the more complex nature of shared sentiment in the modern context. As I have also shown, he misjudged the degree to which institutional factors had primacy in the defining of political principles, neglecting both local and global factors at play in the shaping of intersubjective dynamics among citizens. A further weakness relates to the rather tenuous link he draws between this idea of public passion in the principle of government, and an account of the primacy of liberty as a political value. He appears to waver to some degree in De l’esprit des lois between an account of the basic malleability of human beings, such as is required by the regime of republicanism (as we will explore in greater detail in the next chapter), and the ultimate limits that human beings demand of their political institutions. In the famous passages of book XI, vi, and in book XIX, xxvii, Montesquieu discusses the liberty of the English. On the one hand, it would appear that this liberty is achieved as a result of the particular combination of institutional infrastructure and the complex mixture of manners, mores, and informal political habits, such as the constellation of political allegiances in a nascent form of party politics that characterize the British political way of life.41 However, on the other hand, Montesquieu views liberty as a good “which we immediately feel, the nature of which we little understand, and which may easily be disguised.” In other words, this feeling of liberty that is supposed to provide a sort of bulwark against the abuse of political power appears in the end to be more of a product of institutional arrangement than a universal and subjective guarantee against the abuse of power. It is clear that for Montesquieu not all peoples or individuals have this same feeling of liberty. While he is seeking to hoist a subjective attachment to liberty as a normative standard for good politics, his sense of the pervasive corruptibility of human beings and the weakness of this principle as an empirical description of how politics is actually experienced place in question its strength as a foundational normative principle of political life. What Montesquieu lacks here is an argument that could sustain his acknowledgment of the feeling of liberty as a supreme, if not the supreme, political value. Arguably, in the British case it is an aesthetic appreciation for the “superb” that ultimately grounds his endorsement of liberty as a political principle over anything else.42 Thus, while we may wish to follow Montesquieu in looking to the

41 For a thorough analysis of these two chapters, see Courtney’s “Morals and Manners in Montesquieu’s Analysis of the British System of Liberty.” 42 “Les nations libres sont superbes, les autres peuvent plus aisément être vaines” (XIX, xxvii, 583).



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examples of how emotion can work collectively in political life, a modern appreciation of collective emotion that is applicable to debates in contemporary political theory will need to do a better job of providing a grounding for a distinction between acceptable and less acceptable manifestations of public passion. I return to a deeper discussion of the normative dimensions of the theory of public passion in chapter 9. For now, in the next three chapters, I develop a new direction in my analysis. Each of these chapters is dedicated to a discussion of the workings of love, honour, and fear, respectively, as public passion. These chapters can be seen as extensions of the current chapter insofar as they present and discuss Montesquieu’s own analysis of the working of these political principles. They thereby demonstrate in greater detail the actual manifestations of public passion that he saw as dominant in or relevant to his own context. However, I also provide some perspective on his discussion by considering some contemporary literature on the working of these emotions as regime principles. This allows me to develop greater critical perspective on Montesquieu’s analysis, as well as to demonstrate how both the idea and political manifestations of public passion undergo transformation over the course of history as it adapts to various factors prevalent in the historical context.

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Revisiting the Republic of Love

the next three chapters deal with the workings of love, honour, and fear in a public setting. While perhaps not necessary to  build the normative background to my theory of public passion, these chapters help my analysis in two ways. First, in them I explore Montesquieu’s articulation of the working of political principles and thereby demonstrate how his more general ideas regarding the centrality of emotion to politics apply in more concrete terms. Second, this analysis helps me to build a bridge between the articulation of public passion in the eighteenth century and the nature of the phenomenon today. By drawing on a number of authors who look to similar emotional motivations to form conclusions concerning contemporary politics and theory, I explore more contemporary manifestations of public passion. This sets the stage for my concluding discussion on the significance of public passion for a normative theory of politics. Love has once again become an important theme in political theory, as an outgrowth of the efforts of various theorists exploring the positive role that a wide spectrum of emotion brings to political life.1 In general, 1 The authors of some recent works of political theory argue for the relevance of love as a political principle but from very different perspectives and scholarly traditions. See Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place; Hardt and Negri, Multitude; Mendus, Feminism and Emotion; Mongoven, Just Love; and Irigaray, The Way of Love. Hall in The Trouble with Passion also seeks to retrieve a version of Platonic eros that could inform contemporary politics. For a more sceptical resolution of the question, see Martel, Love Is a Sweet Chain. See also Beardsworth, “A Note to a Political Understanding of Love in Our Global Age,” and de Rivera, “Love, Fear and Justice.” Some might wish to argue that the feminist traditions of “maternal thinking” (associated with Sara Ruddick) or the “ethics of care” (associated with Nel Noddings and Carol Gilligan) are in some ways earlier expressions of an advocacy for a principle of love in politics. (See Tong, Feminist Thought, as well as, for example, Gilligan, In a Different Voice, and Noddings, Caring.) In some ways Susan Mendus’s book cited above provides a transition



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this effort appears in part to be a form of resistance to long-standing gender biases within the history of political theory.2 Although greater attention to this area is welcome, it is curious that some theorists have focused on the emotion of love, which is traditionally identified with intimate relations far removed from the public sphere. While the need to reintegrate a consideration of emotions in political life has a number of defenders, others such as Martha Nussbaum follow Adam Smith’s lead in suggesting that love is a personal and idiosyncratic emotion that cannot be evoked or shared at will. Smith argues, and Nussbaum agrees, that the nature of love makes it an impossible and undesirable candidate for public and political action.3

between the two, and indeed there are certain continuities. However, many of the feminist thinkers associated with these earlier traditions place greater emphasis on gender as an explanatory feature of different forms of ethical and political motivation. The variants of an appeal to a principle of love as relevant to politics gestured to in this chapter differ from the “ethics of care” tradition in general by recognizing that the major obstacles as well as vehicles of love in politics are largely separate from gender. As Mendus states in her critical analysis of feminists of the “ethics of care persuasion,” “Feminists too should not act as if the only solidarity worth its name is the one that unites through every aspect of women’s existence. This is not because such solidarity is a chimera, but because, in certain circumstances, it is destructive of basic feminist ideals … feminist moral theory must not rest content with the mere statement of difference, much less with the insistence on radical difference. It must also provide itself with a means of promoting solidarity through difference” (from Mendus, her chapter “Kantian Ethics and Feminist Philosophy,” in Feminism and Emotion, 65). 2 Ann Mongoven in Just Love does a good job of unpacking some of this background. 3 See Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I, ii, 2, 1, and Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity, 100–1. Also see Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge where she focuses on the connections between love and perception and appreciation for particulars in a way necessary for ethical reflection but largely unsuited for political mobilization. Mendus explains Kant’s objection to love as a political principle: “He perceives love as essentially at odds with respect precisely because love exposes us to the ill-will of others and increases the chances of our being harmed by them. Thus he writes, ‘the principle of mutual love admonishes men to come closer to one another; that of the respect they owe to one another, to keep themselves at a distance’ [Kant, The Doctrine of Virtue: Part II of the Metaphysic of Morals, 116] and he goes on to elaborate on this by claiming that the duty of love involves making another’s ends my own (in so far as that is possible), whereas the duty of respect merely enjoins me not to use others as a means to my own ends. What is problematic (and dangerous) about love is that, in making another’s ends my own, I render myself vulnerable.” Indeed, for Kant, friendship itself is better off left subject to the constraints of a sense of mutual respect: “Friendship is something so delicate that it is never for a moment safe from interruptions if it is allowed to rest on feelings and if this mutual sympathy and self-surrender are not subjected to principles or rules preventing excessive familiarity limiting mutual love by the requirements of respect” (Kant, Metaphysic of Morals, 142–3.) See Mendus, “The Importance of Love in Rawls’s Theory of Justice,” in Feminism and Emotion, 169–70.

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What can we make of efforts by political theorists to call upon love as a central or desired motivation in politics? In assessing their arguments, it may be useful to compare these various appropriations of love with earlier attempts in the history of modern political thought to harness love to politics.4 Versions by theorists such as Thomas More and Charles Fourier5 have sometimes been dismissed for their unrealistic and fanatical overtones. How can these newer versions provide anything different? Across the efforts to make love relevant to modern politics, is there a conception of this emotion that makes the project possible and convincing? The extent to which love could be considered a serious and viable principle of social and political life was a central question of late seventeenth and eighteenth century moral theory. Shaftesbury’s attempt to revive Platonism in the form of a theory of benevolence placed reflection about the value of love as a principle of morality at the centre of the intellectual agenda of the time. There is no question that it was also an important consideration for Montesquieu, especially as it relates to his

Still, in the Grounding, Kant does concede that respect can be deemed synonymous with a form of practical love: “For love as an inclination cannot be commanded; but beneficence from duty, when no inclination impels us and even when a natural and unconquerable aversion opposes such beneficence, is practical, and not pathological, love. Such love resides in the will and not in the propensities of feeling, in principles of action and not in tender sympathy; and only this practical love can be commanded.” Of course, this is a form of love that appears to have no connection with emotion, or precisely in a negative way, i.e., an aversion to beneficence but a duty and action of beneficence nevertheless. See Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, section 399. But the question of “feeling” itself becomes somewhat complicated in his formal theory of morality, as he himself acknowledges in a footnote of the Grounding: “There might be brought against me here an objection that I take refuge behind the word ‘respect’ in an obscure feeling, instead of giving a clear answer to the question by means of a concept of reason. But even though respect is a feeling, it is not one received through any outside influence but is, rather, one that is self-produced by means of a rational concept; hence it is specifically different from all feelings of the first kind, which can all be reduced to inclination or fear … The object of respect is, therefore, nothing but the law – indeed that very law which we impose on ourselves and yet recognize as necessary in itself. As law, we are subject to it without consulting self-love; as imposed on us by ourselves, it is a consequence of our will. In the former aspect, it is analogous to fear; in the latter, to inclination” (Kant, Grounding, section 401). 4 Of course in the history of political thought Augustine stands out as the first and most notable example of seeing love as a key form of motivation in all forms of political life. Nonetheless, the difference between Augustine and more modern forms of harnessing love to a theory of politics is that for Augustine much worldly politics of whatever form can be seen as generated by the same broad love of worldly things (and thereby a rejection of God), whereas modern theories of political love most often seek to demonstrate how this emotion informs a particular type of political community as distinguished from others. See Augustine, City of God. 5 More, Utopia; Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements.



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depiction of republican regimes. The first part of this chapter is devoted to an analysis of his discussion of republicanism, the second part to a more general assessment of the idea of a viable principle of love in politics – in particular by exploring the ways in which contemporary conceptions of a form of love in politics overcome some of the weaknesses of Montesquieu’s discussion. My analysis of Montesquieu’s depiction of republicanism argues that his main interlocutors were defenders of moral sense theory who looked to universal principles of natural benevolence and sympathy as a basis for moral judgment. In his portrayal of republicanism and virtue as “love” of the republic, Montesquieu shows how the altruistic sentiments of humankind should be regarded as socially conditioned and not natural in the way that moral sense theorists broadly held them to be. In addition, despite Montesquieu’s nostalgic appreciation for the political possibilities in harnessing love in political life, he was hampered by his critical project. He advanced a conception of love relevant to politics that allowed for neither critical disposition nor a strong sense of self independent of established social and political institutions. In my discussion of Montesquieu’s depiction of republics, I expressly shy away from traditional themes of civic virtue and patriotism, as I believe that those approaches can obfuscate Montesquieu’s rather peculiar discussion of republics. Pocock’s discussion of civic humanism, for example, was structured so as to provide insight into a peculiar stream of English political thought, a stream that did not resonate in the French context in the same way.6 Authors generally identified with the civic humanist tradition did not focus on the motivating element of passion and sentiment as strongly as did Montesquieu, and the literature on Montesquieu as a civic virtue theorist tends to ignore the centrality of passion to his understanding. I focus on the dynamics of love rather than that of virtue. background to montesquieu’s discussion of love and politics In his ongoing polemic against Hobbes, Shaftesbury continued to uphold an idea of shared public passion.7 Shaftesbury noted that passion could work for the benefit as well as the detriment of society. The dynamic of sympathy, or the conveying of the emotional state of one 6 J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. 7 For my reading of Hobbes, see “The Political Relevance of the Emotions from Descartes to Smith.”

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person to another by identification and contact, is called “panic” when passion is spread through the multitude. As Shaftesbury notes, it can be particularly noxious in the case of religious enthusiasm: Popular fury may be called “panic” when the rage of the people, as we have sometimes known, has put them beyond themselves, especially where religion has had to do. And in this state their very looks are infectious. The fury flies from face to face, and the disease is no sooner seen than caught. They who in a better situation of mind have beheld a multitude under the power of this passion, have owned that they saw in the countenances of men something more ghastly and terrible than at other times is expressed on the most passionate occasions. Such force has society in ill as well as in good passions, and so much stronger any affection is for being social and communicative.8

In contrast to his classical counterparts, Shaftesbury viewed these social passions or affections (his term for an emotion tempered in a rational and appropriate way) as not derivative of authority or of the quality of leadership but having an independent dynamic and indeed standing as a collective phenomenon testing the worth of any leaders in managing such reactions. There are many panics in mankind besides merely that of fear. And thus is religion also panic when enthusiasm of any kind gets up as oft, on melancholy occasions, it will. For vapours naturally rise and, in bad times especially, when the spirits of men are low, as either in public calamities or during the unwholesomeness of air or diet, or when convulsions happen in nature, storms, earthquakes or other amazing prodigies – at this season the panic must needs run high, and the magistrate of necessity give way to it. For to apply a serious remedy and bring the sword or fasces as a cure must make the case more melancholy and increase the very cause of the distemper. To forbid men’s natural fears and to endeavour the overpowering them by other fears, must needs be a most unnatural method. The magistrate, if he be any artist, should have a gentler hand and, instead of caustics, incisions and amputations, should be using the softest balms, and, with a kind sympathy, entering into the concern of the people and taking, as it were, their passion upon him, should, when he has soothed and satisfied it, endeavour, by cheerful ways, to divert and heal it.9

The polemic against Hobbes shines out forcefully here, as Shaftesbury notes the ineffectiveness of fighting fear with fear. However, throughout 8 Shaftesbury, “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm to My Lord,” 7. 9 Ibid.



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most of his writings, he highlights a more positive side of collective passion, what he calls the “social affection.” This sense of public good shared by certain communities he sees as a necessary component of moral virtue. While he considers this conception as an important continuation of a classical idea concerning the centrality of emotion in political life, it may inadvertently have had contrary effects. In his most famous essay, “An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit,” Shaftesbury discusses the foundations of moral virtue as well as virtue’s relation to religion. He places great emphasis on the natural sociability of humankind and argues that all human beings share a natural sense of right and wrong, prior to all social conventions. Reason, for Shaftesbury, is the human faculty that allows us to recognize and approve of the good. The social affection is that which evokes a devotion to the good of one’s fellow human beings, and it is a central component of virtue, along with the natural affection one must have toward oneself: “To stand thus well affected and to have one’s affections right and entire not only in respect of oneself but of society and the public: this is rectitude, integrity or virtue.”10 In conversation with the moralists of his day, Shaftesbury contemplates but ultimately rejects the possibility of a fundamental conflict between the virtues relevant to the self and those relevant to society as a whole. He argues that each of these natural affections can be carried to excess and that the art of virtue is one of balancing the interests of the self with those of society, as can be seen naturally in communities of animals.11 In the practice of the art of fashioning the natural affections in an appropriate way, public authorities have an important role to play, both in terms of establishing laws that encourage virtuous behaviour and in setting good examples for the community by their own behaviour.12

10 Shaftesbury, “An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit,” 192. 11 Ibid., 199–200. 12 “Thus in a civil state or public we see that a virtuous administration and an equal and just distribution of rewards and punishments is of the highest service, not only by restraining the vicious and forcing them to act usefully to society, but by making virtue to be apparently the interest of everyone, so as to remove all prejudices against it, create a fair reception for it and lead men into that path which afterwards they cannot easily quit. For thus a people raised from barbarity or despotic rule, civilized by laws, and made virtuous by the long course of a lawful and just administration, if they chance to fall suddenly under any misgovernment of unjust and arbitrary power, they will on this account be the rather animated to exert a stronger virtue in opposition to such violence and corruption. “But though a right distribution of justice in a government be so essential a cause of virtue, we must observe in this case that it is example which chiefly influences mankind and forms the character and disposition of a people. For a virtuous administration is in a manner necessarily accompanied with virtue in the magistrate. Otherwise it could be of little effect and of no long duration. But where it is sincere and well established, there virtue and

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While Shaftesbury limits the proper scope of social affection to those things that show devotion to the public good but do not undermine the good of the self, he appropriates but modifies the classical view. In the course of highlighting the role of social affections and passions for a proper understanding of moral virtue and political theory, he also narrows their characterization to one of shared devotion to the community. The collective passions of fear, disgust, shame, and others are here put aside in the effort to show the primacy of social affection. For Shaftesbury, public passion has become identified with, and therefore restricted to, an ideal devotion to the common good. making sense of montesquieu’s portrait of republicanism Shaftesbury’s conception of love as harnessed to politics can be regarded as Montesquieu’s central target in his notion of virtue as love of the republic.13 He singles out two aspects in particular in his description of republican regimes that provide a critical counterpart to Shaftesbury’s vision: first, to show that moral sense or virtue as devotion to the common good is not a product of nature but rather of social and political convention; and second, to show that the relationship between the good of the self and the good of others through love of the common is not a seamless one. At the beginning of De l’esprit des lois Montesquieu provides a definition of republican virtue as the love of country, deemed synonymous with a love of equality.14 He is careful to distinguish this concept as a

the laws must necessarily be respected and beloved. So that, as to punishments and rewards, their efficacy is not so much from the fear or expectation which they raise as from a natural esteem of virtue and detestation of villainy, which is awakened and excited by these public expressions of the approbation and hatred of mankind in each case” (ibid., 186). 13 Here I differ from Duncan Kelly, who suggest that Montesquieu had more in common with Shaftesbury. See Kelly, The Propriety of Liberty, 65–7. 14 Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, 111. As a prelude, one should also examine his treatment of the concept in his early works. In letter 12 of Lettres persanes, the virtuous society of the Troglodytes is portrayed as a community in which self-interest and common interest coincide and which bears much affinity to a Ciceronian formulation. In De l’esprit des lois the identity of the two is transformed into a preference for the public interest which assumes that conflicts are inevitable. In Lettres persanes he also presents his understanding as a strict dichotomy between virtue and laws, arguing that the introduction of one will destroy the other. This can be contrasted with his later understanding of the possible support that laws can provide in promoting political virtue despite their continued potential to supersede and weaken it also. In his Treatise on Duties (1725) Montesquieu first provides a definition of virtue in terms of a love for other citizens and for order in the state. He recognizes a possible conflict



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political term from moral or Christian virtue and asserts that this meaning of virtue is a new one. His claim for novelty, however, does not seem to affect his implicit argument that this portrayal of political virtue provides an accurate historical picture of the dynamics of republican politics.15 In book III he acknowledges a possible overlap of political and moral virtue in that both appeal to some notion of the common good, but he also acknowledges that the particular virtues of character that come into play in a complete discussion of ethical virtue do not have their counterpart in political virtue.16 To make sense of this apparent tension, we might say that in an Aristotelian framework, the excellence of character and the actions that define this character are measured through an understanding of the highest virtue of the excellent individual, or phronimos. If there is any recognized commitment to the common good in virtue, it is something that is discovered through post facto reflective judgment, for the standard of good action is not consideration for the good of the whole but rather the action as it would have been performed by the virtuous individual.17 What this means in general is that there is no pre-determined principle that will guarantee that all ethical actions will serve the common good, and indeed the end of individual virtue as happiness or fulfillment can in many circumstances be exercised with little concern for the state of the broader social context, such as in the exercise of the highest intellectual virtue in contemplation. In contrast, the devotion to the public good in Montesquieu’s conception of political virtue serves as a cornerstone and basic principle of orientation from which any other judgment of virtue must flow. Thus, again from an Aristotelian perspective, Montesquieu is quite right to suggest that while there may be practical overlap, in general terms his conception of political virtue can be seen to be quite distinct from that of moral virtue. It is also on this basis that he accurately distinguishes his understanding of

­ etween this general virtue aimed at the common good and more specific virtues which b may be sacrificed in promoting the former (Oeuvres complètes, 1964 ed., 172–5.) 15 The fact that the passage distinguishing political and moral virtue was added later by Montesquieu (printed in the 1757 edition) in the midst of his quarrels with religious authorities is evidence of this. 16 De l’esprit des lois, 148. Shackleton, following Faguet, has argued that Montesquieu did intend an absolute identification of virtue and moral goodness and cites a passage from book V to support his view: “The love of country leads to the goodness of morals and the goodness of morals leads to love of country” (Shackleton, Montesquieu, 273). However, this passage only shows a certain linkage, not their interchangeability. 17 This is one reason why Aristotle has been called a philosophical egoist. See Thomas Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value, and his remarks in a commentary at the conference Is There Progress in Ethics?, University of Toronto, 7 October 2006.

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political virtue from the theological virtues, premised as they are on a fundamental love of God. So political virtue serves as an analytical tool that can overlap with one contingent outcome of moral virtue in the object of its concern (the good of the whole). It is also motivated by collective sentiment.18 In book IV he defines the concept once more as the love of the laws and of the country, a love that involves a renunciation of self and a continued preference for the public interest.19 In examining Montesquieu’s republican principle as a form of love harnessed to politics, we need to reflect on three things. First, what are the general features of this emotion as experienced both individually and collectively? Second, how do these features compare to Shaftesbury’s notion of the “social affection” defended in his political writings? And third, what purposes and consequences underlie this portrait of ancient and modern republican politics? Commentators on Montesquieu’s portrayal of republican politics generally focus on two overriding features: the intensity of the devotion required of Montesquieu’s republican citizens in general (although with a lesser intensity in an aristocratic republican setting), and the rather “unnatural” mechanisms of educational and institutional constraints needed to shape these dispositions in an ongoing way. Of course, on further reflection, any social disposition in Montesquieu’s view is shaped by political institutions and social convention. Just as the principle of honour in a monarchy derives not from nature but from an education in the “world,” or the “mondain,” so the principle of fear derives from particular circumstances related to the institutional dynamics of despotic governments. Thus at one level it is incorrect to suggest that “love of the republic” is in any way less natural than any other of the political emotions Montesquieu describes. This, indeed, is one of the basic lessons of his emotional typology. It serves to suggest – against, I would argue, both theorists of self-interest and theorists inclined to the idea of moral sense, like Shaftesbury – that any general politically useful outlook develops naturally and independently. Instead, Montesquieu shows clearly and forcefully that there are competing impulses in the nature of human beings and that it is only in specific types of social and political contexts that some types of impulses will be favoured and others discouraged.20

18 De l’esprit des lois, 160. 19 Ibid., 160. 20 For the full argument to support this view, see my discussion in chapter 5 of the characteristics of Montesquieu’s state of nature and state of war in the transition to civil society.



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So if we can suggest that all the emotional states associated with political regimes are a product of convention, why does Montesquieu single out political virtue as the kind of political principle that requires “the full power of education” (De l’esprit des lois, IV, 5)? To answer this it is first important to remember what constitutes an emotion for Montesquieu. As we have seen in our analysis of book I of De l’esprit des lois, his view of emotion recognizes the importance of both bodily reaction and cognition, depending on the emotion and the circumstances.21 He speaks of moments in the lives of individuals when the body is more influential, and others when the mind is, but in general he is critical of a strict materialist and deterministic approach to these matters.22 While he is often quoted as recognizing the basic passionate nature of human beings, he is reticent to make the commonplace distinction of his day between what we might call “pure” emotion, or truly passive emotion in the original sense of passion, and “rational” emotion, a distinction that can be traced back to the Stoics.23 While the Stoics could be cognitivist yet maintain the view that there were both proper and improper judgments that led to either worthy or inappropriate emotional states, Montesquieu was not willing to make the relative tranquility of the soul a standard of emotional rectitude. So the Stoic distinction between humane or worthy emotional states and inappropriate ones is replaced in Montesquieu by the distinction between those that in a certain political setting require particular institutionalized forms of cultivation or regulation and those that are more directly derivative of a specific social dynamic and so require less direct political regulation. The reason for the need of more direct political intervention in the case of republics is that a preference for oneself, a preference that is developed in all social settings, is the most antithetical to this principle of love as construed by Montesquieu. The forms of direct political intervention required to instill a sense of love of the republic are well known. These include a community of goods, sumptuary laws, and strict regulation of commerce (as praised in Plato’s Laws and Plutarch’s Moralia – De l’esprit des lois, V, vi, and VII, ii),

21 As discussed in chapter 2, the classic statement of the first view can be found in James, “What Is an Emotion?” See also Lange, The Emotions. The cognitive view can encompass a wide variety of interpretations, ranging from a pure cognitivism (that emotion essentially is judgment) to a more relaxed version (that emotion entails some form of judgment). For a reading of the former see Solomon, The Passions, and Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire; for an example of the latter, see, for example, Robinson, “Emotion, Judgment and Desire,” and Greenspan, “A Case of Mixed Feelings.” A general overview of these issues can be seen in Stephen Leighton, Philosophy and the Emotions. 22 For further clarification of this, see chapter 5. 23 For an excellent discussion of this, see Cicero, Cicero on the Emotions.

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as well as strict inheritance laws (V, v), censors (V, vii), and other institutions for the policing of mores (VII, x). At times Montesquieu refers to the set of these institutions, or some combination thereof, as necessary for the suppression of the passions, but here we may assume that he is referring to a strong sense of ambition and self-centredness. On closer inspection, the “education” effected by these institutions is very little. They work for the most part in a negative way, banning luxury and disallowing the transfer of property and certain behaviour. Montesquieu does not focus on what could be called the more positive ways that one might encourage a greater sense of community, such as through Periclean oratory or through epic poetry (where the recitation of grand accounts of past heroic action would serve to spur the citizens to greater and greater achievements) or even the simple Lycurgan devices of sussitia (eating meals in common). Indeed, there is a sense in Montesquieu’s account that the point of republican institutions is not really to foster or develop a sense of love of the republic at all but merely to preserve something that has predated the laws for as long as it can be preserved. It would seem that in the case of the republic, education consists not in leading citizens toward a positive model of development but rather in seeking to stave off the inevitable moment of corruption. So what are the laws seeking to preserve? If we take Montesquieu’s cognitivist inclinations seriously in his description of emotions, then what the laws seek to preserve in a republic is in part a collective judgment regarding the fundamental importance of the community, a judgment that would appear to entail a larger measure of personal effort for strictly public outcomes than that deemed acceptable by most of Montesquieu’s contemporaries. It is inappropriate to speak of sacrifice in this instance, for as Montesquieu himself states, “For people who have to have nothing but the necessities, there is left to desire only the glory of the homeland and one’s own glory” (VII, ii). The influx of luxury in a republic will change the dynamic by multiplicating desires ultimately leading to a predominant preference of self over others. We can see that Montesquieu’s analysis clashes with Shaftesbury’s on at least two key points. In the first instance, Montesquieu shows us how the principle of placing the community first is not one that applies universally and consistently to all human beings in the way that Shaftesbury would claim it to be. Instead, the principle of high priority for the community is one that is related to specific institutional and historical contingencies. Moral sense as deemed by some seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers to be the basis for all moral motivation cannot be regarded as a universalist account.



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In addition, Montesquieu questions the possible and easy reconciliation of personal and public goods for an individual, as suggested by Shaftesbury. While Shaftesbury regards the moral sense through the mechanism of social affection as in no way impeding individual interest, Montesquieu suggests that there is no obvious balance between the individual and the common good. In a republic where a citizen “should live, act and think” only for the sake of the homeland (V, xix), a commitment to the common good trumps all: “Virtue here asks for the continuous sacrifice to the state of oneself and one’s aversions” – including what would otherwise be regarded as assaults to one’s honour (V, xix). Montesquieu shows that taking the good of the community seriously, as laid out in the same Platonic sources consulted by Shaftesbury, requires a set of practices that by any modern perspective would be perceived to be inimical to individual interests.24 What might be the reasons for Montesquieu taking on Shaftesbury in this way and providing this reading of the historical record of republican politics?25 The absence of this earlier form of political love is one of the major points of contrast between the ancient and the modern world as depicted by Montesquieu, something that helps to explain the deficiencies of modern republics: “[In monarchies] the state continues to exist independently of love of the homeland, desire for true glory, self-­ renunciation, sacrifice of one’s dearest interests, and all those heroic virtues we find in the ancients and know only by hearsay” (III, v). From 24 It could be suggested here that in summary Montesquieu’s critique is basically that Shaftesbury, precisely in his idea of social affection, is radically underestimating the tension between Platonism and modernity. (Thanks to R. Beiner for this suggestion.) 25 I have argued previously that Montesquieu’s understanding of virtue as love of the republic and love of equality and frugality (or moderation in its aristocratic distillation) blurs important cultural, social, and historical distinctions in the uses of the concept in the classical world of both Greece and Rome; moreover, it is misguided in its focus on internal motivation and thereby ignores the importance of deeds (military or otherwise) and a certain public recognition (whether glory be the object of action or not) which are tied in one form or another to these conceptions. Montesquieu’s definition does capture a reality of ancient life in that it recognizes the strong devotion to a way of life and political project that was a foundation for republican society. However, in classical sources this devotion is never identified with virtue itself but only recognized as a condition of its possibility. In addition, historically it is often acknowledged that the development of democratic republicanism was due to a widening of traditional aristocratic categories that conferred specific expectations and obligations on it members. It would be difficult to hold that the virtue of aristocratic regimes as the initial source of the sense and meaning of democratic privileges and honours was in essence a “lesser” one, or “une vertu moindre,” as Montesquieu states. See my essay, “Montesquieu and the Metamorphosis of Political Virtue,” delivered at the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Pittsburgh, 1993.

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the perspective of citizenship, the break between republics and monarchies is irreparable, and any reading of the work as an effort to bridge the two traditions cannot be sustained.26 It is not that humanity is no longer capable of feeling such things politically: for Montesquieu there are reasons why humanity is not willing to make and sustain those judgments that would inform and sustain political virtue. Whatever one might say regarding his ultimate position over the possibility of a revised modern form of republicanism as an institutional model, there is no question that the force of Montesquieu’s analysis here comes from a clear sense of the obsolescence of the political role of love, understood as an overriding commitment to the welfare of the political community as a whole, a generalized commitment that would give leaders the ability to govern a political community with very few formal legal sanctions. Political virtue requires this collective dimension and the participation of all, as it is only on this basis that no single citizen is singled out and that all remain in a standing of equality; otherwise, single acts of sacrifice can be reconstrued as acts of distinction and hence ultimately linked to self-interest (such as the case of the Comte D’Orte).27 What most clearly distinguishes Montesquieu and Shaftesbury on the question of emotion and politics is that Shaftesbury seeks ultimately to reduce acceptable forms of political motivation to one emotional force, that of the social affection, a form of assent and rational modification and moderation of general drives of devotion to the community. In contrast, Montesquieu shows how there can be competing and highly effective forms of psychological motivation suited to very different types of political situations. For Montesquieu, the emotional underpinnings of honour and fear, underpinnings that Shaftesbury would call dysfunctional for politics, emerge as highly functional and rational responses of citizens in particular social and political contexts. Montesquieu thereby shows us that we should not be reductionist in our assessment of the emotions relevant to politics (or in modern terms, should not seek to categorize emotions as fully “good” or “bad” for politics), but should recognize the full gamut of public emotions that can function either well or poorly, depending on the political circumstances.28 One strength of Montesquieu’s analysis here is that it allows for an appreciation of a larger spectrum of political behaviour. He may have

26 Cf. Spector, “Montesquieu: Critique of Republicanism?” 27 For a full discussion of the Comte d’Orte in De l’esprit des lois, see Krause’s Liberalism with Honor. 28 For further discussion regarding the “negative-positive polarity,” see Sokolon, “Feelings in the Political Philosophy of J.S. Mill.”



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r­ eferred to Shaftesbury as a great “poet,” thereby with some appeal for utopian dreamers about new worlds, but in terms of providing a framework for understanding a wide range of political behaviour, he thought Shaftesbury’s analysis proved weak. In relation to their respective understandings of the working of love in politics, Montesquieu recognized the point, carried into some present day analysis, that a focus on love as a political principle leads to a general breakdown of the traditional public/private distinction in politics and not simply to their reconciliation as Shaftesbury suggests.29 This point is the basis for Montesquieu’s assertions from different perspectives of how love as a motivation can provide a radical challenge to established and traditional patterns of political action in the contemporary context.30 It also helps to account for how his depiction of the politics of republics played an important role in the development of a tradition of fundamental political critique, as it provided a basis for a negative conception of the political formalism associated with modern liberalism.31 There is an element of irony in all this insofar as Montesquieu did not overtly intend the nostalgic tone of his invocation of republican virtue to be a clarion call for a renaissance of classical virtue in contemporary politics (and here, as many have noted, he did not follow the path of his civic humanist English associate Bolingbroke).32 Even those who may regard Montesquieu as a defender of republican politics for the contemporary era do so largely with the vision in mind of a new political principle, one more clearly reconciled with the politics of honour and self-interest.33 It would seem that in the minds of most of his readers, Montesquieu’s invocation of the principle of love in politics was retrieved only with the intent to more fully disqualify it. Still, the strong critical tradition that emerged from Montesquieu’s depiction of republicanism, a tradition traced by Bernard Yack, is evidence of a deeper resonance, appeal, and indeed political relevance and  veracity to that representation, a veracity that goes well beyond Montesquieu’s citation of contemporary examples from Pennsylvania and Paraguay (IV, vi). While it may prove difficult to unpack fully all the factors that go into this complex dynamic of literal implausibility yet phenomenal verisimilitude, I would venture that part of the explanation may lie in the incompleteness of Montesquieu’s analysis with regards to

29 On this point see Mendus, Feminism and Emotion, 3. 30 See, for example, ibid., as well as Hardt and Megri, Multitude. 31 See, for example, Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution. 32 See Spector, “Montesquieu: Critique of Republicanism?” 33 See, for example, Hulliung, Montesquieu and the Old Regime.

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the nature and working of the political principle of love. To be more precise, the principle as Montesquieu invokes and describes it provides a good representation of singular examples of motivation in politics or in other realms of life, and by that provides a basis for a phenomenally acceptable account, yet fails as a depiction of the motivation of a whole community on an ongoing basis; thereby it works as a more negative example in the context of the broader lessons put forward in the work. What Montesquieu leaves out is a discussion of the psychological complexities associated with the very idea of a political principle, and of the very different ways in which love (as first and foremost the revealing of a judgment about priorities) might manifest itself in an institutionalized way in a public forum, as opposed to in its very private manifestations. In particular, might it be possible to say that the extreme element of loss of self in the other portrayed by Montesquieu in his depiction of republics is a mapping of the psychology of a particular form of love onto politics (and because of this partial truth it may have an appeal for us), but that in general, political manifestations of love on a collective basis would actually take quite a different form? returning to love as a principle of government? Given the diversity of accounts in political theory that have invoked the idea of love as a corrective to some of the woes of contemporary conceptions of politics, is there anything that is common to them and any lesson that can be retained from them? I do not purport to provide here an indepth and full analysis of all the various works in contemporary political theory that draw on the idea of love as a concept central for understanding political community today. The traditions from which they come are too distinct and the theoretical backgrounds of their varying positions too diverse. A full comparison of their scope and import would also be of no great benefit as it would involve too large a detour into what are largely incommensurable frameworks. Still, at least to gain better perspective on what counts as a more compelling account of the possible relevance of love for politics, an overview of how the concept of love is used in at least some of these theories is useful, with no claims for this being a comprehensive or exhaustive account. As we saw, Montesquieu recognized that a set of economic and social conditions quite specific to an earlier age were essential conditions for even the possibility of conceiving a principle of politics centred on love. Interestingly, in the wake of contemporary liberalism, many theorists today would be dismissive of the idea that there might be any viability or even suitability of appealing to love as relevant to contemporary



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politics – not for reasons of an institutional kind (that is, the difficulty of legislating moderation and frugality in a world dominated by global commerce) but rather for reasons related to the nature of love itself. In particular, various theorists have noted that the nature of love makes it incompatible with public principles of liberalism, given the impossibility to mandate it on a universal basis, the personal fragility it generally involves, and its ongoing association with life in the private realm. So how it is possible to appeal to love for politics in a contemporary context? Does it require a unique conception of love? Or a radically different perspective on the realities of our political context? Love has been invoked as a valuable addition to debates in contemporary liberal theory in at least three different ways: as a basis for better understanding the motivational necessities for a theory of liberal democratic justice (Mendus and Hall); as an underlying feature of the historical essence of modern liberal societies, a feature that makes up for some of the conceptual inadequacies of liberalism (Kahn); and as an inspiration for a new form of attention to others that could overcome the reified nature of relations within contemporary society (Irigaray, Hardt, and Negri).34 All three invocations, in different ways, have recourse to the concept of love as a means to overcome perceived inadequacies of what could be construed as the ontological basis of liberalism (to use the Taylorian sense of ontological) or the idea that individuals in liberal democratic society fashion and pursue their conceptions of the good autonomously. In each case, love enters in where the theorist seeks to explore the way in which relationships across society could or indeed do have a deep impact or transformative effect on how liberal subjects understand themselves and their goals. Love is not regarded as a mechanism through which leaders can fashion truly altruistic citizens out of self-interested ones; rather, it is a means through which an awareness of both the distinctiveness of citizens one from the other, as well as their common embeddedness in a shared liberal democratic political order, leads to a certain sense of open-endedness. This open-endedness can be regarded as a prior sense of commitment to a community before knowing fully what that commitment will bring; or as a willingness to entertain the possibility of transformation in the exchange of visions in the search for collective justice; or as a deeper sense of understanding of others, even if not appreciation of them. In broad terms, the love of contemporary times conceived as relevant for politics is not the intense form of passion that subsumes and overtakes all sense of self and individually 34 See Mendus, “The Importance of Love in Rawls’s Theory of Justice”; Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place; Irigaray, The Way of Love; Hardt and Negri, Multitude.

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conceived goals, but a love in attunement and openness to transformation without necessarily capitulation. Let us look briefly at these three visions that on the surface appear so radically different but provide a similar logic with regard to the manifestation of political love in a contemporary context. A first approach is to suggest that contemporary politics can be supplemented by a greater selfunderstanding that provides a better account of the motivation of liberal democratic citizens. Hall seeks to appropriate a new version of Platonic eros as a form of enthusiasm for political goods, to capture a sense of passion that is necessary for politics in a liberal democratic context.35 Similarly, Mendus seeks through an analysis of Rawls to show how a commitment to justice, explored by Rawls in the latter section of A Theory of Justice, can in part be understood as a “special case of love,” open to possible costs and disappointments.36 In contrast to many of Rawls’s critics and indeed even many of his strong allies, Mendus argues for the coherence of Rawls’s account, even though Rawls himself was led eventually to concede to some of his critics in Political Liberalism.37 For Mendus, if readers of Rawls entertain a particular conception of love involving not the abandonment of self but rather an openness to a redefinition of one’s own conception of the good in light of another recognized or perceived to be valuable and good, then these readers should not expect the question of motivation to be set up as a question of how justice can be made congruent with self-interest. She suggests that individuals do not need to abandon their own interests but rather, through love and a sense of the goodness of justice, they may be led to transform those interests. Paul Kahn, in contrast, in Putting Liberalism in Its Place, provides his readers with an account of the ontological foundation of modern political community, a foundation that both grounds and goes beyond the fundamental tenets of the liberal theory and society that it upholds.38 In particular, Kahn argues that liberalism (rooted as it is largely in a theory of the social contract and seeking in modern terms to place law prior to sovereignty) is misguided as to the formation and foundation of the principles it advocates. Only by unveiling the act and necessity of sacrifice or love as a founding commitment to political community can we begin to provide a coherent account of the essence of modern community and of the liberal principles that flow from it. Kahn argues that

35 Hall, The Trouble with Passion, esp. chap. 2. 36 Mendus, “The Importance of Love in Rawls’s Theory of Justice,” 59; Rawls, A Theory of Justice. 37 Rawls, Political Liberalism. 38 See Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place, 10.



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modern liberalism has been blind to the fundamental importance of love and sacrifice to the grounding of liberal community, a blindness that has helped to shape a general attitude of theoretical and cultural imperialism that has made it impossible for most modern liberals to even begin to understand the significance of cultural conflict. Kahn suggests that the moment of popular sovereignty, as a necessary condition for the possibility of liberal politics, requires a deeper conception of the will than liberal theory generally supposes. In particular, the experience of the will, as the experience through which individuals form a community, is one that reveals love both as the expression of a transcendent meaning and as the more basic commitment to sacrifice for the sake of maintaining the community39: “Against liberalism’s conception of love as private, we must see the way in which love is public. For the end of love is creation of a meaningful world.”40 Kahn regards love as clearly cognitive as a mode of experiencing objective claims about the world (but not rational and governed by judgment as measured by traditional Enlightenment conceptions of reason). Kahn clearly likens his understanding of love to a form of eros. But unlike Hall, who seeks through the concept of eros to show how political actors devote themselves to a broad range of possible projects and visions of the good, Kahn conceives of political eros as attuned to possibilities, but in a “generative” way, that is, linked to the production and labour associated with families and communities (as opposed to the romantic and pornographic as forms of rebellious eros).41 The basic nature of love central to politics for Kahn is the experience of this character or power of ourselves as subjects who within the basic structures of family and community give and discover meaning as a salvation from our own mortality and finitude.42 It is only by a reliance on these particular forms of loving attachment that the modern liberal project is possible. And these loving attachments mean that a basic understanding and acceptance of the possibility of sacrifice are embedded in the heart of modern political community. It is interesting to note that, contrary to Kant, Adam Smith, and others who see eros as fundamentally fragile and idiosyncratic and thereby unsuitable for politics, Kahn views eros as the only real means that modern individuals have to create a more permanent and meaningful existence.

39 Ibid., 17–18. 40 Ibid., 144. 41 Ibid., 218. 42 Ibid., 222–4.

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But while Kahn’s project may seem to work for the glorification and even sanctification of existing forms of political community, other theorists see an absence of love in current political practice and thereby focus on the possible transformative possibilities of a new politics of love. Hardt and Negri suggest that the concept of love needs to be released from the household where it has been imprisoned by modern ideologies.43 This release will allow love to become a binding force in a revolutionary project against global networks and biopower.44 They draw on pre-modern traditions to suggest that love can be conceived as a political act helping to construct the resisting multitude as a basis for political projects in common. While this concept is left largely untheorized in their manifesto, it would appear that the idea of love as shared will for a common political good is the basis of their understanding. It is through love, furthermore, that the “multitude” as a community of resistance is constructed. Another attempt to draw on love as a means to introduce important changes in social and political practice is found in the work of Irigaray.45 While she draws on a concept of love that on the surface seems to have little in common with the view of Hardt, Negri, Mendus, and Kahn, closer analysis shows her understanding to share a great deal with theirs. At the outset, Irigaray’s project is in principle more radical than any of these thinkers. With clear Heideggerian insight, she is less concerned with the rigidity of contemporary liberal thinking or practices than with the whole tradition of Western thinking that has concentrated on the fixity of logos to the detriment of a focus on the fullness and fluidity of being. Her project, then, in The Way of Love, is to help recapture or retrieve a disposition of real openness to the essence of others that escapes the confines of rigid categories of thinking fashioned by our enslavement to language. To summarize an argument that is perhaps not fully able to be summarized, the “way of love” appears as the path of a greater awareness of both the limits of our language and the meaning that we generally retrieve through our invocation of terms, as well as awareness of what may lie beyond it, particularly in our relationships. Here, as in Kahn, love has a privileged relationship with meaning. As with Mendus, it does not point to a loss of self but rather to the possibility of a changed self through a greater attunement to new possibilities. In general, through this admittedly cursory overview of the invocation of love as a principle of politics in contemporary times, we find interesting common ground. Despite differences of position regarding whether 43 Ibid., 351. 44 Hardt and Negri, Multitude. 45 Irigaray, The Way of Love.



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contemporary political practice does or can allow for love as a political principle, and despite differences surrounding how much revolutionary change such a principle could bring about, there appear to be areas of convergence as to how we can conceptualize love as a political principle. It would seem that all these contemporary thinkers abandon the idea that love entails a loss of self to the degree Montesquieu invokes in his sketch of the ancient republican regime. Indeed, in many ways these thinkers appear to recognize that love involves some sort of recognition of a good that does not efface the self but rather transforms it in some fundamental way that makes the subject better prepared for political action. Furthermore, the love that is invoked in these contemporary theories explored above does not appear to have as its object the political community as such, as implied by Montesquieu’s phrase of “love of the republic,” but focuses rather on particular constituents of that community or on some form of idea, ideal, or project that individuals may hold in common and recognize as good. Of particular interest is the common thread of openness and open-endedness that seems to flow from these contemporary interpretations. That is to say, these authors make few claims as to how love will substantively transform the self in politics (beyond for some a readiness for sacrifice and a commitment to political goods) but only suggest that the self through love will be transformed. conclusion While Montesquieu may not be the source of a long tradition of resistance to any invocation of love as a public principle, his account helped to perpetuate it. His account of republican virtue appears to suggest the impos­ si­bility of appealing to love as a political principle in the modern era. Still, in this rejection we have noted an ambiguity, not only through his own admittedly nostalgic comments but also an ambiguity of substance and through the very fact that this portrait of republicanism has provided inspiration for a long line of theoretical criticism of modernity as well as revolutionary action. Something in Montesquieu’s account was meant to appeal and has appealed to us politically, despite recognition that the institutions that accompany Montesquieu’s portrayal would be regarded as despotic and tyrannical today.46 One explanation for this tension might be an ongoing sense of ­uto­pianism that sustains us politically in some way but of which we

46 Arguably it is a somewhat similar ambiguity that can be said to inhabit the work of Hannah Arendt. See Chiba, “Hannah Arendt on Love and the Political.”

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must remain suspicious.47 Alternatively, it may be that Montesquieu was misguided, or partly misguided, in his portrait of the workings of love as a political principle. While he may have been quite right to claim that we must look to a plurality of emotions in order to understand fully the nature of political life, it may also be the case that we need to be open to the possibility that even love can have various manifestations, and that there could be a distinct form of political love that can be relevant to a modern context. Modern commentators, as we have seen, tend to suggest that love as it can be relevant in a political setting does not require the discipline of material depravation and frugality, but certainly behind the idea of love as openness to transformation is a deep commitment to equality – something Montesquieu did invoke and that binds all these thinkers – for it is a reflection of the worthiness of the other and of what the other offers for the redefining of the self.

47 See, for example, Rothstein, “Utopias and Its Discontents,” as well as Isaiah Berlin.

7

Self-Interest and the Public Good in the Discourse of Monarchical Honour the previous chapter on love in Montesquieu’s work has sug­ gested to us that we should not consider an emotion in the public realm to correspond to any one manifestation. Emotions help to define a general orientation toward others and the world. As Aristotle has taught us, there are many ways in which we can be disposed toward our own emotions, and we can often regulate how we act with them.1 In addition, the same emotion can be seen to have multiple political understandings and manifestations, some for the better and some for the worse. For this reason, to suggest that there is something called a public passion in most contemporary regimes does not imply that all citizens will act or respond in the same manner to underlying expectations of the tone of public interaction, or even that similar communities and regimes will inhabit that same passion in the same way. It is thus at the least problematic to suggest that any one emotion will be categorically good or categorically bad for political life, as some recent commentary has suggested. I explore what might help to distinguish the “good” and “bad” manifestations in the final chapter of the book.2 This chapter provides an analysis of Montesquieu’s conception of honour and has a slightly different underlying purpose. While giving some insight into at least one manifestation of honour as a public principle, in broader terms this chapter attempts to demonstrate how a public passion can also be open to reinterpretation and shifting over time. It shows

1 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, II, v and vi. 2 In defence of what is sometimes called the negative-positive polarity (i.e., some emotions being categorically good for politics and others not), see Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity, as well as a number of current authors who suggest that fear is always dysfunctional in a liberal democratic setting (e.g., Furedi, The Politics of Fear).

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that the presence of a dominant principle or public passion does not need to imply a static view of public life. Recently the concept of honour has received new attention. In particular, a number of recent studies look to the idea of honour as an important but heretofore neglected feature of collective identity and of political motivation.3 Although these studies analyze the functioning of the principle of honour in somewhat competing ways, they all suggest that contemporary political science would be enhanced by a deeper understanding and appreciation of how honour functions as a key principle in some forms of social and political life. In this chapter and through a historical analysis of the context of Montesquieu’s writing the subject, I explore how it is possible to conceive of these principles as evolving. One of the most brilliant treatments of the evolving practices of a society undergoing great change, but still beholden to a concept of honour though subject to new forms of interpretation, is Eigo Ikegami’s exploration of the samurai class in the Tokugawa Japan of the seventeenth century.4 This chapter, in a very modest way, takes inspiration from Ikegami’s analysis by suggesting that some of the silences and possible ambiguities in Montesquieu’s treatment of the concept of honour come in part from its articulation at a time of historical transition for the French aristocracy. In particular, we see in this notion how the traditional warrior virtues of feudal culture are giving way to a degree to the demands for greater status and honour on the part of commercially successful.5 In books 3 and 4 of De l’esprit des lois Montesquieu introduces the three principles of government and identifies honour, which he defines as “the prejudice of each person and of each condition” (III, vi), as the principle of the monarchical regime. He tells us that honour leads to the demand for “preeminence and distinction” and allies with the force of ambition so as to give life to and motivate the corporate players of a monarchy. In consequence, “each person works for the common good, believing he works for his individual interests” (III, vii). He elaborates by contrasting honour with republican virtue, defined as “the love of the laws and of the country” (IV, v), and by discussing what honour requires in the daily conduct of citizens – that is, a certain nobility of virtue, a certain frankness in mores, and a certain politeness of manner (IV, ii). 3 Recent works that examine the centrality of honour for politics include Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations; Krause, Liberalism with Honor; and Iliffe, Honour in African History. 4 Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai. Another study of interest implying the relative malleability of honour is Olsthoorn, “Honour, Face and Reputation in Political Theory.” 5 The classic historical treatment of the contours and tensions within the French aristocracy of the eighteenth century is Ford’s Robe and Sword.



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Nonetheless, opinions differ regarding the real meaning of honour for Montesquieu. Some view it as a traditional military and feudal spirit tracing its roots to the ethos of the ancient nobility of the sword.6 Others suggest that in this portrait of honour Montesquieu is inspired by Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees (1714) and the notion of “private vices, public benefits.”7 For yet others, this honour of Montesquieu rooted in interest represents a principle which is meant to surpass monarchy and to characterize a broad change in social mores synonymous with the advent of modernity in general.8 Part of these divergences may be resolved through a more rigorous examination of the text. Another explanation for the difference in interpretation can be traced to the fact, as Paul Janet has noted, that in the work this principle of honour remains rather vaguely defined, straddling both nature and culture and seeming to float between ambition and vanity, or in other words between traditional noble pride and modern egoism.9 Before criticizing Montesquieu for lack of precision, it must be noted that his use of the term was quite possibly clear for his contemporaries. If this is the case, insight into the historical context can shed light on some of the presuppositions of the era and thus the meanings brought to the text to complement the textual use of the terms. The object of this chapter, then, is to explore the context to help give meaning to Montesquieu’s concept of honour, through both a close analysis of the pertinent passages of the text and an analysis of the discourse of the Bordeaux parlement in which Montesquieu underwent a great deal of his practical legal education. I begin by analyzing the concept of honour in De l’esprit des lois, in part to focus on those elements that appear vague. In particular, I raise three questions in light of lacuna in the textual use of the term. In the second 6 This is an interpretation put forward by Shklar in Montesquieu, 80. It is also implied in Carcassonne’s Montesquieu et le problème de la constitution française au XVIIIe siècle. 7 This notion is advanced by Hulliung: “Mandeville’s fable equating private vices with public order was acceptable to Montesquieu with the single revision that it is much more relevant to aristocratic France than to bourgeois Britain. Ambition fires aristocratic society which, on careful examination, turns out to be an ever so courteous footrace for preferences. Self-interested action is the rule, and the honorific ethos is highly individualistic – a corporate individualism wherein the focal points of selfish calculation are personal glory and the interest of the family dynasty” (Montesquieu and the Old Regime, 29). 8 See Klosko, “Montesquieu’s Science of Politics,” 175; Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism; and Rosso, Montesquieu moderniste , chaps. 2 and 3. Other interpretations combine the second and third interpretation, namely that in his link to the Mandevillian tradition Montesquieu also introduces a new conception of modern liberty and politics. See Iglesias, “Montesquieu,” cited by Céline Spector in “L’esprit des lois de Montesquieu.” 9 Janet, introduction, De l’esprit des lois, 25–6.

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part of the chapter I justify my choice of an analysis of the pronouncements of the Bordeaux courts and examine how the magistrates of the time interpreted the constitutive elements of honour. In conclusion, I show how the contextual study can contribute by addressing the questions raised by the study of the text alone. In doing so, I hope to show that even if Montesquieu’s conception of honour as a principle of monarchical government can be seen as protecting and even favouring commercial interests, it cannot be assimilated to it. In addition, even if honour can be seen as compatible with a defence of individual and collective interests, it is not antithetical to a sense of common good. It must be considered to be a sentiment attributable not only to an individual alone, but a sentiment that is constitutive of an intersubjective relation – that is, constitutive of a society of honour governed by a public economy of respect and dignities granted to certain members by others. honour in the text of

de l ’ esprit des lois

Honour as the principle of the monarchical regime serves both to underpin the intermediary, subordinate, and dependent powers that make up the nature of this government (II, iv) and to regulate conduct in those occasions where the law is not applicable (IV, ii). Montesquieu defines honour as “the prejudice of each person and each condition” (III, vi) and in contrast with virtue, the principle of the republican regime, honour is allied with ambition and the pursuit of one’s particular interest (III, vii). At first glance, one might say that Montesquieu’s honour serves as a form of “invisible hand,” a social dynamic resting on the imperative that individuals each pursue their own narrowly defined interests. In this light, some, like Hulliung, conceive the society of honour as a direct transposition of the calculation of the Mandevillian subject to aristocratic France.10 To support this view, Montesquieu in his discussion of education in a monarchy notes that virtues in a monarchy “are always less what one owes others than what one owes oneself” (IV, ii), and that it is through pride that we look to distinguish ourselves by politeness, to show “that we are not common and that we have not lived with the sort of people who have been neglected through the ages” (IV, ii). In highlighting these remarks, some interpreters have concluded that this notion of honour is morally vacuous.11 The conclusion is further supported 10 See note 2. 11 See, for example. Lowenthal, “Montesquieu,” 494–5; and Rétat, “De Mandeville à Montesquieu.”



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by the comparison Montesquieu makes between republican virtue and monarchical honour. As this oft-cited passage notes, “In monarchies … the state continues to exist independently of love of the homeland, desire for true glory, self-renunciation, sacrifice of one’s dearest interests, and all those heroic virtues we find in the ancients and know only by hearsay” (III, v). It is clear by this contrast that Montesquieu is censuring his own times while expressing a nostalgia for the republican regimes he studied in his youth, as many did in his day. However, can one thereby conclude that the regime informed by the principle of honour is empty of deeper meaning? Certainly not. According to Sharon Krause, the essence of honour is exemplified by the actions of the Comte d’Orte.12 For Krause, and contrary to Hulliung, there is an important moral core in Montesquieu’s view of monarchical honour. This honour is a strong sense of duty to one’s place in the social hierarchy as well as to the institutions as a whole, which leads certain extraordinary individuals to exercise their ambition in times of contentious politics through often dangerous acts of rebellion against authority. This is an honour that the noble classes in France exercised in individual actions in opposition to their king and for the sake of a personalized vision of a political good. While Krause’s understanding of Montesquieu’s monarchical honour rightly captures a broader moral foundation of the idea, her conception does not neatly coincide with one aspect of honour reflected in Montesquieu’s discussion. In particular, Montesquieu notes the degree to which, through honour, one’s moral choices are regulated by an internalized version of the opinions and expectations of others. In other words, the subject of a monarchical regime acts less according to an individualized moral compass and more by the expectation of how any actions considered would appear in the eyes of others. Through this dynamic, the virtues are not necessarily dissolved but are transformed: “This bizarre honour makes it such that the virtues are only what it wishes them to be: it places independently rules on all that is proscribed; it spreads or limits our duties according to its whims, whether they are rooted in religion, in politics, or in universal codes” (IV, ii). Honour requires a certain frankness of morals (to give an appearance of freedom) and politeness of manner (in order to be pleasing to others and to present oneself as a distinguished person) (IV, ii). Honour also allows us to acknowledge that ambition in a monarchy is not always tolerated and that there are circumstances when it must be limited: “Ambition is pernicious in a republic. It has good effects in a monarchy; it gives life to that 12 Krause, Liberalism with Honor.

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government; and there it has the advantage of not being dangerous, because it can constantly be suppressed” (III, vii). One can see then how the moral reasoning of a subject in a regime ruled by the principle of honour cannot be a pure calculus of personal interest, nor the evaluation of political action from a fully internalized conception of the political good, because acts are evaluated from the perspective of their anticipated effect on others (that is, on the opinion of others) and because all calculations based on interest or ambition, no matter how much they might be in tune with a worthy conception of political good, are not necessarily tolerated. In addition, in contrast to interest, which does not make any qualitative distinction among choices other than that which would serve that interest, actions motivated by the principle of honour are inspired by a desire for distinction, but a distinction grounded in an understanding of what general opinion will recognize as distinguished. “The nature of honour is to demand preferential treatment and social distinction” (III, vii). In this way, although honours are distributed unequally throughout the monarchical regime, the principle of honour remains a general principle of reference and thus serves to define the whole society as opposed to the actions of particular individuals.13 The regime of honour is thus a very public moral regime, in the sense that people are largely motivated by the recognition they can gain from others and the social level to which they can hope to aspire. However, several questions remain that Montesquieu does not resolve in any adequate fashion throughout this analysis. This lack of resolution may be at the root of the many conflicting interpretations of the full meaning of this principle as it is evoked in this work, but indeed it may point to the very polysemic and evolutionary qualities of much of what can be said to count as public passion. Three questions in particular remain to which the text does not offer any adequate response. In the first instance, while Montesquieu links the idea of honour with ambition and interest (as he states in book III, chapter vii, “Ambition … has good effects in a monarchy”), he does not give an exact indication of the meaning of these two terms. Is ambition synonymous with interest? Is it compatible with commercial interest in particular, or is this motivation linked to ends specifically characteristic of the noble classes? The question is important, especially in order to allow us to better judge those interpretations that hold that honour can also serve as the principle of a new commercial republic. 13 It is for this reason that it is difficult to uphold the idea that the principle of honour only applies to a limited class, as argued by Taylor in Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition.



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A second question relates to the link between honour and the concept of duty, itself important in a society infused with aristocratic culture. Montesquieu clearly distinguishes honour from republican virtue, but that should not prevent us from thinking that his notion of honour impedes duty as a motivation. For example, it has been noted that he recognizes the periodical necessity to suppress ambition, especially when it could constitute a danger (III, vii). Also, he claims that honour does not eliminate duty but only moulds it according to its own whims (IV, ii). Thus he leaves us with the question of the role of duties in personal conduct in monarchical society and of the circumstances under which ambitions can or should be suppressed. The third question relates to the general meaning of the public good in a society organized according to the principle of honour. Can or should one conceive of the public good in a monarchy other than the utilitarian calculus or the sum of personal or corporate calculations? What is the link between duty and the public good in Montesquieu’s monarchy? The text does not offer an adequate response to these questions. One reason for this may be easily discerned. Montesquieu would have assumed that his readers would bring certain understandings of the working of monarchical society to their reading of the text, understandings increasingly lost to readers of later eras. One means, then, of answering these questions is to revive certain elements of his historical context that could then reveal to us in greater detail some of those underlying assumptions or “local knowledge.” In this context, it may be helpful to turn our attention to the declarations of the Parlement of Bordeaux of the period in which Montesquieu was a practising magistrate. This approach does not assume that Montesquieu was not in part an innovator in evoking the concept of honour. He was clearly aware that his distinction between virtue and honour could shock his readership. This is the reason that his “Avertissement de l’auteur” appears at the beginning of his work. Here he notes, “I had new ideas; it was necessary to find new words, or to give new meanings to old ones.” Still, he is more concerned in this passage with the meaning of virtue than of honour. Perhaps more important, linguistic use in the history of political ideas not only must be understood through textual analysis but also must take into account the linguistic conventions in existence at the time of writing.14 We must recognize what his readers brought to the text in order to

14 At one level I am in agreement with Quentin Skinner who holds that a text in the history of political ideas must be understood in the context of contemporary linguistic conventions. However, by focusing almost entirely on what is innovative in linguistic use, his method may lead one to diminish the importance of what remains conventional (which

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understand it more fully. Only with this understanding can we decide the question of the deeper meaning of his portrayal of honour in a monarchy. honour in the declarations of the parlement of bordeaux Why the Parlement of Bordeaux rather than the Parlement of Paris or the court of Louis XV to which Montesquieu makes numerous references? In the first instance, the Parlement of Bordeaux is the first political institution with which Montesquieu had an affiliation.15 As such, it was the place where he deepened his understanding of the functioning of the monarchical regime. Secondly, the declarations of the parlement are good keys to revealing standard and more public linguistic conventions. Thirdly, a study of the discourse of a regional institution instead of one based in Paris serves to highlight the idea that the French state in the pre-revolutionary period was not a monolithic institution. The declarations and arguments of the Parlement of Bordeaux give us a vantage point which is more realistic in revealing the many tensions that existed

even here can hide varied intentions). More importantly, it risks neglecting a study of how the context can help to complete the understanding of a text by the reader, even in those cases where linguistic manipulation can be found. Also, his approach, which assumes that one considers a text in its entirety in relation to broad traditions of argument, cannot be easily adapted to a more specialized study of a particular concept within a text. On Skinner’s methodology see Tully, Meaning and Context. 15 The Parlement of Bordeaux functioned in the first instance as a court of last appeal for a jurisdiction of roughly two million people. It was one of thirteen parlements that shared similar responsibilities in their respective regions. However, in addition to being a court of appeal, the parlements also had the responsibility to register laws within their jurisdictions. With this responsibility came the right of remonstration, or reasoned refusal to register the law. After a remonstrance was issued, the law could not be enforced except in those instances when the central government would issue a lettre de jussion forcing the parlement to bow to the royal will. The parlements also had powers to regulate local concerns, and they often intervened in times of crisis. In these instances the courts would intervene by means of an arrêt de règlement. However, as noted by William Beik, the parlements were often limited in their power, given that they lacked any military force to assure that their rulings would be followed. See Bordes, L’Administration provinciale et municipale en France au XVIIIe siècle, 41, and Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth Century France, 82–3. In the years that concern us here, the greatest regional administrative power was in the hands of the local intendant who had succeeded in reducing the independent powers of the municipal government of Bordeaux, the Jurade. See Pariset, Bordeaux au XVIIIe siècle , chap. 1, and Boutruche, Bordeaux de 1453 à 1715, 364–6. In this context, the Parlement of Bordeaux sought to protect its powers to intervene in the broader interest of the city and the region. The magistrates saw themselves to a certain degree (as revealed by study of the court’s pronouncements) as a group that was not as susceptible to partisan politics and had a better perspective on the true interests of the people under their jurisdiction.



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throughout the monarchical regime, and thus of how honour as a dominant political principle is fully compatible with political conflict. Various historians have discussed reasons why the state took on a more active role in the seventeenth century in the process of expanding its jurisdiction. Certainly the ethos of mercantilism sought to link the greatness of the king and his kingdom to the greatness and prosperity of his people.16 Linked to this explanation are those arguments that hold that the state, regardless of the particular branch concerned, was motivated by the logic of absolutism – that is, motivated to provide for the immediate needs of the population for fear that neglecting them would result in public disorder and thereby undermine the state and its political stability.17 McCloy has noted that the increase in state intervention in the eighteenth century is related to an appeal to charity stemming from the Counter-Reformation and the growing ineffectiveness of private charities.18 There is a surely a great deal of truth in these arguments. Still, these positions assume intensive concerted action and agreement on fundamental principles among the various administrative bodies of the old regime. As we will see through the declarations of the local court, in fact among various administrative levels of the kingdom there were real differences, ones that implied competing conceptions of political interest, ambition, and institutional honour and the best means to promote it. What can the records of the Bordeaux court reveal to us about these notions? With regard to “interest,” the court recognizes in its declarations that there are several kinds. On the one hand the declarations evoke a notion of particular interest, attributable to either an individual or class, which can undermine the ends defended by the court. For example, in opposing changes to the board of the St André Hospital, the court notes that these had been put forward by members of the municipal council (the jurats) to advance their “particular interest” under the guise of the general good. The magistrates note as well that it is important to recognize that the councillors have no legal basis to defend their demand for more representation on the board. They also speak of the “interest of the king.”19 It is evident that “particular interest” can be considered an important motivating force among various political actors. This confirms Montesquieu’s characterization of those within a 16 See Cole, Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism, as well as his French Mercantilism, 1683–1700. 17 See Jones, The Charitable Imperative; Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV, chap. 1. 18 See McCloy, Government Assistance in Eighteenth-Century France. 19 Archives municipales de Bordeaux, Registres secrets du parlement de Bordeaux (version Verthamon), Ms. 758–809, 28 April 1718, 844–75. (My translations).

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monarchical regime (“each one … believing to act in their particular interest” III, vii). However, the court also suggests that interest functions differently according to the class concerned. On the one hand, the court sees utility in the interest and desire for wealth that animates individuals of certain classes. In its remonstrances concerning the establishment of the India Company, the parlement defends the motivation of the merchants and appeals to the king to respect those motivations: “It is an accepted principle, that ambition and the desire to enrich oneself contributes to the progress of men in all States. These two motivating forces are the means by which men can advance themselves and acquire wealth. A merchant animated by the desire to accumulate many goods, who works day and night for this purpose and who often will risk his life and those of his children in a trip for which he foresees great profits, would have his projects halted by the uncertainty brought on by fear in the face of complicated and unfruitful negotiations.”20 The parlementary magistrates defend an “interested spirit” on the part of the entrepreneur and merchant as a necessary condition for commercial confidence and success and thus compatible with public ends.21 In response to the king’s abrogation of parlementary regulations on the price of meat, the magistrates, while not denying the rights of the municipal council, recommend that these rules also be registered in the parlement before coming into effect so as to protect the public interest.22 Perhaps this position can be better understood by evoking a letter written to the regent on 9 December 1722: “The parlement of Bordeaux [is] always attentive to preserving the rights of the king by reconciling the interest of his peoples.”23 The magistrates acknowledge that the court is motivated by a self-regarding interest; nonetheless, this interest is linked to a larger vision and a duty to reconcile other particular interests that may not have an idea of the public good in view. So the magistrates did not see interest as incompatible in all circumstances with a vision of the public good; particular interest was not necessarily opposed to the idea of a more general good. The quality of this interest was often judged by the class of the individual or institution with which it was associated. Through this analysis we can discern a more nuanced understanding of the phrase from De l’esprit des lois: “Each advances the common good, while believing to be advancing their own particular interests” (III, vii).

20 Ibid., 2 August 1725, 291. 21 Ibid., 7 May 1718, 906. 22 Ibid., 30 May 1721, 532–3. 23 Ibid., 9 December 1722, 857.



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This phrase does not necessarily imply that politics functions in the manner of the invisible hand. Even though the pursuit of particular interests in various circumstances may contribute to the common good, there are certain circumstances when it does not. So the market of competing interests requires a force that can “suppress” ambition in cases where it is necessary, or as Montesquieu notes, “a force which pushes all bodies constantly from the centre, and a weighted force that pushes them back” (III, vii). The system described is not void of a sense of public good, but this meaning is often contested and often tinged by the pursuit of particular interest. In this moral economy, the motivations are not always bad, but perhaps always subject to suspicion. How do we understand this notion of “public good” or “common good” which can be made compatible with the pursuit of particular interests? It is certain that the public good serves as a standard rhetorical justification of the period. In a letter to the king protesting the actions of the councillors who held a meeting without inviting representatives from the parlement, the magistrates communicated that their presence would serve to ensure that the king’s laws would be respected. They implied that the municipal councillors needed restraining to ensure that the public good would be respected.24 In the same manner, in its remonstrance to the king protesting the changes introduced to the board of the St André Hospital, the magistrates argued that the founder of the hospital wished to place it under the protection of the parlement so as to better serve the good of the poor.25 However, the magistrates also recognized that the municipal councillors were circulating pamphlets calling for better representation of the bourgeois in the name of the public good. The invocation of the theme of the public good was not always a mere rhetorical flourish. At the time of the 1720 famine in Bordeaux, the magistrates expressed an urgency to act so as to meet the pressing needs of the people in their jurisdiction. Daugeard, the first president of the parlement, worked to regulate the price of meat and other goods as well as to procure the needed quantities of wheat to feed the people of the region. The magistrates expressed the concern that without their diligence the province could be much worse off.26 The next year the parlement sent a letter to the royal chancellor protesting the annulment of the parlement’s edict concerning the price of meat. In this letter, the magistrates defended their position that the municipal councillors should register their regulations on the price of meat with the parlement 24 Ibid., 20 February 1715, 339. 25 Ibid., 29 April 1718, 869. 26 Ibid., 30 April 1720, 261–1, and 30 May 1721, 538.

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before they came into effect so as to “end the reproaches often made by the public that the jurats were partial to the butchers of the city” and give to police ordinances the true aspect of law.27 As the letter explains: “the public good is the principle motivation of this Rule. Prior registration which had become necessary to prevent the abuses which occurred only too often during the absence of the parlement, gave to local ordinances for a time the quality of invariable law which kept the butchers clearly subordinate to the law and left to the people the consolation of believing that the price of meat was made with justice, even when it became prohibitive.”28 The defence of the interests of the magistrates of the parlement was not made without a sense of the public good. This public good was firstly informed by a need to protect the state and its representatives from excessive public protest. As First President Daugeard noted at the opening of parlement on 12 November 1721, the reputation of the magistrates and hence their honour was seen to depend on their usefulness to the public and their success in being perceived as promoting the interests of the people.29 So what does this affair reveal to us about the concept of honour as understood by the magistrates of Bordeaux? Firstly, it is clear that this honour is linked to a notion of distinction. As the magistrates note in a letter of remonstrance concerning the board of the St André Hospital, the honour of this representation on the board can be granted to municipal councillors but not to the bourgeois because “these types of people can never have standing amongst the most distinguished.”30 The counterpart of this demand for distinction is the fear of humiliation. In a letter to the Keeper of the Seals regarding this affair, the magistrates recognize their interest in seeking to block the proposed reform. However, they also invoke the argument that changes in the administration of this hospital would constitute “a kind of insult to the Parlement.”31 In the same way, in response to a letter sent to the chancellor by M. Dudon to criticize the current president, the parlement sent a letter to the king stating how this matter was of concern to the institution as a whole: “When the First President is accused of things which tend to have him lose the esteem and confidence of the public, as in this case, the members are always an interested party in this dishonour.”32 Here one sees clearly the link between honour and the

27 Ibid., 23 June 1721, 561 28 Ibid., 23 June 1721, 565. 29 Ibid., 17 May, 1726, 391–2. 30 Ibid., 29 April 1718, 867. 31 Ibid., 1 April 1718, 875, and 7 May 1718, 907. 32 Ibid., 23 January 1722, 698.



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public eye. It is not surprising that the king ordered M. Dudon to apologize to the first president in the presence of eight magistrates.33 The incident highlights the very public nature of monarchical honour. In contrast to mere interest, honour does not search out arrangements that can be enjoyed in private; rather, honour implies public distinctions and preferential recognition that raises the person or institution in the eyes of the public. As such, honour is less something that can be attributed solely to an individual or even a class. It is rather a recognition that exists between the person who is recognized and the individuals who acknowledge that distinction. It is thus that the principle of honour can serve as a description of a whole society, even though only part of that society shares in those honours. Honour is thereby something very different from simple interest. As a principle animating the political life of a society, honour is that distinction which itself not only shapes personal and corporate interests (as the parlement, much like other political corps, had powers and privileges and hence interests to defend), but which renders these bodies capable of defending them. As the magistrates noted in the affair of the meat prices, “The parlement which loses each day some of its authority in the city of Bordeaux will not always be in a position to see its good intentions realized and insofar as its credit diminishes, it is to fear that its zeal will become useless in the Service of your Majesty.”34 In addition, the magistrates saw those preferences and distinctions as the foundation of political stability and therefore of the welfare of all citizens. As the magistrates expressed it, “The cities who by their loyalty obtained such great privileges, confirmed under each Ruling King claim to no longer have any. The nobility can no longer flatter itself to have the same level of distinction, your loyal subjects tremble and there is reason to fear that the emulation which is so necessary for the stability of the State and the glory of the King will soon be extinguished.”35 In this way, honour, founded on pre-eminence and distinction, links the pursuit of particular interests to a common good perceived firstly in terms of assured security and the provision of fundamental needs. The intrinsic distinction to honour helps to justify the periodic suppression of certain of these ambitions. In addition, the hierarchy of power guarantees that ambitions be pursued according to certain rules and within a well defined frame of action so as not to endanger public order and sanction arbitrary legislation. 33 Ibid., 20 July 1722, 780–1. 34 Ibid., 23 June 1721, 571–2. 35 Ibid., 16 July 1725, 240–1.

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conclusion At the beginning of this chapter three questions were raised to which no satisfactory responses could be found within the text of De l’esprit des lois. The first question concerned the link between honour and interest, and commercial interest in particular. We have seen that in several of their declarations, the magistrates of the court of Bordeaux were very aware of their defence of commerce and the commercial interests of the region. Honour thus appears to have been compatible with commerce or at least with the defence of a flourishing commercial space within society. The opening of this space could set the stage for a tension in the conception of honour, one with the potential to lead to a more robust defence of commercial principles. However, in the vision put forward by the Bordeaux court, the rights of the merchants were defended within a certain sphere. The interest of the merchants, even though their activities were seen to have a beneficial effect on society, was not considered to be a political trump. Recognizing that the limited interest of the bourgeois could conflict with the interests of the poor and of the public in general, the magistrates could not accept the changes proposed in the representation of the board of the St André Hospital, and they demanded that important municipal rulings be registered in parlement. Honour therefore was not regarded as a principle easily adapted to a commercial republic, nor indeed to a liberal democracy.36 It was not that honour denied ambition but that it expressed itself first and foremost as an ambition for public recognition, something distinct from, though perhaps linked to, the desire to enrich oneself. Within the discourse of honour, this tension between an authentic and perhaps more traditional notion of quality that determines social standing, and a notion for which honour and standing become closely linked to expected rewards of commercial success, is a tension that is mirrored in a number of historical instances where honour has been invoked as an overriding social and political principle.37 We can thus see how the identification of one dominant public passion can still be the occasion of competing interpretations and the source of political conflict as well as of political transformation over the course of time.

36 See Krause, Liberalism with Honor. 37 See especially chap. 3, Lebow’s A Cultural Theory of International Relations. Lebow prefers not to call his notion of honour an emotion, relying instead on the ancient Greek notion of “spirit.” However, given that we can easily recast the idea of honour in terms of a desire for social standing, for our purposes I believe that it is not inaccurate to speak of emotion in this instance.



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Montesquieu’s text also left us with the question of the manner in which honour was linked to the concept of duty, and the circumstances in which ambition should be suppressed. In the case of the magistrates of Bordeaux, their honour was in part invested in an understanding of their role as the defenders of the welfare of people within their jurisdiction. However, in contrast to the principle of virtue, honour was not lived as sacrifice or self-denial. The distinction of the magistrates and the continuation of their influence in the region depended in part on their ability to defend the interests of people in their region. Thus, honour was not void of a notion of duty or public interest. In certain cases the magistrates even limited their demands. For example, they did not demand the reinstatement of their former rights to oversee the Jurade and approve of all pricing on food. Their ambitions were restrained so as not to stir excessive hostility locally. This leaves the third question, of the grounds for this sense of public good other than that of a sum of individual calculations. We have noted that the magistrates were conscious that the defence of their privileges was linked to the stability of the regime and the public welfare. In certain cases, this public good seemed to limit itself to basic ends of collective life, such as physical security and sustenance. Still, the declarations also reflected the presumption that the public good is not an easy thing to define and that only a certain social pre-eminence can give political actors the resources necessary to envision it. This is why the magistrates saw themselves as those who protected the statutes and regulations in contrast to the municipal councillors who were judged to contravene them often. In the case of the regulation of prices, the public good was judged to be linked to invariable laws that should protect the public from exploitation by any particular sector of society. Here, the public good is understood as the protection of the general public from any clearly arbitrary rule. In terms of the more general argument of this book, this chapter has served to demonstrate that the idea of public passion does not need to imply a static vision of political life. As was the case in Bordeaux and with Montesquieu’s depiction of the working of the principle of honour in eighteenth century French society, honour was a notion that was used as an important term of justification by both institutions and classes but for very different political agendas. In addition, the tension between traditional aristocratic and bourgeois conceptions of honour, evident in the historical records of French political institutions of the day as well as in Montesquieu’s own presentation of the idea of honour, demonstrates an important process of political transformation generated from within the rhetoric of honour. Public passion, as noted in my articulation of the third general feature of the idea, does not imply a static view of history.

