Emotional Politics – Some notes on anger, resentment and compassion

Emotion, Politics and Society, 2006

The disciplinary context: Towards a political sociology of emotions Oddly enough, a political sociology of emotions is considerably immature when compared with the enormous growth of the sociology of emotion during the last twenty-five years or so (

I argue that the way philosophy conceives of the political subject fails to understand the populist subject. In Section I, I shall sketch an ambiguity in how Hobbes conceives of the political subject as both driven by the passions and yet capable of rationally subduing them. In Section II, I argue that these two different conceptions of the will lead to different models of political representation. In Section III, I offer an sketch of some of the ways the Hobbesian picture of the mind as fueled by the passions has been eschewed by modern liberal philosophy. Finally, in Section IV, I offer an account of two features of populism which seem to me to suggest that the Humean model of the will is appropriate to understand certain essential features of populist politics.

Partecipazione e Conflitto, Issue 13(1) 2020: 83-106, 2020

There is a tendency both in academia and in popular understandings to posit emotions against rationality and to judge them as an expression of intellectual inferiority. This could not be more evident than in current accounts of populism, which often describe populist supporters as overtaken by passions rather than relying on rational deliberation. However these arguments hardly stand up to scientific scrutiny. As I will show by reviewing the state-of-the-art, advancements in disciplines such as political psychology have now provided systematic evidence of how, contrary to what is traditionally rooted in the public imaginary, emotions and cognition work in concert. If emotionality is an integral part of decision-making and is vital to any type of political engagement, the question we should rather ask is what is peculiar about the relationship between emotions and populism. In the second part of the article, I will explore how the emotional 'supply and demand' intersect in our contemporary societies, where capitalism, individualism and globalisation have created particular affective states that provide fertile ground for the populist appeal to resonate. By examining the emotions-populism relationship based on three broad dimensions -structural, subjective and communicative -, this article provides a multilevel analysis that unpacks the significance of emotions for the emergence, diffusion and success of populism.

This article is based on the transcript of a roundtable on the rise of the far-right and right-wing populism held at the AAA Annual Meeting in 2017. The contributors explore this rise in the context of the role of affect in politics, rising socioeconomic inequalities, racism and neoliberalism, and with reference to their own ethnographic research on these phenomena in Germany, Poland, Italy, France, the UK and Hungary.

World complexity science Academy journal, 2020

The essay critically engages a political newsletter which problematically invokes rhetoric in a populist project by making the argument that emotions are a legitimate and sufficient guide to settling political questions, and by implication that facts often are unnecessary in political decision making. Arguing at the meta level-less about political issues and more about the way to reach and justify political positions-the text is a rhetorically adept defense of a populist approach to politics. The analyzed text is an illustration of populist-inflected rhetoric and, in virtue of its "theoretical" nature, also a blueprint for a particular kind of political culture informed by a populist epistemology which on central points is at odds with ideals of deliberative democracy. Analysis of the text reveals that it sets up its argument in a way that perpetuates the reason/emotion dichotomy that has marred the Western tradition and rhetorical studies for centuries; only it does so in an inverted version that promotes the role of emotions at the expense of knowledge. "People vs. elite" appeals recognizable from populism inform this move in an "emotions vs. academic/ technocratic knowledge" version, and the newsletter's disarming

Hybris, 2017

Emotions have a problematic status in modern philosophy. Given the strongly rationalistic character of modernity, the affective aspects of human cognition-sentiments, feelings, passions and emotions-have often been treated with suspicion. This scepticism has been particularly vivid in the history of liberalism-the approach in socio-political philosophy most intimately connected with the modern idea of dignity based on equal rationality of human beings. From this perspective, emotions seem to be more in place in totalitarian regimes, which exercise control over citizens by tapping into the irrational forces lurking in their minds, rather than in the societies devoted to mutual respect and transparency [Nussbaum 2013, 2]. Yet, one the most influential versions of contemporary liberalism alerts us to the relevance of emotions to liberal objectives. In A Theory of Justice John Rawls provides his conception of justice as fairness with extensive psychological underpinnings. Drafting a three-stage account of moral development, Rawls explains how citizens of a well-ordered society acquire the sense of justice, the crucial element of this process being the cultivation of proper moral sentiments [Rawls 1971, 1999, 405-425]. Such emotional support, Rawls argues, is necessary if a conception of justice is to remain stable over generations. We need to demonstrate that citizens are indeed able to be motivated by the

The Power of Emotion in Politics, Philosophy, and Ideology, 2016

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2014

Emotions play an increasingly important role in international relations research. This essay briefly surveys the development of the respective debates and then offers a path forward. The key challenge, we argue, is to theorize the processes through which individual emotions become collective and political. We further suggest that this is done best by exploring insights from two seemingly incompatible scholarly tendencies: macro theoretical approaches that develop generalizable propositions about political emotions and, in contrast, micro approaches that investigate how specific emotions function in specific circumstances. Applying this framework we then identify four realms that are central to appreciating the political significance of emotions: 1) the importance of definitions; 2) the role of the body; 3) questions of representation; and 4) the intertwining of emotions and power. Taken together, these building blocks reveal how emotions permeate world politics in complex and interwoven ways and also, once taken seriously, challenge many entrenched assumptions of international relations scholarship.

2016

What conceptual and methodological resources would it take for political theory to be able to more deeply analyze the emotional and affective dimensions of political life? In this dissertation, I articulate interdisciplinary work on affect and emotion into political theory in order to realize four linked objectives: first, to develop a method of reading and interpreting political theory capable of tracing the theoretical work done by affect and emotion in works of political thought; second, to reassess the boundaries of the political theory canon in terms of the thinkers that 'count' as part of that canon as well as the conceptual concerns that 'count'; third, to provide specific re-readings and re-imaginings of four particular theorists or theoretical movements: