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XIII. Passion and Politics1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Susan James
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Extract

The sudden resurgence of interest in the emotions that has recently overtaken analytical philosophy has raised a range of questions about the place of the passions in established explanatory schemes. How, for example, do the emotions fit into theories of action organized around beliefs and desires? How can they be included in analyses of the mind developed to account for other mental states and capacities? Questions of this general form also arise within political philosophy, and the wish to acknowledge their importance and find a space for them has led to some fruitful developments. Among these are a new sensitivity to ways in which attributions of emotion can create and sustain unequal power relations, an interest in the underlying emotional capacities that make politics possible, a concern with the kinds of emotional suffering that politics should aim to abolish, and analyses of the emotional traits it should foster. While these and comparable explorations have enormously enriched contemporary political philosophy, a great deal of mainstream work continues to ignore or marginalize the emotions, so that their place remains uncertain and obscure. There is no consensus as to what kind of attention should be paid to them, or indeed whether they deserve any systematic attention at all. This is a curious state of affairs, because it was until quite recently taken for granted that political philosophy and psychology are intimately connected, and that political philosophy needs to be grounded on an understanding of human passion. In this essay I shall first consider why political philosophers ever rejected this set of assumptions. I shall then return to the pressing issue of how we might take account of the emotions in our own political theorizing.

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Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 52 , March 2003 , pp. 221 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2003

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References

2 On this Nietzschian theme see for example Elizabeth Spelman's account of the way that subordinate races, and women, are not regarded as entitled to righteous anger but are dismissed as prone to childish tantrums or hysteria. ‘Anger and Insubordination’ in Garry, A. and Pearsall, M. (eds), Women, Knowledge and Reality, 1st edn. (London, 1996), pp. 263–73.Google Scholar

3 See for example Benjamin, Jessica, The Bonds of Love (New York, 1988)Google Scholar; Axel, Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition (Cambridge, 1995).Google Scholar

4 See for example Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shklar, Judith, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, Mass., 1984)Google Scholar; Margalit, Avishai, The Decent Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1996).Google Scholar

5 A notable example of this concern is Rawls's discussion of self-respect in Part III of A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971).Google Scholar

6 David, Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 535, p. 537.Google Scholar

7 Treatise, p. 537.

8 Treatise, p. 500.

9 For instance Hobbes, Spinoza or Smith, to cite just a few prominent examples.

10 See Martha Nussbaum, ‘Constructing Love, Desire and Care’ in Estlund, David M. and Nussbaum, Martha C. (eds), Sex, Preference and Family (Oxford, 1997), pp. 17–43.Google Scholar

11 Treatise, pp. 533–4

12 At least two other types of political philosophy are not concerned with realizability: conceptual enquiries which aim exclusively to articulate our political concepts; and descriptive enquiries which focus on the extension of these concepts. See Sally Haslanger, ‘Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them To Be?’ in Nous vol. XXXIV.l (2000), p. 33. The normative approach I discuss here does not fit into Haslanger's classification, as far as I can see, though the approach I go on to defend is what she calls an analytical form of enquiry.

13 See James, Susan, ‘The Good Enough Citizen. Citizenship and Independence’ in Bock, Gisela and James, Susan eds. Beyond Equality and Difference. Citizenship, Feminist Politics and Female Subjectivity (London, 1992), pp. 48’65.Google Scholar