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Fear

my last chapter explored the notion of honour through a contextual study of Montesquieu’s time, in order to shed light on how a singular notion of public passion is fully compatible with an acceptance of perennial features of contestation and transformation in politics. From a somewhat different perspective, here I examine a notion of fear as a public passion through an invocation of both contemporary and historical sources, including that of Montesquieu, to address the question of whether we can consider certain emotions as perennially “bad” or dysfunctional for politics. Fear is a particularly good candidate for this debate as a number of sources appear to imply that it is an evil to be discouraged and shunned in much of contemporary liberal democratic politics. To sort out our thoughts on fear, including how we understand it as a political principle or public passion, and how we should judge it as such, we will need to explore both history and texts. Once we have sorted out some issues related to fear in politics, we will also be better situated to consider the more general question of how the phenomenon of public passion can play a role in a normative theory of politics. While this latter is an enormous question, I will use the last chapter of this book to unpack some of the considerations related to the answer. Several distinct issues hover behind many contemporary discussions around the notion of fear in its collective dimension and in its relation to contemporary politics. These include the specific nature of fear – how, for example, it distinguishes itself from terror, how it manifests itself in competing political circumstances, and the degree to which cognitive and other elements are constitutive of the emotion. It includes the particular way in which fear works intersubjectively as a social dynamic. Most importantly, it includes the value of fear in its collective dimension, in general but also in particular for the sustaining of liberal democratic institutions, and how this may require democratic leaders and people to act in the context of public fear.



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This chapter furthers the discussion of the nature of fear as a collective or public phenomenon, addressing these issues through a consideration of Montesquieu’s work as well as current writings on political fear. In the context of contemporary liberal democratic thought, different understandings of the nature, workings, and value of fear as a public principle have been proposed by scholars including Judith Shklar, Corey Robin, and Judith Butler.1 In a number of these cases, authors have had recourse to the work of Montesquieu in developing and addressing the question of public fear and its relevance to an understanding of contemporary liberal democracy. I begin here by laying out a general depiction of fear as a social principle. Next, I explore some key debates surrounding the idea of fear in liberal democracies. Then, to address some of the questions raised by the debates, I look back to Montesquieu’s characterization of fear as a collective principle in De l’esprit des lois. The tension inhabiting Montesquieu’s discussion of the principle of fear helps to illustrate ambiguities in contemporary discussions of fear in politics, in turn illuminating more fully the ways in which fear is inseparable and indeed functional to all politics, and the ways in which the scope of fear must be constrained. Fear is in part the recognition of worth or attachment to a certain thing, person, or condition along with an acknowledgment of a threat of change or loss. What distinguishes fear from other intense negative emotions such as despair or horror or terror is the still uncertain quality of the nature and/or timing of the threat. Despair, horror, and terror acknowledge the inevitability and indeed the experience of great loss, while fear only portends it (though with terror, while the loss is deemed inevitable, the timing may be uncertain). Fear can be well grounded or not (contrary to the other emotions of despair, horror, and terror where the acknowledgment of loss is almost inevitably true); thus the cognitive elements in fear regarding both attachment to something of value and the perception of threat say nothing about the real validity of the threat. Fear may distinguish itself from anxiety to the degree that the possible threat is largely acknowledged and can be identified, whereas anxiety can be described as a condition where there is no clear perception or understanding of what the threat is. Furthermore, the degree of fear may be in direct proportion to or indeed evocative of both the degree of

1 Shklar, Ordinary Vices, and “The Liberalism of Fear”; Robin, Fear, and “Reflections on Fear”; Furedi, The Politics of Fear; Butler, Precarious Life. While these writers tend to treat the idea of a collective experience of fear as the aggregate of individual emotions vis-à-vis the same object of public importance rather than a shared emotion that is somewhat transformed by the awareness of its being shared, for my purposes in this chapter I treat their understandings of collective fear as variants of my notion of a public passion.

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attachment and the type of loss or change envisaged. So what is particularly distinctive about fear in general is the character of uncertainty – that is, a degree of structured ignorance that makes those who fear incapable of a fully transparent or reliable assessment of outcomes. Indeed, hidden in the core of fear and an integral part of it is an element of hope that the threat may not be realized. It is this hope, despite the threat, that underlies the uncertainty of fear, as opposed to the certainty of horror and terror. The uncertainty is furthered by the tendency of fear to encourage silence among the subordinate, accompanied by manipulation of interpretation from above. This tendency generates a broad lack of transparency, a feature that strengthens a general feeling of suspicion within. These characteristics of political fear are brilliantly portrayed by Ismail Kadare in his novel The Successor.2 So how can fear function as a public passion, as a social or political principle animating a large group of citizens? Much more discussion has centred on how fear can work as a dysfunctional feature of political life than how it can work as a functional one. Perhaps the most influential historical treatment of fear on a grand scale has been Georges Lefebvre’s 1932 classic La Grande Peur de 1789.3 Lefebvre in many ways can be regarded as a cognitive theorist of the emotions before his time. He wrote in part in opposition to the theories of Le Bon and Tarde, who, as we have seen, sought to interpret mass emotions in politics as in essence irrational and dysfunctional.4 Through his analysis of the early stages of the French Revolution, Lefebvre shows the obvious reasons for the rise of fear across both urban and rural areas in France, given the spread of famine and the increasingly higher fiscal burdens on those whose lives were most vulnerable. Two aspects of Lefebvre’s analysis are particularly insightful. In the first instance, he recognizes that while a general climate of fear spread across the country, it was largely fomented by class divisions and suspicions; that is, the peasants and bourgeois feared an aristocratic backlash and war, and the aristocrats feared widespread insurgency and criminal behaviour toward them from all the popular classes. Fear was generated and sustained by internal division and mutual suspicions. The interplay of classes now seen as antagonistic was an integral element of the more general climate of fear.

2 Kadare, The Successor. 3 Lefebvre, La Grande Peur de 1789. 4 See Jacques Revel’s introduction to the Armand Colin edition of Georges Lefebvre’s book.



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The second aspect of Lefebvre’s analysis of importance for us is his depiction of how basic fears relating to individual survival and livelihood became intensified. While the rhetorical excesses of legislators played a role in spreading a fear of aristocratic invasion and backlash, a series of misjudgments or misinterpretations on the part of a number of individuals was also instrumental in whipping up a general climate of fear. These individuals were predisposed to think the worst, and thus used their growing fears to confirm suspicions and to give greater reasons to those around them to be fearful, and thus to fear more intensely: “Quand une assemblée, une armée ou des populations entières s’attendent à voir paraître l’ennemi, il est bien rare que sa présence ne soit pas signalée un jour ou l’autre. Ce sont les individus les plus émotifs qui l’éventent, surtout quand ils sont isolés ou placés en sentinelle et qu’ils se sentent particulièrement exposés ou fléchissent sous le poids de leur responsabilité. Un individu suspect, une colonne de poussière, moins que cela : un bruit, une lueur, une ombre suffisent à les persuader. Mieux encore, l’auto­ suggestion intervient et ils croient voir ou entendre. Ainsi se déchaînent les paniques des armées, de préférence la nuit ; ainsi se sont déclarées les alarmes qui ont été à l’origine de la grande peur.”5 Lefebvre notes some historical continuity in the occurrence of broad social fears in France. The Revolution of 1789, like that of 1848, saw the spread of fear intensified when the hostility toward a particular class, seen as a threat to the life and goods of another, was reinforced with grounds for suspicion that foreign forces were being mobilized to make good on the threat.6 In examining the place of fear in public life, we should recognize via Lefebvre that it can be compatible with class antagonism, and indeed can be sustained by some deep social and economic cleavages that breed mutual suspicion.7 In addition, we should be sensitive to the nature of collective political fear as an intersubjective dynamic that may be stoked by a series of perceptions (or misperceptions) and interpretations (or misinterpretations) of the actions and dispositions of a rival group.

5 Lefebvre, La Grande Peur de 1789, 72. 6 “En 1848 comme en 1703, outre le sentiment d’insécurité que la situation économique et les circonstances politiques éveillaient naturellement, on trouve à l’origine des paniques l’idée qu’un parti ou une classe sociale menace la vie et les biens de la majorité de la nation, parfois avec le concours de l’étranger. C’est cette crainte, universelle et partout identique, qui donne aux alarmes locales, dont l’occasion et l’importance sont variables, leur valeur émotive et leur force d’expansion” (ibid., 77). 7 Here I subscribe to a more general Weberian conception of class that can account for a number of ways in which populations may perceive their differences.

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Contemporary liberal democratic theorists have had competing interpretations of political fear, many no longer including a sense of domestic suspicions as part of a generalized climate of fear. In general, we can see two axes around which contemporary theorists have differentiated themselves. In the first instance, there are differences of interpretation as to the most important causes or sources of the trends of public fear in modern times (and largely in reference to the American context). While Corey Robin and Frank Furedi regard contemporary public fears in America as largely defined and driven (and indeed thereby falsely exaggerated and manipulated) by political elites, Peter Stearns suggests deeper cultural causes to the current American obsession with fear and the inability to deal with it more calmly and reservedly. The second issue around which theorists can be seen to be divided is the question of whether fear in its public manifestation is a desirable feature of a modern liberal democratic state. The first division is related to the second insofar as those who regard public fears as tools of political control may be more prone to suggest that fears are less than desirable for democratic political community. I will explore in greater detail some of the differences along these two axes, and then, through a return to Montesquieu, show how it is impossible to provide an either/or response to the fundamental issues presented here. Montesquieu shows us how fear of the “other” or of external threats is intrinsically related to fears and suspicions that are internal to a community. He also shows us that it is inappropriate to assume that any political project can be founded on the promise of eliminating public fears. Instead, a politics devoted to a notion of freedom must see its task to be in part to recognize how public fears can sometimes be instrumental to deeper political goals, in part through a focus on the aftermath or the handling of fears in terms of collective and individual behaviour. In contrast to Robin’s and Shklar’s interpretations of Montesquieu’s understanding of fear, I show that Montesquieu did not build a regulative model of fear that remained outside the operative principles of a free society, and thereby, as Robin seeks to show, suggesting a form of external focus to the possible threats to liberal democracy. Instead, through a return to some of the historical sources of Montesquieu’s view of fear, I show that he and his contemporaries were well aware of the dual nature of fear and that he understood that a praiseworthy politics should be structured in part on an understanding of both the beneficial and negative manifestations of fear. One issue that differentiates contemporary commentators on the nature and prevalence of fear in politics is the question of the sources or causes of the politics of fear manifested in today’s liberal democracies



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and in the United States in particular. Stearns suggests that there are deep-seated causes to the particular quality of both public and private manifestations of fear in contemporary America.8 He perceives a changing pattern in American emotional culture, illustrated by the transition from rather stoic reactions to the bombing of Pearl Harbour to the panicked and excessive reactions of individuals and public officials to 9/11. Paradoxically, according to Stearns, the evidence of an increase in panicked reactions and growing fears in latter twentieth-century America can be explained by a collective consensus emerging in the 1920s that fear was unhealthy. This consensus gave rise to a series of techniques and strategies in both public and private life, ranging from the sanitization of traditional children’s stories to increased regulative control over a number of possibly risky products and practices. Such strategies sought to minimize risks and threats and thereby possibly eliminate occasions for fear among both children and adults.9 In Stearns’s view, the unrealistic assumption that all risk could be contained has made Americans less able to cope with fearful circumstances and thereby more prone to ­overreact when faced with fear.10 For Stearns, then, a common cultural

8 Stearns, American Fear. 9 Ibid., 95. 10 “Faced with genuine threat and a legitimate need for fear, Americans have been unwittingly but thoroughly socialized to overreact, from a combination of inexperience, learned resentment, and a quest for reassurance. Small wonder that, as many of the September 11 accounts directly suggested, Americans respond to fear as a highly individual emotional affront – translating the public to the personal – which someone, somehow should both punish and assuage” (ibid., 114) …“Fear had two major consequences, derived from its primal function in readying the body for flight from danger. First, even when it does not provoke outright flight, it stimulates unusual attentiveness to the surroundings, an awareness of possible threat. Fear, in this instantiation, warns. It can be immensely constructive. But second, fear’s emotional intensity – again, when literal flight is not possible – can clout rational judgment, provoking exaggerations of the perceptions of danger in ways that not only increase personal discomfort far beyond any objective necessity but also lead to an acceptance of responses that may distract from real needs or even exacerbate danger. Fear, in this second form, misleads, sometimes quite seriously. It promotes a generalized level of anxiety that is distracting at best, positively counterproductive at worst. The previous chapters have argued that the American approach to fear and risk, developed over several decades, too often veers toward the damaging results of the emotion. “This distortion can be traced in several facets of American life, from parenting to race relations, as several scholars have already concluded. It certainly affects responses to terrorism which, by definition, seeks to use relatively limited attacks to stimulate a far wider, and far more incapacitating, emotional reaction. Americans are not about to give in to terrorism. There is no sign of emotional surrender. But their management of fear has distorted responses and may make terrorist threats more effective than they would otherwise be. American fear and the unusual national sensitivity to risk have consequences” (ibid., 201).

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­ redisposition guided by a spectrum of cultural practices explains a p broad array of behaviour associated with fears in America. In contrast, Robin and Furedi argue that the fears currently manifest in the public realm in America toward potential external enemies and Islamic terrorists in particular can be more effectively explained by elite manipulation.11 Both Robin and Furedi suggest it has been in the interest of some conservative political elites to stir up and channel public fears toward a foreign enemy in order to solidify support for the “law and order” campaigners and to soften dissent on controversial foreign policy campaigns. The sub-text of these arguments is that the fears have been falsely exaggerated (in conscious or less conscious acts of political deception) to be greater than the actual threat as a means to divert attention from pressing internal and domestic issues.12 The attention given to the threat of Islamic terrorists has also depoliticized what is argued to be the more salient fear in America: fear within the workplace and the economy at large.13 Through these strategies the rallying force of fear vis-à-vis

11 Robin, Fear; Furedi, The Politics of Fear. 12 The more sophisticated argument of Robin suggests that the sources of understanding the manipulation of fear lie in a certain reading of Hobbes, and that part of the reason for the misguided perception of the American people is their acceptance of a certain interpretation of a paradigm of liberalism articulated by Judith Shklar (discussed later in this chapter) that focuses on external rather than internal threats to liberal democracies. 13 “Political fear can work in one of two ways. First, leaders or militants can define what is or ought to be the public’s chief object of fear. Political fear of this sort almost always preys upon some real threat – it seldom, if ever, is created out of nothing – but since the harms of life are as various as its pleasures, politicians and other leaders have much leeway in deciding which threats are worthy of political attention and which are not. It is they who identify a threat to the population’s well being who interpret the nature and origins of that threat, and who propose a method for meeting that threat. It is they who make particular fears items of civic discussion and public mobilization. This does not means that each member of the public actually fears the chosen object: not every American citizen for instance, is actively afraid today of terrorism. It merely means that the object dominates the political agenda, crowding out other possible objects of fear and concern … “The second kind of fear arises from the social, political and economic hierarchies that divide a people. Though this fear is also created, wielded, or manipulated by political leaders, its specific purpose or function is internal intimidation to use sanctions or the threat of sanctions to ensure that one group retains or augments its power at the expense of another. Where the first mode of fear involves a collective’s fear of faraway dangers or of objects, like a foreign enemy, separate from the collective, this second mode of political fear is more intimate and less fabulist, arising from the vertical conflicts and cleavages endemic to a society. There are the inequities of wealth, status, and power … the most salient political fear, the one that most pervasively structures our lives and limits our possibilities, is the fear among the less powerful of the more powerful, whether public officials or private employers, far-off agents of state or local, familiar elites. And here we come to the crux of the argument. For all our talk today of the fear of terrorism, or before that, of communism,



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an external enemy in the name of implementing supposed universal values of American liberal democracy in other parts of the globe serves as a diversionary tactic to prevent the effective implementation of these values at home. Robin’s central contention, it can be argued, is to suggest that American political elites have outdone Hobbes by using Hobbes’s knowledge of political fear as a tool that they have dressed in the rhetoric of Montesquieu, thereby fooling the public into believing that fear is something endemic and not created or a product of politics. The issue of whether public fear can be seen as issuing from culture or from politics and political manipulation is related to another deeper issue of contention in contemporary discussions of fear: that is, the question of whether public or collective fear is a desirable feature of politics. For Robin and Furedi, who see the contemporary politics of fear in both its domestic and external manifestations as the effect of forms of political manipulation, fear clearly cannot serve as a positive feature of politics. As Robin suggests, political fear has been a friend to the practice of (a corrupt) American liberalism, thereby undermining the true promise of politics informed by freedom and equality: “What has prevented freedom and equality from becoming a reality in the United States? The politics of fear, and the liberal web of political institutions, laws, ideologies, elites, civic structures, and private associations that support politics. Underwritten by our constitutional arrangements, political fear is a friend of American liberalism; undermining our great national efforts on behalf of freedom and equality, it is its foe. And it is our liberal commitment to a limited state and a pluralist civil society that prevents us from seeing both sides of this ambivalent relationship.”14 In support of Robin’s analysis, one could cite those studies suggesting that a general climate of fear drives individuals to have a heightened concern for their own particular needs and security, thereby weakening the social trust and good will to others presumably necessary for the social efforts required to maintain a more substantial equalizing project.15

the most important form of fear is that which ordinary Americans have of their superiors, who sponsor and benefit from the inequities of everyday life. This kind of fear is repressive, constraining the actions of the less powerful, enabling the actions of the more powerful. It ensures that the less powerful abide by the express or implied wishes of their supervisors, or merely do nothing to challenge or undermine the existing distribution of power” (Robin, Fear, 16–20). 14 Ibid., 250. 15 De Rivera, “Love, Fear and Justice,” 403. “When fear for the self is dominant over love for the other it may be manifested in two quite different ways. When it leads a person to mistrust the nurturance of others it leads to the aggressive individualism with which we are so acquainted. When it leads a person to mistrust the worth of the self it leads to the

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Through this argument, Robin regards himself to be in opposition to Judith Shklar and her idea that the promise of liberalism can be pursued and sustained through the regulative notion of fear, or the idea that liberal society can find its identity and be made more just by collective agreement on political objects of condemnation, such as despotism, terror, and genocide.16 Robin’s argument is also a plea for a renewed politics of social justice as articulated by Rawls and Dworkin.17 Still, the degree to which Robin’s argument is actually in opposition to that of Shklar can be disputed. While Shklar does describe her understanding of a liberalism of fear as a “fear of fear” and rejects the language of utopian visions, she does in the end share with Robin the recognition that a just politics in the contemporary age is one that rejects a politics of character (that is, for the development of personal virtues) to embrace a model of systemic, or deontological, justification. Indeed, if one extends Shklar’s notion of cruelty beyond the strict parameters of physical pain to the dimension of the material, physical, and psychological effects of economic oppression, then Robin’s view of a just politics falls closely in line with the logic of Shklar. Both share Kantian inspiration in suggesting that the normative model for contemporary liberal politics should be driven by a need to overcome the worst features of oppression, be it political or economic, through proper institutional design. In addition, and most significant for our purposes, despite the name of the “liberalism of fear,” Shklar, like Robin, suggests that a politics is better to the degree that it can be devoid of fear. Yet is fear really necessarily a negative political emotion? As we have seen, Stearns does not decry the place of fear in politics per se, but only the particularly dysfunctional manifestation of collective fear in contemporary America. He has clear admiration for the ethos of previous generations of Americans who recognized the inevitability of fears but sought to manage them in more balanced ways, in part by being more comfortable with the emotion.18 Similarly, among contemporary political theorists, Judith Butler is one who suggests that while an ongoing fear may be debilitating, the collective sense of fear that struck Americans in the wake of 9/11 also had a potentially positive feature.19 That fear and anxiety, Butler believes, could have been harnessed in a different way so submissive conformism and lack of individuality so prevalent in collectivist movements and Western cultures. In both cases the dominance of fear is the basis for the tensions and splits we have observed within persons and cultures” (ibid., 404). 16 Ibid., 4–7. 17 Ibid., 251. 18 Stearns, American Fear, 95, 213. 19 Butler, Precarious Life.



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as to heighten a more realistic sense of the nation’s vulnerability and humanity. This heightened self-awareness could in turn have allowed citizens to recognize aspects of their own condition that brought them closer to other groups of vulnerable citizens in the world. In this light, fear, if channelled in a certain way and interpreted to foster solidarities beyond the nation’s boundaries rather than aggression toward others, can be beneficial in serving the cause of a greater political maturity: “Suffering can yield an experience of humility, of vulnerability, of impressionability and dependence, and these can become resources, if we do not ‘resolve’ them too quickly; they can move us beyond and against the vocation of the paranoid victim who regenerates infinitely the justifications for war. It is as much a matter of wrestling ethically with one’s own murderous impulses, impulses that seek to quell an overwhelming fear, as it is a matter of apprehending the suffering of others and taking stock of the suffering one has inflicted.”20 So while it may be acknowledged that at times collective fear can be a debilitating feature of political life, we must be careful not to regard all collective manifestations of fear as necessarily dysfunctional. The question, then, is how we might distinguish politically beneficial fears from dysfunctional ones. While Butler allows us to recognize the potentially positive features of collective fear, her work is more relevant to exceptional circumstances in collective political life and does not acknowledge ongoing public fears as a feature of most forms of political life. A strategy that may be helpful in sorting functional manifestations of collective political fear from dysfunctional ones is to turn back to the history of political thought. According to Robin, Montesquieu’s depiction of despotism as the regime informed by the principle of collective fear is a cause of ongoing misunderstanding regarding the nature of fear as relevant to politics. In particular, Robin argues that Montesquieu in his depiction of despotism narrowed the parameters of political fear to one of exaggerated terror, something that led readers to associate political fear with extreme forms of dysfunctional politics and fully irrational behaviour perpetrated by a single leader.21 This in turn made Montesquieu’s 20 Ibid., 149. 21 “Montesquieu revised the Hobbesian concept of fear in a way that would shape intellectual perception for centuries to come … Political fear was no longer to be thought of as a passion bearing an elective affinity to reason; from now on, political fear was to be understood as despotic terror. Unlike Hobbesian fear, despotic terror was devoid of rationality and insusceptible to education. It was an involuntary, almost physiological response to unmitigated violence. The terrorized possessed none of the inner life that Hobbes attributed to the fearful … Montesquieu also reconceived the politics of fear. Where Hobbesian fear was a tool of political order, serving ruler and ruled alike, Montesquieu believed that

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followers blind to the more subtle yet pervasive possibilities of political fear and how it could play a role in even supposedly moderate regimes through sustained social and economic hierarchies. Robin’s Montesquieu is Shklar’s Montesquieu, a thinker whose main focus was to build allegiance to liberal institutions through the spreading of a sense of fear toward the political alternative of absolute power, given an unwillingness to open the question of what might be a fuller positive conception of human ends.22 Just as Robin demonstrates that Montesquieu had a deeper conception of political fear in his Persian Letters, so I would argue (against Robin) that Montesquieu also carries a fuller conception into his later work of De l’esprit des lois.23 The Montesquieu who is said to provide a false caricature of political fear can be regarded in some way as a misleading depiction of his own writing. As a start, it will be helpful to shed light on one of the central metaphors Montesquieu evokes in his discussion of despotism in the text of De l’esprit des lois, that of sickness. This metaphor shows that Montesquieu’s interpretation of despotism, contrary to Robin’s interpretation, was not reducible to the mad whims of a single leader, but there was indeed in Montesquieu’s thinking an awareness of systemic degeneration that led a regime to become despotic. This intuition meant that political ills were not only posited outside moderate regimes but that, like pathological inquiry, these political ills could be perceived in their incipient growth from within. Furthermore, as I will argue, the source of political pathology can be seen in both the excessive ambitions of political leaders and in the complacency of subjects and citizens. It is not surprising that Montesquieu had recourse to medical metaphor. He had an interest in medical science, as we know from a number of his scientific essays as well as the books in his library; he also counted many doctors among his close friends and associates.24 Still, apart from terror satisfied only the depraved needs of a savage despot. The Hobbesian sovereign was aided by influential elites and learned men, scattered throughout civil society, who saw it in their interest to collaborate with him. The despot decimated elites and obliterated institutions, subduing any social organization not entirely his” (Robin, Fear, 52). 22 “Montesquieu did not know – and did not care to enquire – whether we were free and equal, but he did know that terror was awful and had to be resisted. Thus was liberalism born in opposition to terror – and at the same time yoked to its menacing shadow” (ibid., 54). 23 Ibid., 55. 24 As Chiquet tells us, “Les lectures médicales et scientifiques de Montesquieu constituent effectivement une part non négligeable, ne serait-ce qu’en terme quantitative, de son oeuvre” (Montesquieu, 25). Chiquet discusses the numerous medical authors whose works were found in Montesquieu’s library. We also know of the influence of the work of the



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analysis of the direct application of medical science to his theories of air, water, and climate, there has been little discussion of the rhetorical force of medicine in his work. If we focus on Montesquieu’s description of the subjects of a despotic regime, we see that he depicts the people living under these conditions as the victims of some form of natural disaster. Their features are described so as to express a degree of simplicity. He tells us, for example, that these subjects are motivated only by passion, and he often compares them to animals or savages.25 The fear they feel leads them to pare down their needs to a single one of sheer survival, the women being home-bound and families isolated in their housesholds. Their souls can become “effarouchées” and “atroces,” as he notes in his description of life in Japan.26 Fear also has physical effects, such as making faces appear “pale.”27 In addition to these images allowing us to draw parallels between despotism and illness, Montesquieu provides a more explicit analogy in book XXIII in the context of his discussion of the relationship between laws and the number of inhabitants in a particular state. In chapter 28, on how to deal with a declining population, Montesquieu suggests that depopulation can be provoked by incidents including wars, plagues, and famines or by internal corruption and poor government. In the latter case, he tells us, “les hommes y ont péri par une maladie insensible et habituelle: nés dans la langueur et dans la misère, dans la violence ou les préjugés du gouvernement, ils se sont vu détruire, souvent sans sentir les causes de leur destruction” (my emphasis).28 The explicit parallel between despotism and sickness confirms the variety of images evoking a similar theme dispersed throughout the text. How does this metaphor function in the argument? Given the distinction made in the text among the three models of government, this metaphorical language serves to underpin a second emerging distinction between moderate and despotic governments and, of course, highlights the fact that despotism is not to be regarded as just one form of political rule among many, but a negative example. However, and in addition, another factor linking despotic government with a state of sickness is the psychological effect of both, in particular their relation to fear. In eighteenth-century France there was much

English doctor John Arbuthnot on Montesquieu. See Dedieu, Montesquieu et la tradition politique anglaise en France. 25 Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, V, xiii, 292, and VI, v. 26 Ibid., VI, xiii, 323. 27 Ibid., VI, v, 314. 28 Ibid., XXIII, xxvii, 711.

