Abstract
Among the most striking developments in contemporary social science has been the wholesale rethinking of the relationship of reason to emotion. Psychologists and philosophers now speak of “emotional intelligence,” experimental economists speak of the interplay of “moral sentiments and material interests,” and political scientists have recently become interested in the implications of “emotion research.” 1 And political theorists have hardly been idle on this front, as suggested by several important recent books—including now Rebecca Kingston’s stimulating Public Passions—which explore the intersection of cognition and emotion with special reference to the eighteenth century. 2
Kingston introduces her book as “an analysis and intellectual history of the nature and status of affective networks at the level of the state” (4). Implicit are two projects: first, a conceptual and ultimately normative analysis of the place of shared emotion in modern politics and its implications for our understanding of justice; second, a historical study of how the concept of public passion emerged (and in some sense failed to emerge) as a result of a long tradition. The book’s first two chapters are devoted to conceptual analysis, its next three to intellectual history, its following three to themes of contemporary import that emerge from this history, and its concluding chapter to a normative account of how attending to public passion may lead us to reconsider justice today.
The analytic and the normative projects that open and close the book are dedicated to a recovery of emotion in order to compel a reconsideration of familiar liberal theories of justice. Kingston several times notes that the universalist principles that are said to lie at the heart of much modern liberalism “either marginalize or silence the passions as far as political life is concerned” (6)—a concern that leads her to present her book as an effort to establish a “new way” that can serve to bring into relief and also redress the “inadequacies of liberalism” (12; see also 19, 61, 109). On her account, what demands recovery is the concept of “public passion” itself, defined as “an intersubjective mood or general affective atmosphere both complex and of long duration that tends to be specific to regime types” (5; cf. 23, 46). At least three key themes are at work here. First is the concept of affect or passion, which Kingston argues is “potentially rational” rather than necessarily irrational (23). Second is the concept of intersubjectivity; Kingston claims that the affect that matters for theorists of justice is not mere subjective feeling but the emotions or passions shared by all in a given political community. Third is the notion that particular types of regime are naturally best suited to particular types of shared passion—a view that does much to further Kingston’s efforts to resist the one-size-fits-all universalism associated with deontological strains of modern liberalism.
Kingston aims to complement this conceptual analysis by exploring “three key moments” in the history of public passion (61): antiquity (Plato and Aristotle), early modernity (Descartes and Hobbes), and the Enlightenment (Montesquieu). Most important is Montesquieu, animated by a consciousness of the “deep connection between the faculties of reason and passion” (112). Montesquieu is also especially valuable for Kingston given his emphasis on the differences between differing types of regimes and the sorts of public passion suited to them; in this sense, Montesquieu serves as a welcome departure from other universalizing tendencies within the Enlightenment, from Scottish moral sense to Kantianism. Yet Kingston is well aware of the challenges endemic to any attempt to appropriate Montesquieu for use today; contemporary politics, she notes, is inherently multivocal, containing always “a multiplicity of emotional components combined in a complex way” (122). This recognition leads Kingston to include three chapters meant to apply in “more concrete terms” Montesquieu’s concepts, and thereby “build a bridge” between the eighteenth-century theory of political emotion and “the nature of the phenomenon today” (128). These three chapters—on love, honor, and fear—are all of interest, but the first is the most stimulating. As Kingston rightly notes, love has recently been revived as a subject of theoretical inquiry, and her definition of the type of love as most relevant to modern politics—“not the intense form of passion that subsumes and overtakes all sense of self and individually conceived goals, but a love in attunement and openness to transformation” without entailing total capitulation (143-44)—serves to bring the insights of thinkers such as Luce Irigaray to bear on political theory proper.
Kingston is to be commended for covering far-ranging territory; not only does she treat historical thinkers from Plato to Montesquieu, but she also engages a great deal of contemporary scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. Yet one wonders whether such breadth compels a degree of selectivity. Kingston casts Adam Smith as the culminating figure in the movement toward “the marginalization of the passions” (93); the section dedicated to him is titled “the last rites for political emotion in Adam Smith” (99). But Smith is today widely regarded as a foremost defender of the notion that our commitment to justice is founded precisely on an intersubjective sharing of sentiments that sympathy makes possible. Smith’s crucial account of “sympathetic indignation” and its centrality to justice is largely absent here, owing perhaps to the decision to focus on a very short though important section of one of his works (100), or perhaps a propensity to judge the historical arguments here examined against a working model rather than on their own terms, a concern prompted by Kingston’s claim that “with Smith, something important is lost from the perspective I develop here” (105). None of this does anything to take away from the value of Kingston’s analytic model. But it may lead some readers to wonder whether the historical account offered here is as successful as the analytic project.
Part of the success of this analytic project is suggested by the questions that engaging with it prompts. Several of these are questions of which Kingston, to her credit, is already aware (199). But it would have been interesting to hear more from her on two fronts. The first concerns the possible tension between shared emotion and pluralism. Kingston often suggests that this tension is more apparent than real, and that public passion need not lead to homogeneity. But elsewhere she lauds public passion as a vehicle to “transcendence, or at least a periodic marginalization, of multicultural politics” (201). Not everyone may be comfortable with what seems to be suggested here: that when public passion and pluralism conflict, the latter ought to give way. Second, I confess that I can’t quite find in myself Kingston’s optimism regarding the potential of public passion to promote the justice-affirming behaviors described here. I want to be stirred when reading her account of the “infectious excitement” that animates Toronto during the World Cup (202), yet it’s hard not to think that the truth of the matter isn’t better captured by the tragic headline on my doorstep this morning concerning the 73 Egyptian soccer fans killed yesterday in post-game rioting in Port Said. So too, reading Rousseau’s rapturous account of the spontaneous dance of the St. Gervais regiment that ends the Letter to d’Alembert and prompts in Jean-Jacques profound feelings of civic brotherhood and la joye publique (as clear as an example of “public passion” as one could wish), it’s hard again not to wonder whether the reality of public passion might not be better reflected in those mobs who burned his books in Geneva and stoned his house in Môtiers. To be sure, Kingston herself clearly distinguishes “functional and dysfunctional manifestations of public emotion” (199). Even so, there’s a deeper question here: given that public passion can lead to both justice and injustice, what determines it in one direction or another? Is it how it is expressed or what prompted it? Or does it have something to do with the specific institutions present or absent in the regime that forms the context of this expression?
Ultimately Kingston’s book opens up several new horizons in addition to being successful at meeting the objectives it sets for itself, and particularly its more normative objectives. These are at once practical and theoretical, and if the aim of the work is ultimately to “disrupt our sense of traditional norms” and thereby open us to certain “potentially radical possibilities,” we’d need to know more about how the author envisions these before passing judgment (20). At the same time one can’t but warmly welcome this work’s normative implications for the practice of political theory today. As Kingston rightly reminds us, “a good normative theory of politics must take into account what our actual experience of politics is” (8), and failure to do will leave political theory vulnerable to “the danger of being perceived as more and more irrelevant to actual political practice” (11). Kingston’s awareness of this concern renders her book not simply an important contribution to the debate over the relationship of reason to affect but also to that over the proper relationship of political theory to political life.