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evidence to reinforce the equation, and there were many public health issues for which the management of popular fears was central. As one most prominent example, the return of the plague to Marseille in 1720– 22 left roughly 100,000 people – half the population of the city and its outlying areas – dead.29 The situation raised medical and public policy issues that were discussed in a number of forums within Bordeaux, including the Chamber of Commerce, the Parlement, and the Académie. Some of the discussion involved the degree of isolation needed for Marseille and whether some of the goods to be traded by the region of Provence could pass through the port of Bordeaux instead of Marseille, as well as what public health measures could stem the spread of the contagion and avert public panic in the face of the disease.30 Indeed, among the competing theories of disease at the time, one (like that espoused by Chirac, the king’s doctor, as well as by the majority of city councillors in Marseille) held that individual fears, leading to internal imbalances, were the primary cause of the spread of the plague.31 Montesquieu’s old friend, Joseph Navarre, published Lettres sur la peste in the summer of 1721 when discussions concerning the nature of the disease and the best policies to follow to contain it were at their height.32 Moreover, the subject of the essay competition for the Académie of Bordeaux in 1721–22 was the cause and nature of the plague.33 In this context it is certain that Montesquieu was aware of the political stakes and of the effects of political choices on the general sentiments of the population both in Marseille and in Bordeaux. By using the metaphor of sickness in his discussion of despotism, he is not suggesting that despotism is an exotic and singular regime; in contrast, this metaphor suggests a much closer line between monarchy and despotism – that is, despotism as a sick monarchy, or despotism as the hidden virus within the life of monarchies and other moderate regimes.34 Montesquieu was 29 See, for example, Gafferel and Duranty, La Peste de 1720 à Marseille et en France d’après des documents inédits; Mouton, La Malédiction du Grand-Saint-Antoine; Bertrand, A Historical Relation of the Plague at Marseille in the Year 1720. 30 See for example Archives municipales de Bordeaux, “Registres secrets du Parlement de Bordeaux,” Ms 758–806, vol. 42, 310, 519–20, 591–6, and 609–11, where there is evidence of a great deal of discussion surrounding a petition sent by commercial officials of Languedoc to the king asking that goods to be traded with Holland be sent through the port of Bordeaux instead of Marseille. Officials in Bordeaux were in general strongly opposed to this petition and sent notice to the king to this effect. Two months later the king rejected the petition. 31 Chicoyneau et al., Observations et réflexions sur la peste de Marseille. 32 Navarre, Lettres sur la peste écrites à un médecin de Bordeaux. 33 Barrière, L’Académie de Bordeaux. 34 On this point see Rahe, Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, especially chap. 1.



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not an unreserved apologist for monarchical government, and his understanding of the distance between his idea of moderate government and the more generic idea of monarchy is also evidence of his awareness of the malevolent effects of certain uses of political power. The debate around the plague demonstrated in dramatic terms how political choices could directly impact collective psychology. It is quite possible to conceive of Montesquieu’s understanding of despotism as a transposition of a paradigm of health and sickness to the field of politics. That transposition helps to demonstrate that the evil of despotism was not something distant for Montesquieu. He regarded despotism as the latent possibility of any political system, in the same way that Usbek, the enlightened protagonist, carried but may not have not recognized his own abusive tendencies.35 A further feature of Montesquieu’s discussion of political fear as a principle of despotic regimes is a deep ambiguity regarding whether it can be regarded as a primitive emotion evoked in conditions of great social passivity and subjection, or whether there is a much more sophisticated social dynamic that not only supports but indeed can help to generate political fear. Contrary to Robin as well as Bertrand Binoche, the depiction in De l’esprit des lois of individuals driven by political fear does not conform in all ways to the image of people living in a state of nature.36 Certainly there are passages where Montesquieu uses a language suggesting a more primitive life for those driven by despotic fear. He notes, for example, that there is no need for education in a despotism and that in such a regime knowledge is dangerous (III, iii, and Iv, iii and v). He also alludes in some of his depictions of despotic fear to a form of almost bestial primitivism.37 So while there may be some basis for suggesting an aspect of caricature in Montesquieu’s portrayal of despotism, at the same time one cannot ignore other descriptions of despotic fear that allude to a much more complex phenomenon. Montesquieu notes from the beginning of the

35 Montesquieu, Lettres persanes. 36 “Le despotisme est cet étrange régime politique qui, en quelque sorte, institutionnalise l’état de nature en interdisant à ses victims de s’y attacher, c’est-à-dire en les condamnant à vivre indéfiniment dans la terreur d’une force dont elles ne peuvent jamais anticiper les points d’impact” (Binoche, introduction à ‘De l’esprit des lois’ de Montesquieu, 130). 37 “On n’y peut pas plus representer ses craintes sur un événement future, qu’excuser ses mauvais succès sur le caprice de la fortune. Le partage des hommes, comme des bêtes, y est l’instinct, l’obéissance, le châtiment” (III, x, 260) ; “Tout y doit rouler sur deux ou trois idées ; il n’en faut donc pas de nouvelles. Quand vous instruisez une bête, vous vous donnez bien de garde de lui faire changer de maître, de leçon et d’allure ; vous frappez son cerveau par deux ou trois mouvements, et pas d’avantage” (V, xiv, 293)

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text that human fear is unique; it is shaped by a life in a social setting, and therefore in reality it cannot have essentially bestial qualities (I, ii). Indeed, Montesquieu reinforces this idea in his polemic against Hobbes by suggesting that the political relationship between a master and subordinate is not a simple or primitive idea (such as might issue directly out of a state of nature) but the result of a long history and experience. Again (in III, iii), when he revisits the process by which Rome’s democracy became corrupt (the classical example of the rise of despotism in any Western account of political development), he recognizes that it involved a complex interaction of both leadership initiatives and new perceptions and interpretations on the part of citizens: “Lorsque cette vertu cesse, l’ambition entre dans les coeurs qui peuvent la recevoir, et l’avarice entre dans tous. Les desirs changent d’objet; ce qu’on aimait, on ne l’aime plus; on étoit libre avec les lois, on veut être libre contre elles; chaque citoyen est comme un esclave échappé de la maison de son maître; ce qui étoit maxime, on l’appelle rigueur, ce qui étoit règle, on l’appelle gêne; ce qui y étoit attention, on l’appelle crainte.” Here the growing perception of fear within a society in a period of political change comes from a re-evaluation and reinterpretation of what had been virtue rather than a form of collective emotional regression. It appears as a clear form of paradiastolic exercise, requiring on the part of citizens an added attention to circumstances and greater reflection on the purposes through which their lives were defined in the past. Through this example two things emerge about Montesquieu’s understanding of fear. First is the possibility that political fear requires not a less sophisticated but indeed a more sophisticated process of reflection and interpretation. The power of “education” required by the institutionalization of virtue, as we have seen, relates largely to a training of habits rather than improved powers of ratiocination and reflection. The cognitive element of fear involves a heightened understanding of what one values and what one will seek to preserve above all, as well as greater powers of assessment regarding the possible threats to one’s well-being. While such thinking may be instigated initially by changing political circumstances, it is evident that such a change in perception cannot be possible without quite advanced powers of reflection and judgment. This example also illustrates a second aspect of Montesquieu’s notion of fear, namely, the idea that fear cannot issue solely from the objective position and actions of a tyrant who seeks to oppress a people. It can also derive from society itself where a social relation once characterized by trust or common purpose becomes laden with mutual suspicion and a sense of the burden of public duties. In this light, despotism does not appear at the beginning of history in a primitive era but rather at the end.



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Indeed, the dynamic of fear involves more than one’s passive subjection to the whims of a ruler, however much some of the language used by Montesquieu might suggest the contrary. As noted in our preliminary look at Lefebvre’s work on fear, as a social principle it is often compatible with deep-seated social divisions and suspicions. Similarly, in Montesquieu one finds that the despotic regime is riveted with divisions. In the first instance, the ruler is seen as driven by a sense of insecurity and suspicion of the subjects, particularly the more powerful ones, an attitude that both fuels and necessitates increased arbitrary action. So fear may begin with the ruler. The lack of security exacerbated by the actions of the despot in turn lead the subjects to seek greater security in localized groups. A cycle of fear brings individuals of the same background and/or inclination to stick together to protect themselves, a dynamic that also induces greater fear for those of other groups. As Michel Nehme has noted with regard to contemporary Middle Eastern politics, “A Lebanese Christian leader once said to me in confidence, ‘Merely by their solidarity as religious groups (the different religious sects), they create fear in me; I could become secure only through the solidarity and security of my own group; the history of sectarian bloodshed in the region does not encourage me to feel at ease.’”38 In addition, for fear to be possible as a more general principle, subjects must also be exercising judgment in seeking to predict and hoping to protect themselves or to be excluded from the ill effects of the exercise of power. That is why Montesquieu tells us (III, ix) that despotic fear tends to be greater among social and political elites than in the general population who can live, for the most part, in relative security.39 It suggests that those with the greatest hopes and ambitions as well as those who have the most to preserve will be those with the greatest fears. Political fear is directly related to a series of judgments and assessments about one’s situation and hopes in relation to a political structure that could work to thwart them. In a despotic regime, fear appears in particular as a mechanism of subordination between a prince and those who might be in a position to be future rivals for power. Even though fear is born with threats and punishments (IV, v), this dynamic assumes a sophisticated social organization, not a primitive state. It thrives in a social structure that has provided some encouragement to the avarice and cupidity of the more

38 Nehme, Fear and Anxiety in the Arab World, 93. 39 “Il faut que le people soit jugé par les lois, et les grands par la fantaisie du prince; que la tête du dernier sujet soit en surété, et celle des bachas toujours exposée. On ne peut parler sans frémir de ces gouvernements monstrueux” (De l’esprit des lois, 258).

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powerful (V, xiv). It also depends on the hope of the less powerful for the basic commodities required to live in order that they tolerate the limited security offered by the regime (III, ix, 259, and V, xvii, 301). We have seen in general, then, how the portrait of Montesquieu’s political fear Robin sketches is incomplete because it does not consider some of the complexities within Montesquieu’s depiction. Despite a certain rhetorical flourish within Montesquieu’s text that might suggest a reduction of the idea of fear to a series of non-rational and instinctual reflexes, we have seen how his notion of political fear requires sophisticated cognitive powers of self-knowledge and assessment on the part of the fearful, as well as a developed social structure that is the product of a longer history. We are left, then, with a question: What does this dual depiction of the principle of fear in De l’esprit des lois serve? It may be that Montesquieu was struggling in this work over the appropriate balance between what he perceived as dysfunctional or pathological manifestations of political fear, and functional ones, an ambiguity illustrated by the double function of the despotic regime in the text as a regime separate and distinct from moderate government but also existing within the same spectrum and seen as an unhealthy outgrowth of the same. At one level Shklar is right to suggest that a function of the image of despotism in De l’esprit des lois is to provide a negative rallying point for positive politics, that is, a summun malum through which other efforts to institute good politics can be measured (and in that sense, one can read Montesquieu as merely a more sophisticated version of the Hobbesian argument). However, the politics of fear seen as a part of a political spectrum is also regarded as a pervasive and enduring feature of all politics, something that can only be kept from becoming too extreme and all-defining by vigilance and foresight, but that can never be eradicated. It was in this latter spirit that Robert Molesworth published his famous account of the government of Denmark at the end of the seventeenth century.40 Here, as a result of weariness with disputes concerning the financing of the state and through the search for a practical solution, the estates transferred their fiscal powers to the monarch, only to find themselves several years later in a state of miserable oppression. Despite these examples of the obvious malfunction of the regime based on fear, in some instances within Montesquieu’s text fear in a lesser intensity can serve as a useful sentiment in politics. A clear example is  within the despotic regime where the fear engendered by religion can  also serve as an important check on the excessive use of power, 40 Molesworth, An Account of Denmark as It Was in the Year 1692.



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mitigating the inevitably unstable and destructive tendencies linked with the rule of a single despot (III, x). In addition, in discussing criminal law within more moderate regimes Montesquieu suggests that it is more important to deter criminals through an understanding of the certainty of punishment through a more efficient system of enforcement than through exemplary punishments. The net effect of the former is to increase the fear of potential criminals through a sense of the inevitability of being caught while softening the horror of imagined punishment.41 Still, it is clear that in Montesquieu’s work the beneficial or necessary side to a lesser sense of political fear is softened, perhaps so as not to overshadow the message of a need for concern over the possibility of political decay. In deeper terms, we might suggest that fear can and should play a role in politics to the extent that politics reveals humanity’s attachment to the world (insofar as through politics humanity seeks to shape that world toward a vision of the better), but also the unpredictability of action and thereby the ongoing vulnerability of human beings to their world and each other. In other words, fear at a basic level can be the product of greater reflective awareness of the limits and weaknesses of intentional political action. It is precisely this sense of fear, as stressed by Butler, that may reinforce a deeper sense of humanity and build new solidarities as well as cultivate a sense of political humility. Fear, then, as a public passion, can become dysfunctional for politics when despair over the limits of politics leads to acquiescence to the need for efficiency over the demands of the better. It was excessive concern over efficient process, according to Molesworth, that led the government of Denmark into despotism. Similarly with Montesquieu the pathological dimension of his analysis of despotism shows an evolution away from monarchical government in circumstances where there appears to be no opposition to the growing concentration of power in a monarch as a result of a promise of efficiency in rule over and above any other considerations.

41 See my Montesquieu and the Parlement of Bordeaux.

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Normative Political Theory in Light of Public Passion: Justice out of Passion in this book so far I have undertaken four main tasks. I have articulated the concept of a public passion to supplement an understanding of political life and the place of emotion within it. In particular, I have tried to show that political institutions have a tendency to promote common affective dispositions within a population, dispositions that shape both intersubjective relations and the way that publics within a regime orient themselves to politics at a very general level. I have shown that despite evident patterns of affect issuing from a shared institutional framework, acknowledgment of public passion does not carry a presumption of extreme homogeneity in political commitments or policy stances. Indeed, throughout this work I have traced the history of the concept with emphasis on how various renditions of the idea have been compatible with pluralism and a politics of conflict and contestation. I also have shown that there is not just one transhistorical manifestation of this idea, but that through time and in different types of regimes and differing cultural contexts, the understanding and practice of public ­passion has been subject to variation. I have shown that the work of Montesquieu demonstrates an important (if not flawless) articulation of this idea providing us with an approach that can be helpful as a starting point in thinking about our political life. I have repeatedly stressed that this argument relates to only one particular phenomenon in politics: the way in which affect is cultivated, desired, or shared among citizens of a regime. In doing so, my intent is not to supplant a vision of politics as conflict, nor to abandon the understanding of a sphere of public life characterized by winners and losers, or to reject the notion that people may feel a wide variety of personal emotional reactions to political matters. The idea of an emotional climate does not undermine an idea of politics as conflict and with conflicting emotions but provides a more realistic understanding that politics operates within the context of



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an institutional setting and a popular dynamic that shapes an underlying tone of interaction that is itself emotional. It is clear that, for example, in a well-functioning liberal democratic regime, there are fundamental rules and principles of public behaviour, and that in public and in relation to matters of public importance we carry certain expectations about our own interaction with others as well as how others should interact with us – expectations partly constituted by particular forms of affect or feelings. Acceptance of these practices and acknowledgment of the way they can differ in competing institutional settings lead to an awareness of shared underlying dispositional qualities, or shared public passion, alongside the clashing emotions stemming from daily deliberations over process and policy choices. the idea of public passion: the third articulation In chapter 2 I introduced five key features of my understanding of the phenomenon of public passion. Here I revisit those features and provide some broad reflection on them as a whole to provide a backdrop for the chapter’s final section, where I show how a better understanding of this idea can enhance contemporary discussions in liberal democratic theory. The five key features of public passion are as follows. First, it is experienced as a simultaneity of shared feeling within a community of citizens and is in general terms regime specific but among regimes can be expressed in more or less pervasive and intense ways (something that I have alluded to in the distinction between “thick” and “thin” manifestations). Second, it can be seen to be generated by both horizontal and vertical dynamics, meaning that it is favoured by institutions but also spread independently among citizens. Third, it is not fully static and indeed can shift over time. Fourth, it is subject to modification by contingencies of history that give rise to greater awareness of an intensity of public feeling at certain intervals, Fifth, it is compatible with competing ideological principles and practices and general public dialogue concerning the viability of one policy over another. This last feature includes the acknowledgment that policy debates can often be as much or more about means as about ends. It is fully reasonable to expect intense political dialogue among advocates of the same political values and vision; indeed, political “friends” can often be fierce opponents. Through my discussion of the literature on the public emotions of love, honour, and fear, it has been possible to fine-tune this model. We must first be sensitive to the polysemic quality of even the same emotion, so that on the surface it is very difficult to make categorical judgments regarding suitability or compatibility with any one form of political

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commitment, in turn making it difficult to suggest that one emotion is categorically good or bad for politics.1 This position, of course, is somewhat of a departure from the message often read in Montesquieu. We saw in chapter 6 that the same emotion may give rise to competing manifestations. For the case of love as a political principle, the collective conception of political love as intense personal sacrifice and subordination to a reified notion of the common good may lead to less than ideal consequences, whereas a conception of collective political love that incorporates some understanding of openness and willingness to change in the face of the other may be a more effective means of thinking about one form of political justice. Similarly, while fear may be the dominant emotion in repressive regimes, this does not make some manifestations of fear fully dysfunctional or disruptive to the good functioning of more open regimes, and indeed fear can serve for some as a motivation for a pursuit of justice. In general terms, then, the notion of public passion is merely a starting point for new directions of reflection on the experience of democratic politics; we must go beyond the signalling of one emotion or another as the lynchpin on which the success of liberal democratic regimes thrive or fail. The remainder of this chapter focuses on the normative implications of this phenomenon. In order to complete my argument regarding the benefits of this way of thinking, I need to show how it can be harnessed to a theory of justice. I identify three strategies for doing so. The first is to suggest that the phenomenon of politically shared emotions is an outgrowth of basic human tendencies and needs and has the potential to aim at a shared sense of justice. The second strategy is to show how public passion might serve as a mechanism of political education, helping to inculcate a sense of justice. My third strategy involves the most challenging task, which is to demonstrate how the basic principles or parameters of justice can themselves be derived from some consideration of shared public passion, helping us then to discriminate between its more acceptable and unacceptable manifestations. public passion as an outgrowth of basic human tendencies Current experimental psychology stresses that the need to belong is fundamental to human life. Our need for social connectedness is not just of calculated instrumental importance to human beings (e.g., for the benefits of language, education, and “commodious living”) but is so much a part of 1 This position is compatible with the line of argument most famously associated with Robert Solomon in “The Emotions of Justice.”



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who we are that social rupture activates our automatic biological pain mechanisms.2 While the nature of belonging and a sense of belonging are complicated psychological phenomena, the tendency to share emotions across smaller groups, as has been readily documented, as well as across larger groups, as I argue in this book, may be just another manifestation of this basic social need and demonstrate one aspect of the experience of belonging that human beings seek.3 From this perspective, the notion of public passion is a diffuse but nonetheless palpable manifestation of a basic human need, and as such expresses the aspiration to a human good. More importantly, while not a direct normative connection, the fact that public passion can be linked even at the level of polity to a more basic human need to belong may be at least one indication of the undesirability of a politics of exclusion. Insofar as some shared public passions may be interpreted or manipulated to stigmatize or exclude a category of resident or citizen, we can suggest that this manifestation is a betrayal of the very claims to justice embedded in the nature of public passion. public passion and political education Aristotle defined citizenship in terms of a shared understanding of justice, but it would be rare for many citizens today to be able to articulate what they consider justice to be. However, most could easily articulate and indeed might agree on what they feel to be just and unjust actions, and many of those sentiments helping to identify just and unjust actions are developed not through theoretical reflection but through association and emotive consideration in response to publicity and the representation of similar emotional responses. Arguably, citizens in modern liberal democracies first acquire a sense of political justice emotively, through emotional transfer among citizens, and only secondarily through reflection. If this is the case, then what was labelled in early social science as “contagion” and seen to be the bane of liberal democratic politics may be the very basis through which a commitment to principles of justice can be sustained across generations. Proceeding along these lines, many theorists who seek a more naturalistic foundation for justice and who are sceptical of Kantian approaches 2 The general theory suggests a greater link between physical pain processes and emotional pain processes than previously acknowledged. Indeed, experimentation has shown that anti-inflammatory drugs can reduce the amount of “social pain” felt as a result of being shunned or rejected socially. See De Wall et al., “Tylenol Reduces Social Pain,” as well as Gere and MacDonald, “An Update of the Empirical Case for the Need to Belong”; MacDonald and Jensen-Campbell, Social Pain. 3 See Fischer, Parkinson, and Manstead, Emotion in Social Relations, 182–3.

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to the basis for moral and ethical thinking focus on one or several key emotions, such as compassion, empathy or love, as being most fundamental to a sense and practice of political education for justice. The idea is that there are one or more emotional dispositions that give us privileged access to moral thinking and behaviour. Still, I believe that the links between public passion and a sense of justice have less to do with the substantive quality of the emotion or emotions involved, whether they be compassion, fear, or shame, and more to do with the fact or more formal structure of shared emotions within a political community. I suggest that recognition that emotions can be shared within a political community, and the sense that this can be a good thing, can provide a starting point for deeper reflection on the nature and requirements of our lives in political community. I am sceptical that any one emotion in itself provides us with that privileged access. A reason why the actual content or quality of the shared emotional climate may not be the key to political justice is due both to the complexity of public passions – themselves characterized by a mixture of shared emotions in our intersubjective relations with other citizens (and not just one emotion such as love, honour, or fear, as suggested by Montesquieu) – and to the ambivalence that can inhabit even one of these shared emotions, as seen earlier in this work. Thus, in a liberal democracy, in the course of our public interactions and expectations of others, we can recognize that trust in the authenticity of claims being made by ourselves and other citizens may be mixed with suspicion or anxiety concerning the motivations and/or capacities for good judgment of those who claim to lead us or want to lead us; fear for many of the contingencies of life may be mixed with hope that public decision-making power can be used effectively to minimize the pain of dealing with some of these contingencies; a desire to treat others and be treated ourselves in a spirit of equality as a respected individual with dignity may be mixed with possible guilt or shame in the acknowledgment of injustices perpetrated toward minority groups by our own institutions; and confidence in our own ability to make (or delegate) decisions responsibly may be mixed with an openness to remorse or shame as well as forgiveness of self if our judgment turns out to be misguided. This list does not exhaust the complexity of feeling(s) that describes in phenomenological terms and forms a background to political discussion in a modern liberal democratic setting. As we have seen, the elements of this mix may be open to cultural shifting and reinterpretation, so that even a shared emotion such as honour or love may be the locus of ambivalence. In addition, despite great emphasis on the “positive” emotions in the literature on emotions and justice, it may be that a shared sense of the emotions traditionally



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regarded as negative, such as fear and guilt, has as great an impact on the emergence of a strong sense of political justice as the emotions of love or empathy. Instead of relying on any one emotion, a better way of proceeding may be to derive principles of justice from the very mechanisms or the structure of shared emotion that help to constitute public passion. What I venture here is the sketch of a theory, rather than its full elucidation, as a basis for thinking about justice as proceeding from the fact of shared emotion. This articulation stands as an alternative to the development of theories of justice from either rational principle alone or from a core set of what have been termed “positive” emotions such as love. Still, in order to proceed, I first need to distinguish public passion from a more general idea of a capacity for empathy. There are of course parallels between the notion I have developed in this book and the phenomenon of empathy. Both point to tendencies of individuals to mirror and feel the emotions of others, and in this sense they point to processes related to emotions rather than to emotions themselves. In addition, neither public passion nor empathy necessarily imply an element of “concern,” in the way that “sympathy” generally does.4 Another way of stating it is that empathy is characterized as the capacity for feeling what another is feeling, as opposed to pity or sympathy, which is feeling for others, but not necessarily feeling with them.5 Where empathy and public passion differ, most importantly, is in the degree to which these are individual capacities for which we can be held largely responsible – that is, which we can develop, or not, in ourselves. My observation is that the tendency for individuals within particular types of political communities to share a dispositional and emotional outlook is something that takes place as a natural outgrowth of our way of living in those communities. To say that we act in public life in and through an understanding of public passion is more a fact of social and political life than an observation of individual character. To have a capacity for empathy, then, is to go beyond this and to more consciously cultivate an understanding of the feelings of others in both their public and private lives and in relation to more specific concerns. In addition, while public passion is participation in a similar emotional outlook common to all citizens to some degree, empathy is largely about spanning the divide between one’s own private emotional state and those of others who are feeling quite differently. It is because of the much more challenging task of empathy that I can argue, despite the mechanism of public passion that operates at a very general 4 Prinz, “The Moral Emotions,” 533. 5 Krause, Civil Passions.

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level in our public lives, that we cannot expect a deeper and more farreaching notion of empathy to be a generalizable nor indeed always desirable solution to the challenges of liberal democratic politics. Empathy has often been invoked as an emotional capacity of all human beings that is foundational to morality and an appropriate moral compass for the pursuit of justice in contemporary liberal democratic states. As one example, Krause explores how empathy plays a role in the constitution of liberal impartiality rightly understood. She argues that the exercise of our ability to feel what other citizens may be feeling and our judgment of the salience of those feelings in deliberation (filtered through both our understanding of basic human concerns and our overall liberal commitments to ideals of liberty and respect for the dignity of all) allow us to attain an engaged emotional equivalent to a sort of veil of ignorance wherein we rise above personal interest and gain insight into what policy might best serve the whole. Krause’s concept offers a unique and intriguing way in which we might think of incorporating emotion into a normative view of liberal democratic politics.6

6 I believe that liberal democracy currently does not solicit a general capacity for empathy so much as a particular sensitivity to the suffering of other groups of citizens. For puritanical reasons or otherwise, we tend to be suspicious of public expressions of citizen joy and contentedness but take the expression of pain and suffering more seriously. In the main I diverge from Krause’s analysis on two points. First, I am not convinced that she escapes the criticism that she herself uses to discount the theories of Martha Nussbaum and John Dryzek. She maintains that both of these theorists undermine their defence of emotion by suggesting that the work of emotion in politics is made ultimately subject to rational tribunals, as in Nussbaum’s dismissal of shame in politics for its potential to betray the basic liberal-democratic principles of dignity and self-respect (154). While Krause frames her delineation of the acceptable and non-acceptable emotional stances in politics through an injunction that we be attentive to basic human concerns, it is not fully obvious that her limit is one of emotion and Nussbaum’s one of pure rational adjudication. In essence they appear to be similar theoretical moves. In addition, we might question whether good citizens must be those who seek in all deliberative functions to transcend or overcome their individual perspectives and always seek to sense what the other is feeling. While the capacity for empathy is crucial for a wellfunctioning liberal democratic regime, I am not convinced that the proper place of emotion in politics or liberal democratic politics is limited to this capacity for feeling with others, in the way developed and advocated by Krause. The constant striving for this form of a generalized perspective may hinder the development of one’s own commitments and make one most responsive to the most vocal of citizens who in fact do the least in cultivating empathy for their detractors and critics. A call for a politics of empathy may suggest that political preferences and choices tend to be determined individually, prior to the consideration of social and political circumstances, and therefore such a politics may obfuscate the degree to which political stances are already socially and collectively constituted. In contrast, if we acknowledge a generalized social background through which some political passions can be shared, then the process of deliberation may be not so much as



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Krause taps into a growing current in democratic thought and rhetoric to draw increasingly on our capacity for empathy as a means to deepen and strengthen the practice of citizenship. A more recent work by Michael Frazer also offers an attempt to recapture an understanding of empathy that can be effectively harnessed to a more robust notion of reflective autonomy.7 In the context of increased recourse to empathy as a corrective to contemporary liberal democratic theory, it is crucial to acknowledge that empathy generally does not work as a capacity that one can exercise rightly or not at all – that is, that one has or does not have. Rather, following the German phenomenologist and social thinker Albert Schutz, and in light of the point raised above, we should acknowledge empathy as a spectrum of possibilities with multiple manifestations.8 If we think of empathy as the ability or attempt to understand others by delving into their motives and grasping the subjective understanding of their words and behaviours, this can be done on one side of the spectrum through a conceptual apparatus that draws on a vision of standardized social types (sometimes accurate and sometimes not) as one might have recourse to in standard Weberian sociological analysis; on the other side, it can be done through an intimate understanding of the character and motivations of the particular individual, such as one might practice in a well-functioning relationship or marriage. These are two forms of empathetic understanding, but they can be thought to operate in quite distinct ways. At a social and public level, one may pay most attention to the statements of social actors in order to gain access into their own sense of their motivations and emotions, and one can treat these statements as largely authoritative. In contrast, at a personal level, with closer knowledge of personal histories, it may be that a close and good-willed observer will have a better understanding of certain aspects of the subject’s behaviour and feelings than even the subject could achieve, or at least could articulate. An obvious example is the practice of empathy that parents can exercise toward their children. Empathy, then, at a deep level, requires a particular type of attunement to a subjective state that incorporates not only some form of emotional identification but also an ability to articulate a history or background through which that emotion makes sense.

entering into the different feelings of others with regard to one issue or another (which really is not much different from recognizing that they may have a different judgment about certain matters of public importance), but rather starting from what might be shared or in common as a first step to discussion or possible compromise. 7 Frazer, The Enlightenment of Sympathy. 8 Wagner, introduction to Schutz, 33.

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It may be that empathy as deep understanding is neither possible nor desirable as a goal for citizens in liberal democratic politics. Because it is impossible for citizens to develop a full understanding of all other citizens as individuals, something that would require that we gain a thorough knowledge of the life and family history of all our co-citizens, it is impossible to expect citizens to practise the most intense forms of empathy. However, the more we loosen our expectations about empathy and seek an approximate understanding of personal and collective narratives and emotions, the more we may be prone to broad generalizations, stereotyping, and inaccuracies.9 The type of empathy that we can envisage in a good political community is of a particular kind – one that may draw on generalizations to help understand the motivations of others, but these generalizations must be open to modification and amendment in the face of new evidence. In addition, this form of empathy must place greater weight on statements offered by the subjects themselves and must take these statements at face value, given not only a lack of intimate knowledge of the individuals involved, and a basic presumption of equality, but also the inappropriateness of making deeper soul disclosure and the interpretation of motives a subject of public deliberation. While the talk of empathy in contemporary democratic citizenship may suggest that we think of political interaction more on the model of the intimate domestic sphere of friends and family with greater individualized attentiveness to subjectivity, we should be careful not to advocate a model that, partly for reasons of scale, would not work appropriately in the public realm. Perhaps a more important reason for the inappropriateness of what we may call “citizen-specific empathy,” at least as a basis for a theory and practice of justice, is that the public realm demands a much more complex disposition on the part of citizens who should not always demand the deep subjective understanding of the other of the type we may seek in more personal relationships. Partly because of the complexities of the nature of citizen-specific empathy and partly because it appears to presuppose already given normative dimensions of liberal democratic politics, I think one must look for the link between emotion and liberal democratic norms along other lines.10 9 The perspectives of others can often wield significantly different results, as illustrated by Nancy Huston in her novel An Adoration (in which we are given competing accounts of the life of a certain Cosmo). 10 Furthermore, we should acknowledge that even “citizen-specific empathy” may not be sufficient for a moral outlook, as citizens will also need what is sometimes called “the concern mechanism” in addition to some capacity to feel with other citizens. As Alvin Goldman notes, the capacity for concern is what will distinguish the good citizen from the general psychopath (Goldman, Simulating Minds, 293).



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Still, at the micro level of the acquisition of basic moral intuitions for each individual, as suggested by Greenspan, the mechanism of emotional transfer is key. Our fundamental individual characters are in part shaped by adult intervention vis-à-vis our behaviour and reactions, and as children we are most often taught through the work of mimicry. Adults will act out and seek to work with the mechanism of emotional transfer to show outwardly and thereby instil in children the emotional state that forms a background to a more developed and cognitive moral sense.11 So, for example, a toddler who takes a toy from another child or threatens to hit another child will not just be told “no,” told that the behaviour is wrong, and given reasons why this is so, but will be given a demonstration of how such action will elicit sadness in caregivers and others around them. This mechanism provides an emotional primer in development, laying a foundation for a future sense of morality. If the development of our moral sense in individual terms can be said to be related to the work of emotional transfer among caregivers and peers, then we might also see how recognition of shared affect at the level of political community, however diffuse, can help in the formation of a sense of political justice. If the norms of the regime and political community hold that an attitude of basic respect, a general trustworthiness, and desire for tolerance are general expectations in all our public interactions, then an ongoing critical project of bringing violations of these norms to light provides in a similar way an ongoing process of civic education for new generations of citizens. justice and public passion as a form of shared emotion While answering the question of how moral attitudes and an awareness of political justice can emerge from a form of emotional education in the development of each individual, the mechanism of emotional transfer does not in and of itself assure us of the appropriate moral compass. In other words, how can we be assured of the justice embedded in the initial principles and ethos through which citizens are initially formed? Is the mechanism of emotional transfer in and of itself not morally neutral in terms of the values or goods it can instil, and in this sense could it not just as effectively be morally corrupting as well as morally beneficial? Does it not have the same neutral moral status as Rousseauian pitié? Or what do we make, for example, of the civic and economic apathy cultivated among subjects of a number of authoritarian regimes?

11 Greenspan, “Learning Emotions and Ethics,” 546.

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While this concern is certainly legitimate at the individual and the family group level, where it is quite possible that a deviant set of priorities could be instilled in a younger member of the group, I venture the somewhat controversial claim that, at the level of regime that concerns me in this book, the nature of the mechanism of emotional transfer is manifested in different ways that are no longer fully neutral with regard to moral priorities, and indeed work in the interests of a form of political justice. The first point here is merely empirical. In other words, when we explore the various forms of public passion, we find that the shared emotions in separate regimes tend in a great number of instances not to reflect the priorities of corrupt leaders but indeed to follow their own particular form of logic, much of which is reactive and rejecting of public corruption. What we have learned in our depiction of public passion is that people living in political communities have a tendency to share emotion on matters of public importance in sometimes diffuse ways. These emotions shape people’s expectations in their interactions in public spaces and tend to be regime specific, correlating to some degree to the quality and nature of political institutions and leaders, but not in a mimicking way. Furthermore, these emotions as a form of limited adaptation or resistance imply some concept of the well-being of the community as a whole. In an oppressive or highly authoritarian regime, the sentiments circulated are often ones of fear with a general sense of potential threats to each and all.12 In contrast, in a liberal democratic welfare state such as Canada, passion may include a mix of a number of tendencies including a desire to maintain goals that further the development and relative subjective well-being of all; desire to ensure and respect individual freedom, despite differences in understanding how this should play out in policy terms; hope in our roles of furthering a common political project, yet anxiety and suspicion vis-à-vis political and economic elites who may often appear to derail those efforts; aspirations that good results can be possible through effective public action, but frustration that the political process appears to make such action difficult to achieve.13 What these differing manifestations show is that they are not mere reflections of institutional leadership, or products of institutional conditioning (otherwise, each set of emotions would only reaffirm the existing state of affairs), but rather social and popular manifestations of

12 See, for example, Skidmore’s Karaoke Facism. 13 To some degree, some of these features of public passion mirror the basic sense of liberal purposes that Galston defines as common to all liberal democratic regimes. See William Galston, Liberal Purposes, especially chapter 8.



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justice-seeking within a particular institutional and political setting. While such expressions may not be able to provide us with the full content of the principles of justice, they do show us some understanding of the basic affective motivations that help to motivate a sense of justice and that are given more substantive content as a result of discussion, exchange, and more reflection. So, my claim here is that there appears to be embedded in the very nature of public passion a form of naturalistic claim to political justice as a generalized sense of how citizens ought to relate to one another in the conditions they find themselves in; although perhaps not fully consistent or even clear to itself, this passion does show an underlying tendency to resist the work of political elites who seek to fashion political communities in their own self-interested and corrupt way. While not itself a form of justice, then, public passion nonetheless provides the articulation of a desire for justice and a tentative, if not fully theorized, sense of the content of justice. As such, it may not always aim correctly but it is amenable to analysis and provides the basis for reflection as a start for collective rethinking. Rather than the occurrent and transitory feelings of a public in relation to changing matters of public policy, public passion is rather the deeper and more fundamental affective attitudes that shape our basic expectations of one another in a public setting and with relation to public matters. To go a bit deeper, the fact of emotional transferal at the level of regime, when analyzed as a phenomenon and through its very structure, can issue in basic normative claims that will help us to distinguish between good and bad manifestations of the same. As a preliminary to this analysis, highlighting distinctions within existing moral philosophy will help to clarify the move being made here. We should first distinguish what might be called “hard-core Kantianism” from “soft Kantianism,” both of which in their various forms are resistant to the idea of allowing emotion to have a place in the act of discerning normative outcomes in political theory (a position that is distinct, as we will see, from outlawing emotion altogether from deliberation). Hard-core Kantianism refers to the view that moral thinking is by necessity rational and devoid of emotion. While there may be some concessions in acknowledging that emotion may play a role in motivating individuals and citizens to moral action and the espousal of moral principles such as the need for justice and a general concern for broad ideals of social welfare, in general theorists in this category tend to argue that the content of moral principles and application of moral logic need to be determined through reason alone. One may struggle internally with conflicting ideas and principles, and these are weighed and adjudicated through pre-established procedures that dictate the universalizability, and hence morality, of the final outcome of deliberation. Contemporary examples

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of  this category include most prominently Thomas Spragens but also, ­arguably, Habermas.14 In contrast, “soft Kantianism” (my term) refers to such thinkers as Christine Korsgaard and a large number of theorists of deliberative democracy, including Simone Chambers, who suggest that while emotions can provide the motivation as well as the matter or content for moral deliberation, reason still is ultimately privileged in the determination of fundamental principles deemed to guide good deliberation and just democratic practices. While those entering into deliberation may be driven by different and competing motivations, reason is still given a privileged status by providing the means or the tool for properly adjudicating both the principles that serve as the appropriate parameters of debate and the ways that various positions are adjudicated so as to issue in the most appropriate outcome.15 Soft Kantians, then, will acknowledge that emotion has a place in a theory of politics and public deliberation; however, they will not concede that it can play the role of ultimate adjudication or help to determine that process by which moral principle (generally put to the test of universalizability) is distinguished from mere convention or generalized social norms. Despite some of the concessions of soft Kantians on the place of emotions in political life and political judgment, a Kantian-inspired (hard or soft) approach to moral thinking that looks to universalizability as a true test of what constitutes a moral principle has major weaknesses. In the first instance, it is possible that certain universal principles may indeed be obviously noxious to human interests. While Sujata Miri’s invocation of the “Kantian terrorist” – the person who acts destructively from a sense of duty – is overblown, it is conceivable that certain conclusions that do not instrumentalize human life but that are grounded on a universalized sense of human duty do not always conform to our intuitive sense of what constitutes a moral life.16 In other words, universalizability should be regarded as neither necessary nor sufficient for the moral point of view.

14 See Spragens, Reason and Democracy. 15 For a good representation of Korsgaard’s position, see her “Morality and the Distinctiveness of Human Action.” Many thanks to Simone Chambers for alerting me to this piece. See also Chambers’s review of Krause’s Civil Passions in Ethics. Here Chambers argues that the vast majority of deliberative democrats do not disavow the place of emotion in deliberative politics. However, one should here distinguish the determination of basic principles of democracy that set the parameters for discussion from the deliberative process itself. The former is clearly subject to conventional rules of moral reasoning in a Kantian framework, while the latter may allow for a variety of motivations. 16 Miri, “The Kantian Terrorist.”



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Indeed, some theorists have argued for the phenomenon of what is labelled “inverse akrasia.” This refers to occasions when the conclusions of rational deliberation are confronted and overcome by competing intuitions from emotion that ultimately dictate a better moral response. In other words, there are circumstances when action against one’s better judgment is deemed to be best: “the akratic course of action is superior to the course of action recommended by the agent’s best judgment.”17 The most common example cited here is the case of Huckleberry Finn who, according to his conscious deliberation, felt he had a duty to hand over Jim as a runaway slave to the proper authorities, but nonetheless failed to do so given his feelings of loyalty and friendship for Jim. This case, some suggest, demonstrates how morality can be sometimes better achieved following emotional impulse rather than a Kantian procedure of universalizability and acting on one’s concept of duty. Although controversial, such positions illustrate the point that universalizability may be insufficient and is sometimes misguided as a test of moral appropriateness. The discussion in chapter 2 suggests, in addition, that there are some cognitive aspects to emotional experience that do not collapse into reason, but that do allow us to a certain degree to have confidence in their claims, such as the ambivalence in judgments associated with emotion, as highlighted by Greenspan. In addition, even at the core of Kantian discernment it is not always reason that suggests the primacy of one principle over another; instead, as de Sousa has convincingly argued, the sense of that primacy or superiority can be argued to be grounded ultimately in a feeling of its superiority.18 So while we may think that we are being rational in our logical analysis and in promoting one principle over another, we could also say that it ultimately comes down to some aspects of our emotional experience. Of course, the issue is further complicated with the recognition that the sense of what is superior may not be innate but may be fashioned by a more general sense of what is taken to be superior within a social context. So to begin to surpass the Kantian stance, emotion must be acknowledged to play not only a motivating role but also a constitutive role in the content of the moral impulse. The soft Kantian who acknowledges that emotions may provide the matter for moral deliberation, and even the desire for rightness and justice, disregards the degree to which different forms of feeling can inform the procedure and adjudication process. In

17 The key defender of this notion is Nomy Arpaly (Arpaly and Schroeder, “Praise, Blame and the Whole Self,” 162). See also the insightful discussion of inverse akrasia by Döring in “Why Be Emotional?” 18 De Sousa, “Thinking about Emotion.”

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matters of public policy, emotion can inform the very content of deliberation by allowing us to acknowledge how damaging or desired certain options may be.19 In addition, an understanding of the quality of relationship we have with particular individuals, including the degree and nature of our emotional attachment to them, often plays a central role in informing our moral judgments. These relationships not only refer to the most intimate circles of family and friends. Fellow citizens with whom we have had no previous personal relationship still figure uniquely in a number of decisions of moral and political judgment, including being more directly subject to the intensity of our moral judgments for their actions on the international stage. So, for example, a co-national who has been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for humanitarian actions will often be the object of more intense interest and approval than someone from another country who has performed similar actions. Or let us think of Canadian reaction to the Khadrs, immigrants to Canada from Egypt, who subsequently trained with and fought alongside Bin Laden. Anger from a sense of betrayal is not an epiphenomenon resulting from the wrong but is partly constitutive of the broken relationship and the wrong suffered. Emotions figure centrally in moral judgment.20 In terms of the role that emotions are said to play in moral judgment, the soft Kantian would maintain that they play a positive role only insofar as their integration into deliberative politics does not threaten basic liberal principles whose validity is established independently of emotional considerations. Still, it is not apparent that any professed defenders of Kant in public deliberation, as well as even those such as Nussbaum and Krause who may at times criticize Kant, will allow for outcomes determined by emotion that will in any independent way run contrary to the pre-established norms set by basic liberal principles, no matter how much those norms may be subject to redescription to allow for emotive input and foundations. So the real challenge, as well as the possible cost, of taking emotions seriously in public life, is that the sanctity and the foundations of those principles may themselves be put into question. The most important question, then, is whether, or how, emotion can provide a means of adjudicating between or among more acceptable and 19 Krause, Civil Passions. 20 Of course, in the case of the detainment of Omar Khadr, we also must factor in a consideration of his age at the time of his detainment and more general concern for the welfare of the individual. In this circumstance, I do not believe that the force of collective anger should outweigh collective concern for the fate of a fellow-citizen on the basis that the conditions of his detainment up until now have caused him trauma and permanent emotional damage; thereby I agree with the courts that he should be returned from Guantanamo prison to custody in Canada.



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less acceptable manifestations – in other words, whether, or how, they may ground or precede liberal democratic principles. It appears to me that the approach needed here to demonstrate the priority of emotion in moral judgment must be phenomenological. This will demonstrate that the generation of some of the norms commonly associated with liberal democratic practice (as well as those norms that resist or react against various forms of non-democratic practice) can more effectively be described as issuing from emotional capacities, that is, stated more precisely, from the manner or structure through which emotions can be shared (as public passion) rather than through any one type or kind of emotional feeling (e.g., compassion, empathy, and the like). Following Schutz, we will assume that intersubjectivity should be considered as a fundamental ontological category of human existence: “The world of my daily life is by no means my private world but is from the outset an intersubjective one, shared with my fellow men, experienced and interpreted by others; in brief, it is a world common to all of us … Man takes for granted the bodily existence of fellow men, their conscious life, the possibility of intercommunication, and the historical givenness of social organization and culture, just as he takes for granted the world of nature into which he was born.”21 In other words, we can consider that the social world is a given, and that our experience as individuals derives less from within than from our interaction with others and with the world in general. Our experience of language as a given and into which we are thrown and find meaning can be considered as a model, and indeed synecdoche, of our broader relationship to the social world. One could suggest that despite this common experience of the world and others, one of the most difficult mental acts of understanding is that of entering into the psychological life of others so as to comprehend not only their actions but their thoughts and motives. True empathy, or empathy in its fullest sense, would appear to be an almost impossible task, even assuming a common world, and certainly something that could not  be prescribed as a fundamental duty grounding all good political ­decision-making and behaviour. So what basic principles can we suggest as being derived from the very structure of emotional currents in this vision of a common world? These are principles that will give us some normative currency to allow us to discriminate between positive and negative manifestations of public passion. I identify three core principles here: the presumption of goodwill, the need for equality, and the notion of politics as a project in common 21 See Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, IV, chap. 8, 163–4; see also Wagner’s introduction to the same volume.

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and thereby always subject to revisions. An awareness of the community in which we live as shared in the deeper constitutive sense suggests that our basic attitude toward others should be a presumptive goodwill. To the degree that all that we are does not fully emanate from our individual selves but is in a sense part and parcel of an economy of affect in both smaller and larger groups suggests that at a basic level, and despite the vast occasions for conflict, we approach our public dealings with one another with a basic acknowledgment that we are co-constituents of ourselves and our world. That all to some extent have a part to play in this economy of affect, and that the workings of wealth, power, and influence do not have a monopoly in determining the quality or character of affect in a larger group, further establish a presumption of equality. This sense of equality, of course, is reinforced by the deeper sense of a shared condition of mortality. We do not have to move into the particular cultural Hobbesian context of “killing or being killed” to recognize a more general equalizing aspect of the human condition – a shared susceptibility to suffering and to death, even in the most peaceful and cooperative of circumstances and contexts. Furthermore, the most tangible benefit of the experience of public passion is that it appears to gesture toward the overcoming of spatial constraints. It may be precisely this type of experience that makes possible a conceptualization of politics as the advancement of common projects. In this sense it serves as a foundational necessity for the exercise of the political imagination. As Schutz acknowledges in his account of interactional relationships, the experience of reciprocal witnessing in a shared experience (something I extend from Schutz to move beyond the immediate face-to-face encounter to encompass a communal experience within a regime that itself transcends spatial constraints) has multiple effects on my perception of other citizens, as well as how I act in this motivational context.22 This shared experience through time also c­hanges 22 “Because he and I continually undergo modifications of attention with respect to each other in the We-relationship, I can actually live through and participate in the constitution of his motivational context. I interpret the present lived experiences which I impute to you as the in-order-to motives of the behavior I expect from you or as the consequences of your past experiences, which I then regard as their because-motives. I ‘orient’ my action to these motivational contexts of yours, as you ‘orient’ yours to mine. However, this ‘orienting oneself’ takes place within the directly experienced social realm in the particular mode of ‘witnessing’. When interacting with you within this realm, I witness how you react to my behavior, how you interpret my meaning, how my in-order-to motives trigger corresponding because-motives of your behavior. In between my expectation of your reaction and that reaction itself I have ‘grown older’ and perhaps wiser, taking into account the realities of the situation, as well as my own hopes of what you would do. But in the face-to-face situation you and I grow older together, and I can add to my expectation of what you are going



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how one perceives oneself in relation to the broader community. In this sense, one can reject Max Scheler’s position that the experience of shared emotion (or empathy as a form of emotional contagion) is unreflective and collapses into solipsism. It is obvious, following Schutz’s account, that the recognition of emotion being shared can be politically transformational insofar as through this experience, even if short lived, one’s idea of the possibilities of political community is forever altered in the imagination. This means that whatever our current principled commitments (including the primacy of liberty itself), they may always be subject to revision but with a caveat in the recognition of a regulative principle of equality, as acknowledged above. three challenges I identify here three major challenges to my idea. First, the idea of collective emotion associated with regime structure undermines a general commitment to liberal pluralism; second, the idea carries with it an excessive privileging of established state boundaries, over and above universal, cosmopolitan, or transnational identities as well as cultural enclaves within states; and third, the concept gives us no basis for distinguishing between functional and dysfunctional manifestations of public emotion. Addressing these important challenges may help to preempt some of the concerns that the approach taken in this book may have raised so far for my readers. public passion and liberal pluralism The first challenge could also be understood in the light of more general criticism of traditional communitarian ideals regarding the importance of shared values within a political community. According to this critical perspective, the idea of a shared public passion is evidence of a nostalgic urge to collapse the categories of the cultural and the political.23 Political communities come to be understood as an extension of the family to do the actual sight of you making up your mind, and then of your action itself in all its constituent phases. During all this time we are aware of each other’s stream of consciousness as contemporaneous with our own; we share a rich, concrete We-relationship without any need to reflect on it. In a flash I see your whole plan and its execution in action. This episode of my biography is full of continuous lived experiences of you grasped within the We-relationship; meanwhile, you are experiencing me in the same way, and I am aware of the fact” (Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, 194–5). 23 For an articulation of this general principle, although geared toward a discussion of Michael Walzer’s theory of justice, see Levy, “What It Means to Be a Pluralist.”

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i­nsofar as members are expected to hold similar priorities and subscribe to the same general political outlook, something that in practice ignores long histories in the movement of peoples and the lived cultural diversity within most states today. A shared public passion is troubling to committed liberals insofar as a presumption of homogeneity has stood behind a number of projects of assimilation and oppression of cultural minorities. It appears to undermine what is now a long history of reflection in political theory on the necessity and desirability of cultural diversity as a condition of political freedom. Furthermore, it could be argued that a great deal of empirical evidence suggests that conflicting passions are more often than not the norm in politics, especially in well-functioning liberal democratic politics. A marginal case might be that of contemporary India, whose liberal democracy has always appeared as somewhat fragile and whose political culture has recently been described as “the clash within.”24 In the Indian case we can see markers of where the normalized politics of civility and agreement on constitutional fundamentals, itself still very heated and full of emotional strife, at times collapses into something close to civil war and the shared outlook on fundamentals no longer holds. In defence of the idea of public passion, it can be suggested that there is still evidence for it even in those regimes that we recognize as committed to cultural diversity and the plurality of ways of life. The experience of public passion can be discerned in at least three different ways within well-functioning multicultural societies. In the first instance, multicultural regimes devoted to the importance of diversity promote the values of cultural appreciation through a number of educational and cultural initiatives. All of these projects carry a recognition of the importance of citizen empathy, at least to a limited degree, or a sense of compassion as well as respect, as a needed basis for toleration and peaceful dialogue. As I suggested earlier in this chapter, what I mean by empathy “to a limited degree,” or citizen-specific empathy, is that liberal democratic theory in general should not espouse the idea of citizens entering into the joy or grief of the other in an unlimited way. The idea of empathy in a liberal democratic setting means that citizens exercise some aspect of moral imagination so that they can recognize a degree of material and moral suffering of others due to causes that are possible to manipulate in some way through social policy. In relation to emotional states that are only relevant to personal relations and largely personal matters, liberal democratic ideas hold in general that citizens remain cool, unless the individual concerned has broached the matter first. 24 Nussbaum, The Clash Within.



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In regimes with an expressed commitment to multiculturalism, there is no danger of this notion of public passion undermining the ideal of liberal pluralism. In addition to a rhetorical call for empathy, liberal democratic regimes tend to cultivate appreciation of difference, and one sees attempts to develop general presumptions among citizens that diversity in ways of life and in moral and religious commitments is a desirable thing. Thus, well-functioning multicultural regimes can be said to generate both a shared desire for the principle of difference and an orientation of goodwill to others and sensitivity to the suffering of other citizens. These are necessary shared emotional underpinnings (i.e., public passion) of a wellfunctioning regime committed to diversity and multiculturalism. In addition, on occasion events within or outside the regime may give rise to shared emotional reactions across the citizenry, regardless of their cultural enclave. While the pattern of reactions may not always be systematic or predictable, in cases of severe institutional crisis or threatened takeover citizens can share fear or apprehensiveness regarding the future of their political community (though, as I argued, citizens may not necessarily advocate for the same policy in the face of that fear). As a symbol of collective achievement, the rallying force of Olympic or other sports events, like external threats to the integrity of a regime’s traditional territorial borders, can cut across cultural boundaries within a political community. Not all features of political life can be understood through a rubric of multiculturalism. The idea of public passion is relevant as a reminder of the possibilities of a transcendence, or at least a periodic marginalization, of multicultural politics. Still, my understanding of the public is not meant to be a reified one. I recognize that in certain instances we should be able to speak of “publics” and “counterpublics,” and that certain aspects of collective life and public policy will have features not amenable to reduction to a shared emotional perspective.25 However, arguably the existence of counterpublics is precisely an attempt by various minority groups to seek a more general public empathy that they regard as lacking, or to bring new issues into the realm of public dialogue as traditionally defined, stretching, rather than challenging, more affective and intuitive senses of political justice. Finally, shared public passion can be evident even in the expression of specific cultural identities. Indeed, a vigorous display of a particular cultural identity may be the means through which a more general experience of shared emotion is expressed. So, for example, the public display of particular cultural and religious festivals with inclusion and outreach 25 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics.

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to others outside the community, including invitations for public officials, can serve as a particular expression of a more general pride of living in a community where these differences are celebrated. Anyone who has been in Toronto during the time of Eurosoccer or World Cup playoffs will be familiar with the infectious excitement when self-declared members or supporters of participating national communities parade their flags. Whatever one’s preferred team, there is a shared sense of emotional intensity and participation in a collective drama. A similar dynamic is evident in a number of practices flowing from the public endorsement and implementation of multicultural policies such as heritage language training and ongoing support for cultural centres and community groups. So the idea of public passion in no way undermines a commitment to cultural diversity. Indeed, a better understanding of the phenomenon may serve to deepen our understanding of the complex ways in which different cultural communities interact within a larger political regime, and of the ways in which cultural identities are relevant to politics and of the ways in which public life can best be understood separate from them. public passion and the privileging of affective networks at the level of states The second argument against my articulation of the working of public passion, as relevant largely to regime types, comes from the perspective of both the global and the smaller cultural community. The challenge here is that the idea as I present it in this book privileges the regime as the relevant political realm of shared sentiment. In doing so, it ignores and thereby downplays the way in which emotion can motivate indi­ viduals across national boundaries, and within cultural communities. Furthermore, one could suggest that it is precisely these two contexts that historically have given rise to the most intense forms of political emotion, particularly in destructive ways. Why do I limit my study of public passion to the confines of the traditional state? At the global level, despite improvements in communications technology and increased mobility of persons in the international community, it is not controversial to suggest that emotional mirroring that is part of the dynamic through which public passion becomes shared does not reach to the limits of the universal. Real geographic and linguistic barriers make the universal sharing of emotion inconceivable. While some thinkers have sought to build a theory of universal justice on a shared sense of compassion or benevolence, many have followed in the line of Hume and Adam Smith, recognizing the importance of personal proximity for



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this shared emotion to serve as a strong motive for moral action.26 Similarly, even in the event of what have been called “global” conflicts, not all nations, or even a majority of what we call nations today, have been involved, and certainly not a majority of world citizens. The level of the universal is too massive and complex to be made sense of in the terms suggested in this book. The passions commonly associated with global conflict are most often, perhaps unfortunately, an aggregate of state-centred ones. At the level of the specific cultural community, passions can often animate cultural groups, even those several generations removed from an initial immigration experience. These passions are often expressions of national pride and matters of community ritual, on the occasion of national holidays or in the re-enactment of national rivalries. Often the expressions can be intense and may have a tendency to overshadow other more diffuse emotional states. In many senses, such emotions also have the characteristics of public passion. My focus on the regime is not meant to deny this identifiable phenomenon within most liberal democracies. However, I would argue that the way these communities go about expressing their particular commitments and cultural pride is ultimately conditioned and shaped by the deeper emotional tone of the broader political community in which they are embedded. Repressive political regimes tend to deny such expressions, often engendering deep resentment which is expressed through political violence when the repressive regime weakens. The world was witness to this at the time of changes in the former Soviet Union. When public expressions of cultural pride are tolerated but not celebrated, as was the case in Canada prior to the 1970s, there are distinct expectations of the limits, in geographic and participatory terms, to these expressions. They were largely seen as private matters in the broader public mindset, not of concern to a broader citizen base. Only in the latter 1970s did the tone begin to shift. Such cultural expressions were brought more routinely out onto the streets and there began to be an appreciation of their public significance; participation began to be open to those beyond the particular cultural community. This shift in attitude and practice demonstrates how the manifestation of particular cultural pride takes place against a background of a subtle but perhaps important disposition of citizens and leaders. The emotional disposition within the broader population toward such displays has helped to shape a general view of the appropriateness of key features of how these celebrations are carried out. 26 Smith, A Theory of Moral Sentiments.

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distinguishing the good and the bad in public passion The final challenge to my analysis of public passion, certainly the most important as well as the most daunting, relates to the question of adjudicating various forms of public passion. In other words, can the description of a certain political phenomenon form the basis of a theory of how politics should be? Surely a shared public passion cannot always be regarded as a good thing, as the history of the twentieth century showed us more times than we thought possible. So why elucidate the idea of public passion at all if it can shed no light on the nature of political justice? I should make clear that I am not seeking to defend public passion in all its manifestations. While I suggest (contra Nussbaum) that all emotions can be suitable for liberal democratic politics, I acknowledge that actions issuing from a number of emotional dispositions can be debilitating and thereby require condemnation. Still, as I have argued earlier in this chapter, I hold that the structure of the fact of shared emotion concerning public matters within a regime generates basic principles on which we can subsequently make normative distinctions. So, given that we can hold, contrary to the views of both hard-core and soft Kantians, that emotions can play a role in normative theory and moral judgment in general, and in political judgment as one outgrowth of moral judgment, how can we judge between a proper and improper place of emotion in political judgment, and what place does that give specifically to the type of emotional phenomenon developed here, namely, public passion?27 Thinking about communities in this way does 27 The first part of the challenge addresses a fundamental issue on the nature of political theorizing. Some may ask: Why build a normative theory upon some general empirical claim (and why this empirical fact as opposed to any other)? If the task of political theory is to debate differing models of governance, and to interrogate the nature and priority of a number of competing values related to the purposes of politics and how to best instantiate them, then are we not largely dealing with the realm of the ideal rather than the real? For this characterization of the distinction between the nature of political theory and social theory, I draw from the work of Philip Pettit, in particular his The Common Mind. As Pettit states, drawing in part from Plamenatz and Rawls, “Political theory is a normative discipline, designed to let us evaluate rather than explain; in this it resembles moral or ethical theory. What distinguishes it is that it is designed to facilitate in particular the evaluation of government or, if that is something more general, the state. We are to identify the purposes of government – more strictly, the proper purposes of government – so that we can decide on which arrangements it is best for a government to foster in a society: which basic constitution it is best to establish and which procedures or outcomes it is best to prescribe in the day-to-day operation of the society” (284). In the normative realm we are not concerned with the actual manifestation of things, or even the full spectrum of possibilities in the nature of human beings, but rather the framework through which actual manifestations are to be judged. We can perhaps debate the



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provide room for making distinctions between healthy and dysfunctional regimes. It may be difficult, if not impossible, to identify the most

relative suitability of a set of competing normative standards, but the invocation of “normative” in the description of a theoretical project requires that we leave it immune from any charges regarding validity, that is, that we judge it to be a misrepresentation. “Normative” can mean “authoritative” for us, but the basis of that authority need not rest on a claim to reflect human possibilities in all their variety. I offer two arguments in response to this set of challenges. The first focuses on the effects of this traditional normative thinking. Given that we cannot in general eradicate our emotions from an authentic expression of our political judgments in many cases, traditional normative theories that do not acknowledge our emotions give us an improper understanding of ourselves as political actors and thereby inadequate expectations of political life. This is the argument of George Marcus that I have referred to in my opening chapter. See in particular his The Sentimental Citizen. Related to this argument, there is a need to reflect on what it is that can make a theory normative or binding for us. While clearly there may be a characteristic inherent to the theory that demonstrates its link to broader, more universal dimensions of justice, to be binding for us, is there not a requirement that the theory also speak particularly to us in some fundamental way? The Kantian injunction of the categorical imperative in moral theory is one way in which this is done, that is, to reason from one’s own position of what could function as a law for everyone. The force of this construction is that it demonstrates not only its status as a universal, given the need to incorporate all persons as subject to the maxim, but also its status as a moral stance particular to human beings. Perhaps a helpful analogy in this regard is the history of the concept of gender in relation to political theory. Carole Pateman was one of the first to recognize the political implications of the differences ascribed to gender and class in some of the classics in Western political thought (Patemen, The Problem of Political Obligation, chap. 4). In particular, given the tendency of proto-liberal theorists such as Locke to ground the authority of the state and hence the political obligation of citizens on the consent of merely a few, she exposed an ongoing problem with the assumption of unproblematic obligation in contemporary liberal societies. The inability of the propertyless and women to see themselves reflected and incorporated into the collective act of submission, or at least not in the same way as the propertied males, meant that the moral legitimacy of their submission was tenuous at best. In a similar vein, though with somewhat different conclusions, Susan Moller Okin has shown how contemporary liberal theorists, by ostensibly neglecting gender, have privileged the wage-earning male (Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family). The solution for Okin is not to shake our general faith in liberal theory but to demand greater consistency in its application by extending our discussions about justice and equality to the heart of the family unit. Both of these cases generally acknowledge that the issue of representation is crucial to the degree to which a theory can be said to be authoritative or binding. More recently, we can see a similar logic in those arguments in defence of multicultural citizenship that espouse some variant of the Taylorian stance of a cultural group’s need for “recognition” to be considered a fully fledged member of a particular political community (Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition”). While clearly the characteristics of gender, class, and ethnicity as group characteristics differ significantly from qualities of emotion, sentiment, and passion as partial characteristics of both individuals and groups, can it not be suggested that there is then an even greater basis for incorporating greater consideration of humans as emotional beings, sometimes in

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healthy form of political community, but the task of identifying the regimes that are most destructive of human community and its flourishing is an easier one. William Reddy argues that the most destructive form of political leadership is of a kind that seeks emotional purity among citizens.28 In the case of France during the Reign of Terror, the rulers did not accept the possibility of equivocation, or wavering levels of commitment and devotion to the patriotic cause, and the impossibility of living up to the expected degree of emotional purity generated a sense of pervasive suspicion. For Reddy the emotional suffering induced by political demands for purity is a measure of the destructiveness of the regime. Certainly the Terror was a time of political injustice and widespread suffering. It is also true that climates of suspicion and fear are often associated with oppressive political practice. However, I disagree with Reddy that this political experiment demonstrates the worst that political life can offer, particularly when it comes to emotional regimes. We do not need to think past the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to see worse examples of political and emotional manipulation, especially acts targeting youth. If we think of leaders who have ordered the seizing of children and trained them to act in the most brutal ways, in part to desensitize them to any emotional call, we find perhaps the most heinous of political crimes. In many cases these individuals suffer, but in others they have been denied an emotional life by virtue of the extreme acts they have been forced to witness or commit. I would argue that it is not so much emotional suffering that is an indicator of the worst that politics can bring, but rather the lack of an emotional life that can result from

a collective and shared way, and in ways that can further the cause of justice, in our theories of politics? An emotional life is a central component of what it means to be human, yet the presence of emotion in most contemporary theories of politics is often significantly obscured, as we saw in chapter 1. If components of personal identity are now acknowledged by many in the field of political theory to be fully relevant to questions of legitimacy and moral authority, it follows that a more universal component of human identity – namely, the centrality of the emotions for people and for communities in both their positive and negative manifestations – should be regarded as an important concern of political theorists. (Indeed, the point is even acknowledged in part by Rawls. While his political conception of justice as fairness is intended to provide an ideal, not empirically verifiable understanding of the citizen and human agent, Rawls notes that natural psychology can have a bearing in limiting the viable conceptions of persons acceptable in theory. In addition, Rawls’s appeal to the reasonable citizen in Political Liberalism involves a recognition of the capacity of individuals to not only develop their own conception of the good, but also to be able to define, order, and place priorities on their desires (87). Also see Frazer, “John Rawls between Two Enlightenments”; Krause, “Desiring Justice”). 28 Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling



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trauma induced by deliberate and extreme political manipulation, crippling individuals for the duration of their social lives. Once fully desensitized, they can be capable of the most extreme cruelty, and their lack of hope in the possibility of any other way of life becomes an important factor in continued control over them. Such individuals may be said of course to lack concern for others. In contrast, there are instances where widespread empathy may not be evident but where the sharing of broad public passion may attest to a common political project. For example, even a pervasive element of fear shared among citizens in an oppressive regime, such as may be said to characterize present-day Burma (Myanmar), attests to some vague idea of a thwarted common project and the faint possibility of hope. Of course, such rogue regimes tread a fine line, and their oppressive practices can lead to the traumatizing of citizens and in turn a lack of capacity to feel. The desensitizing of subjects to the point of eliminating a basic sense of concern for others is clearly the worst of political crimes, as it denies even the potentiality of citizenship and basic humanity. Still, we also should be wary, as Reddy argues, of a regime that seeks emotional purity as the basis for citizenship. While issuing the emotions back to the forefront of political theory, we need to acknowledge natural human tendencies to equivocation and inner complexity. Any theory of politics that demands of citizens too reductive and intense a view of emotional commitment will likely induce suffering. As Reddy advocates, as a principle of a good collective life we should endorse minimizing emotional suffering as much as is possible by institutional means, with the added note that this must be done also through fostering emotional capacities and not harming them.29 This principle stands as more robust than that advocated by Avishai Margalit, who suggests that a decent society is identified by institutions that do not humiliate people.30 Whereas for Margalit social institutions must avoid behaviours that single out ­individuals and groups for debilitating treatment, according to the

29 Ibid. 30 Margalit, The Decent Society. Another discussion of the line between functional and dysfunctional emotions in a national community is offered by Ghassan Hage: “Societies are mechanisms for the distribution of hope, and … the kind of affective attachment (worrying or caring) that a society creates among its citizens is intimately connected to its capacity to distribute hope. The caring society is essentially an embracing society that generates hope among its citizens and induces them to care for it. The defensive society … suffers from a scarcity of hope and creates citizens who see threats everywhere. It generates worrying citizens and a paranoid nationalism” (Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism). While I agree with Hage in the general thrust of his argument, his articulation of this principle is too vague to provide any direction for public policy.

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principle I advocate here, public institutions and social practices should also seek to address causes of suffering beyond assaults to equality. This also means that as citizens we may be better off not oriented directly to achieving full understanding of and full empathy for the other; rather, we may enhance our citizenship practice more deeply by attending to those things that appear to impede a sense of equal stake in the community. It may be this principle that can allow us to discriminate between outbursts of public emotion that have been constructive (such as the public passions of the civil rights movement) as opposed to those that may have potential to be more destructive. A better manifestation of public passion is one that contributes to wellfunctioning human emotional capacities (i.e., avoids trauma and emotional damage to fellow citizens and seeks to develop a potential for concern for others while not demanding the impossible and undesirable all-encompassing universalist form of empathy) and also minimizes the extent of emotional suffering among citizens. Inflicting trauma and causing emotional damage can be as harmful to the perpetrators as to the victims, which is why I suggest that a proper functioning of public passion cannot be associated with such crimes. These principles can be seen to have direct political application: for example, the Canadian policy of establishing residential schools for Aboriginal populations can be condemned on this basis for inflicting widespread emotional trauma by separating children from their families at a very young age. The ideal of an integrated community (itself poorly conceived) that may have been felt to justify this policy neglected to factor in the policy’s emotional costs, which effectively undermined the desired outcome. In this sense, emotional accounting would be a welcome and indeed necessary addition to work in public policy. What this discussion of emotional regimes may provide in terms of highlighting some aspects of good leadership and good citizenship practice is greater attunement to the content of intersubjective relations within a political community. Attention to the quality of relationships among citizens and between citizens and their leaders is itself a public act and a sign of an initial goodwill and sense of caring for a broader community. It may be that different political communities will need to strive for different emotional principles in achieving a better sense of cohesion and a minimum of suffering. The carving out of an appropriate public passion may be an ongoing project, and one subject to constant transformation, but awareness of this feature of collective life could make us more sensitive to the specifically public dimensions of our lives. Attention to and care for the disposition and the tone through which we engage other citizens is essential for an ongoing practice of good citizenship.



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As a final point, we might want to consider the broader implications of thinking about the central place of emotion in a normative theory of politics. It is important to recognize the competing dynamics that may motivate individuals. Identification of the relevant sphere for debates about justice and the public good should not be restricted to the traditional deliberative forums of newspapers, legislatures, and citizen assemblies. Integrating an understanding of public passion into normative political theory will lead us to recognize a much wider sphere for political deliberation than before. This broadened sphere will include the realms of artistic expression through a number of media, and will allow for more multiple forms of exchange and debate than the traditional giving and receiving of arguments. It will involve a heightened sensitivity to the multiple manifestations of political communication. Attention to public passion will also lead to greater consideration of the type of character and broad public emotional stances that we wish to promote through education in liberal democratic communities. I have mentioned that many educational regimes in liberal democratic societies seek to promote empathy as an emotion and emotional capacity of great civic value. This position, nonetheless, generates further questions. What should the link be between empathy and compassion? Are there justified limits to empathy or compassion? If so, how are they determined? What are the most effective methods for developing a sense of concern? How do we effectively measure emotional trauma? In general terms, while citizens of liberal democracies recognize the importance of being sensitive to the position of the other and praise those institutions through which these capacities are developed, there has been little public dialogue on the question of fashioning the judgments that flow from the initial exercise of empathy. As Hume and Adam Smith have pointed out, empathy in no way means endorsement of a need for compassion, and in fact may be considered a process that minimizes it. These are issues that could become central to public debates with the acknowledgment that some common emotional dispositions are a feature of contemporary liberal democratic politics. We should also consider whether there are other emotional capacities through which the cause of equality and justice might be better served. A political culture that encourages emphasis on the pervasiveness of oppression generates attitudes of suspicion and defiance as positive features of good democratic politics, linked with a broad feeling of guilt vis-à-vis the past. Furthermore, the constraints of democratic mobilization may generate indulgence toward the targeting of blame and the creation of villains. However, a demand for political purity asks for more than what politics can deliver, and may need to be balanced with concerted effort to

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encourage political forgiveness and to celebrate intelligent acts of compassion. In more general terms, public passion as a thread of political analysis opens for us many exciting avenues for both deepening our understanding of ourselves as political beings and furthering our pursuit of equality and justice.

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Index

Aboriginals, 208 absolutism, 157 affect, 4, 6, 9, 23–4, 50, 72, 198; ancient Greece, 72; Aristotle, 71, 81, 86; circulation of, 9, 49; citizenship, 6, 121, 183; cultivation of, 182; and emotion, 4, 5n6, 23–4, 183, 191; institutions, 50, 182; justice, 191, 193, 201; networks, 4, 120, 202–3; passion, 5n6, 24; ­Plato on, 79; in political theory, 50, 98, 101–2, 105, 120, 132–4, 136, 139–40; public passion, 4–5, 23­–4, 105, 182, 193; regime, 4–5, 9, 45n59, 121, 182–3, 191, 198; shared, 4, 86, 105, 120, 191, 198; transmission of (Brennan’s ­theory), 47–8 affective appraisal, 30 akrasia, inverse 195 ambition, 76–7, 79, 81n41, 123­–4; Montesquieu, 138, 150–63, 178–9 anger, 25–6, 30, 46, 57, 196; Aristotle, 65, 69–70, 84; Plato, 65. See also thumos Annas, Julia, 73 Aristotle (384–322 bce); character, 86, 135; citizenship, 82–3, 185; city-state, 63n; democracy, 86–8;

desire, 68; emotion, 64–6, 68­­–72, 81–2, 84–6, 89­–90, 149; friendship, 82–4; justice, 84–5, 87–91, 185; Nicomachean Ethics, 66, 68–70, 82, 83n45–6, 85; oligarchy, 86–9; The Politics, 62, 66, 68–70, 72, 82, 84–5; public passion, 21, 43, 60–2, 66, 80–89; regime, 62­–3, 80­–1, 85–90; On Rhetoric, 62, 66, 70, 81, 86; soul, 69–72, 85–6, 102; thumos, 65, 81, tyranny, 86 aristocracy, 3, 19n, 36, 75, 83n45; ­Aristotle on, 86; Montesquieu on, 3, 121, 123, 136, 139n25, 150–2, 155, 163, 166–7 Armon-Jones, Claire, 32 Augustine, Saint (354–430), 130n4, and Montesquieu, 119 authoritarianism, 51–2, 191–2 Balot, Ryan, 90 belonging, 54, 121, 184–5 Berlin, Isaiah (1909–97), 29, 64 Binoche, Bertrand, 177 Brafman, Ori, 34 Brafman, Rom, 34 Brennan, Teresa, 47–8 Burke, Edmund (1729–97), 50 Burma (Myanmar), 52, 207

228 Butler, Judith; 10, 49, 165, 172–3, 181 Canada, 52, 56, 93n2, 122, 192, 196, 203 Canetti, Elias (1905–94), 34–5 Chambers, Simone, 194 chameleon effect, 48 Charland, Louis, 5n6 citizen(s), 8n16, 174, 185, 191; affect, 4, 6, 72; ancient Greece, 7, 72; Aristotle, 63, 65–6, 72, 82–3, 85, 87, 89; behaviour, 18­–19n, 35–6, 40, 44n57, 51, 53, 89, 149; Descartes, 99; emotion, 17, 19n, 51, 52n79, 59, 63, 66, 93, 105, 107, 143, 149, 166, 190, 193, 200–1, 207–8; institutions, 51, 89, 209; liberal democracy, 6, 16, 18– 19n, 52–3, 78, 100, 122, 143–4, 185, 190, 200–1, 209; Montesquieu on, 3, 109, 121–4, 134n14, 136, 138–40, 150, 161, 174, 178; moral theory, 13­–4; passion(s), 5, 59, 77, 99, 121–2; Plato on, 3, 63, 64–6, 73, 77–8; public passion, 11, 23, 93, 122, 149, 166, 183, 185, 187, 193; regime, 11, 51, 63, 72, 87, 89, 93, 107, 121, 124, 125, 138, 149, 182–3, 198, 203, 207–8; relation to government, 121–3, 125, 205n, 208; relation to other citizens, 18–19n, 23, 37, 52, 59, 63, 72, 82–3, 121–3, 126, 143, 173, 186, 188, 190, 193, 196, 198, 206; rights theory, 16–18, 19n, 206n citizenship, 7, 36, 52n79, 53n85, 63, 189–90, 205n, 207–8; and affect, 6, 121 Aristotle on, 65, 82–3, 185; Montesquieu, 140; Plato, 65 civic humanism, 131, 141 Clarke, Desmond, 96–7

Index cognitive approach, 24–5, 27, 29–32, 47–8, 55, 109–10, 137n21, 166, 195 Cohen, Doy, 55 collective emotion, 22, 34, 44–5, 47, 61, 86, 107, 110, 127, 178, 199. See also emotion; public emotion; shared emotion common good, 14, 159, 161, 184; Montesquieu on, 134–5, 139, 150, 152, 158–9. See also public good compassion, 14, 51, 58–60, 185, 202, 210; Nussbaum, 58, 109–10; public passion, 185–6, 197; and empathy, 200, 209. See also empathy Comte d’Orte, 140, 152 communitarianism, 199 consequentialism, 13. See also utilitarianism constitution, 50, 171, 188, 200, 204n; Aristotle, 62, 80–1, 83n45, Hobbes on, 100; 85–9; Montesquieu on, 108–9, 117, 120; norms, 62, 65; Plato on, 62, 72, 75–6, 78; public passion, 7. See also regime, politeia contagion, 55n89, 176, 185, 199; theory, 21, 23, 33–4, 54 contextualism, 32–3, 48, 115, 117. See also social constructionism Cooper, John, 71 counterpublics, 201 Cvetkovich, Ann, 49–50 democracy, 18n81, 36, 41, 52, 168; anti-, 36; Aristotle on, 62, 86–9; behavior in, 41; deliberative, 18n, 194; emotion, 11, 19n, 59, 65, 189–90, 209; India, 53n85, 200; liberal; Montesquieu, 3, 121, 139n25, 178; Plato on, 62, 72­–3, 78; public passion, 184; theory, 11, 22, 189. See also liberal democracy deontology, 13, 16



Index

de Rivera, Joseph, 44–5, 49, 171n15 Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004), 120 Descartes, Rene (1596–1650), 21, 71, 93; emotion, 93–4, 99; and Montesquieu, 113, 119–20; Les passions de l’âme, 93–4; passion, 94–9; public passion, 93–9; soul, 93–9, 101; will, 95–6, 98 desire, 57, 90, 98, 105, 186, 191; Aristotle on, 68–9, 82, 84–8; ­Montesquieu on, 112–13, 115, 117, 138–9, 153–4, 158, 162; Plato on, 67, 71, 76, 78–80, 88; utilitarianism, 14–15 De Sousa, Ronald, 70n26, 195 despotism, 172; Montesquieu, 3, 121, 123–5, 136, 147, 173–81 Diana, Princess of Wales, 8n15, 56 Dombrowski, Daniel, 17 Durkheim, Emile (1858–1917), 46, 109n4 duty, 14, 153, 155, 163, 194–5, 197. See also honour Dworkin, Ronald, 53n84, 172 embodied appraisal, 30–1 emotion; affect, 4, 5n6, 23–4, 183, 191; as affective appraisal, 28, 30–1; Aristotle on, 64–6, 68­­–72, 81–2, 84–6, 89­–90, 149; circulation of, 54–5; collective, see collective emotion; Descartes on, 93–4, 99; as feeling, 26–7, 29, 195; institutions, 53, 183; as judgement (cognitive and propositional theories), 6, 24–33, 55, 109–10, 137n21, 164, 166, 195; ­justice, 9, 22, 39, 46, 49, 56, 186–7, 191; Montesquieu on, 9, 22, 106, 110, 113–18, 122, 124, 137, 140, 148; and moral theory, 12–21; as negative/positive, 11, 35, 58–9, 140, 149, 164–5, 172, 184, 186–7, 193, 199, 204; Plato, 62–4, 66–8,

229

71–3, 79–80, 90; political, see political emotion; in ­political theory, 6–7, 11, 20–1, 33, 44n57, 58–9, 61, 99– 104, 107, 127–9, 132, 137, 188, 190–7, 204, 209; in politics, 5, 7, 9, 11, 21, 46, 58, 66, 73, 90, 124, 128– 30, 133, 140, 164, 166, 182, 188n, 195–6, 206; public, see public emotion; public passion, 7–8, 11, 57, 60–1, 122, 182, 186, 192, 201–3, 208; and rationality/reason, 28, 35, 38–40, 81, 109–10, 195; regime, 23–4, 44–7, 50–2, 54, 56–7, 62–3, 66, 72, 80, 90, 99–100, 107–8, 137, 184, 192, 199, 202, 204, 206–8; as rooted in the body and neuroscientific accounts, 22, 25, 41–2, 48–9, 96, 107; shared, see shared emotion; social, 31–3, 39, 106 emotional climate, 44–5, 182–3, 186 emotional transfer, 32–3, 185, 191– 3, Montesquieu on, 114 empathy, 45–6, 48, 186–90, 197, 201, 207–9; citizen-specific, 190, 200; emotion, 54, 58, 188; liberal democracy, 51–2, 188–90, 200–1, 209. See also compassion Enlightenment, 23; and passion, 94 equality, 54, 190, 197–9, 205n, 208– 9; Aristotle on, 83, 87–8; justice, 18n; liberal democracy, 19n, 51–2, 64, 122, 171, 186; Montesquieu on, 115–16, 122–3, 134, 139n25, 140, 148, 154; passion(s), 10, 109; Plato on, 78; utilitarianism, 13–4 eros, 64–5, 67, 144–5 De l’esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws) (Montesquieu), 3, 110–12, 115, 117, 119, 121, 123, 125–6, 134–9, 150–5, 158–9, 165, 174–5, 177, 179–81 ethos, 63, 81 Eustace, Nicole, 51

230

Index

fear, 15, 28–31, 35, 55, 58, 125, 164– 81, 184, 206; and 9/11, 10, 44, 93, 169, 172; Aristotle on, 65, 86; causes, 168­–72, 177–8; collective, 100, 125, 164–7, 171–3, 201, 207; cultural factors, 28, 166–7, 171, 178; Hobbes on, 100, 132, 171, 180; institutions, 55, 125, 136, 171; liberal democracy, 64, 149n2, 165, 168­–72, 186; manipulation of, 100, 166, 168, 170–1; Marseille plague, 176–7; Montesquieu on, 3, 108, 117, 123, 125, 136, 140, 160–1, 164–5, 168, 171, 173–5, 177–81; as negative/positive, 58– 9, 140, 149n2, 164–6, 168–9, 171–4, 181, 184, 186–7; Plato, 65, 68, 79; public passion, 59–60, 93, 164, 166, 181; regime, 51–2, 125, 136, 173–5, 177–80, 184, 207; Shaftesbury on, 132–4, 140; as social principle, 165–7, 178–80 Ferrari, G.R.F., 73, 77 Flax, Jane, 53 Fourier, Charles (1772–1837), 130 Frazer, Michael, 20, 105, 189 freedom, 51, 78–9, 87, 108–9, 119– 20, 153, 200; and fear, 168, 171, 192 French Revolution, 125, 166–7 Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939), 34, 39, 47, 53n82 friendship, 18n81, 19n, 37, 46; ­Aristotle on, 82–4; Kant on, 129n3, 195 functionalism, 32n Furedi, Frank, 165, 168, 170–1 Gintis, Herbert, 40–2 Goldfarb, Jeffrey, 54 Gorgias (Plato), 65, 74–5 Greece, ancient, 7, 52, 90, 139n25

Greenspan, Patricia, 191, 195 Griffiths, Paul E., 24n, 31 Gross, Daniel, 49–50, 81n41 Habermas, Jurgen, 194 Hacking, Ian, 25 Hall, Cheryl, 5–6, 46, 64–5, 128n, 143–5 happiness principle (utilitarianism), 14 Hardt, Michael, 143, 146 Hirschman, Albert, 94 Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679), 71, 94, 99, 131, 198; fear, 100, 171, 173n21; and Montesquieu, 115, 173n21, 178; public passion, 100 honour, 55, 149, 186; Aristotle on, 71, 85–9; Montesquieu on, 3, 4n2, 121–3, 136, 139–41, 149–57, 162– 3; Plato on, 67, 71–3; and Parlement of Bordeaux, 161; political theory, 150; Smith, 105. See also duty Hulliung, Mark, 151n7, 152–3 human nature; Montesquieu on, 111, 136–7; human rights, 16, 51; Montesquieu on, 6; Hume, David (1711–76), 103, 202– 3, 209 identity, 31, 35–6, 38, 42, 63, 172, 206n; Aristotle on, 63, 72, 82, 89; collective, 72, 93, 120, 150; cultural, 10–11, 121, 201; Montesquieu on, 117, 134n14; Plato on, 63, 67– 8, 79, 89; public passion, 7, 52, 57; regime, 7, 52, 57, 63, 72 Ikegami, Eigo, 150 India, 200, 53n85 institutions, 7, 50, 57–8, 178, 192–3, 209; affect, 50, 182; Aristotle on,



Index

62–3, 65, 89–90; citizen(s), 38, 51, 89, 209; emotion, 49, 53, 55, 58, 163, 183, 207–8; fear, 55, 125, 136, 171, 201; Montesquieu on, 109, 115, 117, 120–6, 131, 136–8, 140, 142–3, 147, 153, 155­–8, 163, 174; Parlement de Bordeaux, 155–8, 160–1, 163; passion(s), 5n8; Plato on, 62–3, 65, 74, 79– 80, 85; political theory, 13, 17, 19n, 41, 50, 164, 172, 207; public passion, 7, 47, 50–1, 55, 57­–8, 182, 207–8; regime, 51, 136, 182, 192, 209 Iran, 53–4 Irigaray, Luce, 143, 146 James, Susan, 101–2 James, William (1842–1910), 25, 137n21 Janet, Paul, 151 judgment, 169n10, 196; affect, 6, 81; Aristotle on, 68–71, 82n41, 84–6; cognitive theories, 27, 29, 109–10; collective, 110, 138; contextualism, 32, 110, 117; deliberation, 71; Descartes on, 96–7; emotion, 23, 28–9, 68, 70–1, 96, 109–10, 117, 137n21, 179, 188, 196, 209; Montesquieu on, 110, 117–18, 131, 135, 137–8, 140, 178–9; moral, 28, 84, 102–3, 131, 196–7, 204; passion, 110, 119, 194; Plato on, 68–9, 75, 81; political, 6, 59, 81, 104, 194, 196, 204, 205n; political theory, 20; propositional theories, 25–7; Smith on, 102–5 justice, 46, 182–5; affect, 191, 193, 201; Aristotle on, 83n45, 84–5, 87–91, 185; emotion, 9–10, 17, 22, 39, 46–7, 49, 56, 117, 143, 184–7, 191, 209; Montesquieu on,

231 22, 117, 120; Plato on, 73–6, 80; political, 16, 43, 46, 49, 84, 184–7, 191–3, 201, 204; political theory, 10–11, 16–17, 18n81, 19n, 64, 144, 172, 185–6, 202, 205–6n; public passion, 7, 10, 45, 184–99, 204, 209–10, theory of, 8n16, 9, 43, 56, 184–210

Kadare, Ismail, 166 Kahn, Charles, 71 Kahn, Paul, 128n, 144–6 Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804), 14, 15n33, 92, 129n3, 130n, 172; categorical imperative, 205n; emotion, 193–6, 204; hard-core Kantianism, 193–4, 204; morality, 193­–4, 196, 204; soft Kantianism, 193–6, 204; universalizability, 193–5 Kelly, Duncan, 20, 119, 134n13 Khadr, Omar, 196 Korsgaard, Christine, 194 Koyré, Alexandre (1892–1964), 73 Koziak, Barbara, 46, 65 Krause, Sharon, 18n, 104n32, 153, 188–9, 196 Laslett, Peter (1915–2001), 52, 120 Lear, Joanthan, 76–7 LeBon, Gustave (1841–1931), 34–9, 41, 166 Lebow, Richard Ned, 45, 162n37 Lefebvre, Georges (1874–1959), 166–7, 179 legislator; Montesquieu on, 118–19 Lettres persanes (Persian Letters) (Montesquieu), 134n14, 174 Leviathan (Hobbes), 100; collective fear, 100 liberal democracy, 5–6, 12, 19n, 51– 53, 186, 200; citizen(s), 6, 16,

232

Index

18–19n, 52–53, 78, 100, 122, 143–4, 185, 190, 200–1, 209; contemporary, 12, 53, 56, 122–3, 164–5, 168, 171, 188–9, 192, 200; emotion, 19n, 16, 33, 64, 162, 188, 190, 204, 209; empathy, 51– 2, 188–90, 200–1, 209; equality, 19n, 51–2, 64, 122, 171, 186; fear, 64, 149n2, 165, 168­–72, 186; institutions, 164; justice, 143, 188; political theory, 5, 11–12, 16, 33, 44n57, 58, 64, 100, 143–4, 165, 168, 183, 188–90, 197; public passion, 52, 122, 184, 200, 203–4, 209; regime, 64, 122, 183–4, 188n, 200–3, 209 liberalism, 5n8, 12–22, 63n, 64–5, 92, 100, 109, 141–5, 170n12, 171–2 liberty, 63n, 64, 88, 100n19, 126, 188, 199; Montesquieu on, 6, 126 Locke, John (1632–1704), 16n35, 100, 115, 205n; and Montesquieu, 115 logos, 81, 84–5 love, 128–31, 145–6, 148, 184; Montesquieu, 3, 130–1, 134, 136– 42, 147 Machiavelli, Niccolò (1469–1527), 99 Mackay, Charles (1814–1889), 34 Malebranche, Nicolas (1638–1715), 101 Mandeville, Bernard (1670–1733), 151 Marcus, George E., 6, 53n82, 205n Margalit, Avishai, 207 Marseille plague (1720–22), 176–7 McCloy, Shelby, 157 McDougall, William (1871–1938), 34, 39

Mendus, Susan, 128n, 129n3 143–4, 146 Middle East, 52, 179 Mill, John Stuart (1806–73), 13–14, 50 Miri, Sujata, 194 mirror neurons, 48 Molesworth, Robert (1656–1725), 180–1 monarchy; Montesquieu on, 3, 136, 139–40, 150, 152–7, 176–7, 181 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de ­Secondat (1689–1755), 21; ambition, 138, 150–163, 178–9; animals and human beings compared, 111–12; aristocracy, 3, 123; and Saint ­Augustine, 119; collective (shared) sentiment, 124, 126–7, 136; contemporary political theory, 6–7, 128–9; deficiencies in theory, 126, 142, 148, 151, 154–5; democracy, 3; and ­Descartes, 113, 119–20; despotism, 3, 123, 136, 173–81; emotion, 9, 106, 110, 113–18, 122, 124, 137, 140, 148; De l’esprit des lois, 3, 110–12, 115, 117, 119, 121, 123, 125–6, 134–9, 150–5, 158–9, 165, 174–5, 177, 179–81; equality, 116, 134, 148; fear, 3, 117, 123, 125, 136, 140, 165, 168, 171, 173–5, 177–81; and Hobbes, 115, 173n21, 178; honour, 3, 4n2, 136, 140, 149–57, 163; human nature, 111, 136–37; human rights, 6; judgment, 110, 118, 135; justice, 22, 120; legislator, 118–19; Lettres persanes, 134n14, 174; liberty, 6, 126; and Locke, 115; love, 3, 130– 1, 134, 136–42, 147; monarchy, 3, 136, 139–40, 150, 152–7, 176–7, 181; natural law, 112–13, 115,



Index

117; and the Parlement of ­Bordeaux, 151, 155–8; passions, 109–11, 113, 115–20, 131; Pensées, 113, 119; principle of government (principe), 3, 4n2, 6, 107–9, 118, 120, 124, 126, 128, 137; public passion, 7, 21–2, 43, 106– 8, 110, 120–2, 125–7, 149–63, 182; reason, 111–2; regime, 121– 5; republic, 123–4, 130–1, 134– 41, 147, 150, 153; and Rousseau, 111–13; and Shaftesbury, 114, 134, 136, 138–41; soul, 111, 113, 119, 137, 175; state of nature, 115, 177–8; and Stoics, 119, 137; Treatise on Duties, 134n14; virtue, 3, 131, 134–7, 139–41, 147, 150, 152–3, 155, 163, 178; war, 115–16 More, Thomas (1478–1535), 130 Morrow, Glenn, 103­–4 natural law, 193; Montesquieu on, 112–13, 115, 117 Navarre, Joseph, 176 negative-positive polarity, 58–9, 149n Negri, Antonio, 143, 146 Nehme, Michel, 179 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 66, 68–70, 82, 83n45–6, 85 Nisbett, Richard E., 55 Nussbaum, Martha, 11n, 18n, 28, 52n79, 53n85, 58, 67n13, 109–10, 124, 129 188n, 196, 204 Okin, Susan Moller (1946–2004), 205n oligarchy, 72–3, 77, 87–9 Orange Revolution, 52, 93 Parlement of Bordeaux, 155, 156n; and Montesquieu, 151, 155–8

233

passion(s), 4–6, 24, 36–7, 48­–9, 53, 94n4, 122, 193, 205n; political theory, 3, 11–20, 22, 43, 57, 62­–4, 77–8, 81, 92–9, 101–2, 105, 108– 19, 121, 125, 131–4, 137–8, 144, 175; politics, 10­–12, 43, 110, 143, 149, 188n, 192, 203; public, see public passion Passions de l’âme, Les, 93 Pateman, Carole, 205n pathe, 69, 98 pathos, 81, 98n Pensées (Montesquieu), 113, 119 Petitt, Phillip, 204n Persian Letters (Lettres persanes) (Montesquieu), 134n14, 174 Phillipson, Nicholas, 103n29 philosopher, 91, 138; Aristotle, 69; Descartes, 95, 113; Montesquieu, 113; Plato, 67, 72, 74–6, 80; Smith, 101 philosophy of mind, 23, 25, 114, 119 phronesis, 70 phronimos, 135 Plato (429–347 bce), 102, 130; citystate, 63n; city-soul analogy, 73–5, 79; democracy, 78; desire, 67, 71, 76; emotion, 62–4, 66–8, 71–3, 79–80, 90; eros, 64–5, 67, 144; Gorgias, 65, 74–5; justice, 74–6, 80; oligarchy, 77; public passion, 21, 43, 60–3, 66, 72–80; regime, 62–3, 66, 73­–7, 80, 90; The Republic, 3, 62, 71–5; Socrates, 68, 74–6; soul, 66–8, 71–6, 79; thumos, 67; timocracy, 72–3, 76–7, 79; tyranny, 73, 78–9 pluralism, 19n, 171; liberal, 8, 199– 202; moral, 7–8, 29; Plato on, 77– 8; public passion, 8, 57, 182, 199–202 Pocock, J.G.A., 131

234

Index

politeia, 72, 80–1. See also constitution; regime political emotion, 16, 24, 31, 33, 41, 55, 59, 61, 64, 136, 172, 202. See also public passion politics, contemporary, 5, 16, 63n, 65, 128, 141, 144, 147, 150, 164, 171; emotion in, 5–11, 21, 46, 58, 66, 73, 90, 124, 128–30, 133, 140, 164, 166, 182, 188n, 195–6, 206; and judgment, 6, 59, 81, 104, 194, 196, 204, 205n; and justice, 16, 43, 46, 49, 84, 184–7, 191–3, 201, 204; liberal democratic, 6, 10, 16, 58, 122, 185, 188, 190, 200, 204, 209; passion(s), 5, 10­–12, 43, 110, 143, 149, 188n, 192, 203; theory, 8–9, 11, 16, 46, 127–8, 142, 172 Politics, The (Aristotle) 62, 66, 68–70, 72, 82, 84–5 principe, 3. See also principle of government principle of government, 108–10; honour, 152–6, love, 142–7; ­Montesquieu on, 3, 4n2, 6, 107– 110, 117–18, 120–7 Prinz, Jesse, 14–15, 25­–6, 30–1 propositional theories, 24–33 public, the, 10n21, 23–4, 37, 39, 160–3, 201; Le Bon on, 37; emotion, 11; political theory, 14–15, 18n, 99, 102, 171; Tarde, 36–7. See also public passion public emotion, 8, 11, 13, 15, 22, 24, 34, 45–6, 54–7, 60, 65­–6, 93, 140, 149, 183, 199, 208–9. See also emotion public good, 14, 40, 47, 155, 159, 163, 209; Montesquieu on, 135, 139, 155, 158–60, 163; Shaftesbury, 133–4, 139. See also common good

public passion, 5, 7–8, 10–11, 23–5, 33–4, 42, 48–9, 60, 93; affect, transmission of (theory), 47–8; ancient Greece and, 52; Aristotle on, 21, 43, 60–2, 66, 80–9; change (political/public emotions), 55, 149–63, 183; collective consciousness, 46–7; contemporary regimes, 149; contemporary theory, 57; Descartes on, 93–9; fear, 164­–81; empathy, 187­–91, 200, 207–9; global level, 202; Hobbes on, 99­ –100, 106; honour, 149­–63; horizontal dynamics, 54–5, 183; institutions, 50–1, 55, 57­–8, 182, 207–8; justice, 184–99, 204, 209– 10; liberal democracy, 184, 200, 203–4, 209; liberal democratic theory, 183; mirror neurons, 48; Montesquieu on, 7, 21–2, 43, 106–8, 110, 120–2, 125–7, 149– 63, 182; multiculturalism, 200–3; as necessity, 184–5; normative ­theory, 204–5n; Plato on, 21, 43, 60–3, 66, 72–80; pluralism, 56–7, 182­–3, 199–201; political education, 184–91, 209; regime, 50–8, 182, 199–207, 209; shared emotion, intensity and quality of, 56, 183; Smith, 100–6, 209; social ­passions, 49–50; at state level, see public passion: regime; trust, 47; vertical dynamics, 55, 183 Rahe, Paul A., 4n2 rational choice theory, 34, 39–43, 47–8 Rawls, John (1921–2002), 13, 18– 19n, 144, 172, 206n reason, 15n33, 130n, 145, 193; ­Aristotle on, 68–71, 81, 85–7; Descartes on, 94, 97–8; emotion,



Index

38–9, 61, 67, 125, 194–5; Montesquieu on, 111–12, 118–19; Plato on, 74, 84; passion, 109, 112; public, 18–19n, Shaftesbury on, 133; Smith on, 102, and Stoicism, 119 Reddy, William M., 45, 125, 206–7 regime(s), 9, 11, 124, 163, 191, 198, affect, 4–5, 9, 121, 182; ancient, 7, 72, 147; Aristotle on, 61­–3, 65– 6, 69, 72, 80­–3, 85–90, 107; authoritarian, 51–2, 191–2; comparison of, 41–2; contemporary, 21, 52–4, 149; democratic, 73, 78, 83, 87–8; despotic, 124, 173–7, 179–81, 184; emotion(s), 23–4, 44–7, 50–2, 54, 56–7, 62–3, 66, 72, 80, 90, 99–100, 107–8, 137, 192, 199, 202, 204, 206–8; emotional ­transfer, 192–3; Hobbes on, 100; institutions, 51, 182; liberal democratic, 64, 122, 183–4, 188n, 200–3, 209; monarchial, 3, 123, 150, 152–4, 156–8, 176; Montesquieu on, 3, 21, 107– 10, 121–7, 130–1, 134, 137, 147, 150, 152–4, 156–8, 173–7, 179– 81; multicultural, 200–2; normative evaluation of, 125, 204–6; oligarchic, 72­–3, 77, 87–9; Plato on, 61–3, 66, 69, 72–80, 90, 107; plural, 200–2; public passion, 5, 7, 8, 10, 24, 47, 50, 54–8, 66, 110, 149, 182–3, 200, 202–3; repressive, 52, 184, 203, 207; republican, 63n, 122, 130–1, 134, 147, 153; timocratic, 72–3, 76­–7, 79, 83n45; tyrannical, 73, 78–9, 86. See also constitution; politeia Reign of Terror, 125, 206–7 Republic, The (Plato), 3, 62, 71–5 republicanism, 122–3, 124, 126; Montesquieu on, 124, 126, 131,

235

134–42, 147, 150, 152–5. See also virtue, Montesquieu on Rhetoric, On (Aristotle) 62, 66, 70, 81, 86 rights, 5, 16–17, 158, 162–3, 208; ­Aristotle on, 87; deontology, 13, 16; institutions, 51; Montesquieu on, 6–7; Plato on, 78; theory, 16–18 Robin, Corey, 10n21, 165, 168, 170–4, 177, 180 Robinson, Jenefer, 26n, 30 Rome, ancient, 139n25, 178 Ross, Andrew, 45n59 Ross, Edward, 34, 38–9, Rothschild, Emma, 104 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712– 1778), 111–13, 120; and Montesquieu, 111–13 Saint André Hospital, 157, 159–62 Sandelands, Lloyd, 7 Scheler, Max (1874–1928), 199 Schutz, Alfred (1899–1959), 4, 189, 197–9 self-interest, 85, 134n14, 140–1; ­theory, 34, 39–40, 136, 144 sentiment(s), 16, 185, 192, 205n; ­differing, 46­–7; Enlightenment position, 94; Montesquieu on, 109, 111–12, 115–17, 121, 124, 126, 131, 136, 152, 176; shared (public), 37–8, 43–4, 79, 124, 126, 131, 136, 202; Smith, 101–6 September 11, 2001 (9/11), 10, 44, 56, 93, 169, 172 Shaftesbury, 3rd Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper) (1671–1713), 21, 105, 116, 130, 133–4, 136, 138– 41; and Hobbes, 131–2; and ­Montesquieu, 114, 134, 136, 138– 41; social affection, 133–4, 136, 139–40

236

Index

shame, 11, 18n, 19n, 30, 58, 186, 188n6; Gorgias, 65 shared emotion, 7–9, 15–16, 33, 38, 43, 47–8, 50, 53, 56–7, 61–3, 78, 86, 99–100, 102, 107, 125, 165n, 185–7, 191–2, 199, 201–4. See also collective emotion; emotion; public emotion Shklar, Judith (1928–1992), 64, 151n6, 165, 168, 170n12, 172, 174, 180 Singer, Peter, 14 Skinner, Quentin, 155n Smith, Adam (1723–1790), 21, 100, 129, 145, 202–3, 209; and Descartes, 101; doctrine of sympathy, 102–3; impartial spectator, 103–4; and Montesquieu, 106, 114; passions, 101–2, 105; and Plato, 102; sentiment, 101–6; sympathy, 103–5; Theory of Moral Sentiments, 100­–6 social affection, 133–4, 136, 139–40. See also Shaftesbury, 3rd Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper) social constructionism, 24­–5, 32. See also contextualism Sokolon, Marlene, 46 Solomon, Robert (1942–2007), 27– 8, 49, 113 Sontag, Susan (1933–2004), 56 soul, 66; Aristotle on, 69–72, 85–6, 102; Descartes on, 93–9, 101; and emotion, 25, 35, 62, 66–72; Montesquieu on, 111, 113, 119, 137, 175; Plato and city analogy, 66–8, 71–6, 79 Spragens, Thomas, 194 Spinoza, Baruch (1632–1677), 101 Spirit of the Laws, The (De l’esprit des lois) (Montesquieu), 3, 110–12, 115, 117, 119, 121, 123, 125–6,

134–9, 150–5, 158–9, 165, 174–5, 177, 179–81 state of nature, 100, 110, 177; Montesquieu on, 115, 177–8 Staub, Ervin, 52, 54n87 Stearns, Peter, 45, 168–70, 172 Stoicism, 28, 97, 98n; and Montesquieu, 119, 137 strong reciprocity, 34, 40–2. See also rational choice theory Tarde, Gabriel (1843–1904), 34­–9, 166 Tarnopolsky, Christina, 65 Taylor, Charles, 8n15, 143, 154n, 205 theocratic rule, 53–4 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 100­–5 thumos, 65, 67, 69, 81 Thyssen, Henrik Pontoppidan, 68 Tilly, Charles (1929–2008), 41–2 timocracy, 83n45; Plato, 72–3, 76­–7, 79 Tocqueville, Alexis de (1805–59), 12n27, 44n57, 50 trauma, 45–6, 206–9 Treatise on Duties (Montesquieu), 134n14 trust, 3, 40, 47, 171, 178, 186, 191 tyranny: Aristotle on, 86; Plato on, 73, 78–9 United States of America, 51, 53, 56, 93n2; and fear, 44, 169–72 utilitarianism, 13–16, 109, 155 virtue, 63, 131, 172; Aristotle on, 68– 70, 83; Montesquieu on, 3, 131, 134–7, 139–41, 147, 150, 152–3, 155, 163, 178; Plato on, 68, 75–6; Shaftesbury on, 132–4

vulnerability, 54n87, 115, 125, 172–3, 181 Ward, Lester F. (1841–1913), 34, 38 Weber, Max (1864–1920), 4, 5n7, 167n7, 189 Williams, Bernard (1929–2003), 73

Index

237

Woolf, Virginia (1882–1941), 56 Yack, Bernard, 63n, 141 Young, Iris Marion (1949–2006), 8 Zweig, Stefan (1881–1942), 43