Introduction: Bridging the Emotional/Intellectual Divide

Abstract

The following themes are discussed in this chapter: 1. From different perspectives on ‘Night and Day’ to the ‘Contradictions of Modernity’: the expectation of ever-increasing rationality in economic enterprise and in bureaucratic administration confronts violent outbursts of ‘irrational exuberance’. 2. The Enlightenment tradition of social science and its belief in the ‘rational actor’ find great difficulty in accounting for the role of the ‘irrational’. 3. The use of fictions, as source of emotions, restores the repressed affective dimension of society. 4. The two components — emotional and rational — are represented in Kant’s ‘trilogy of passions’, fusing imaginative truths with the existential conditions of economic ‘possession’, political ‘power’ and social values. These conditions are necessary for the production of wealth, political order and social identity; but they may take either a destructive or constructive form (power, for example, may be used cooperatively for the common good, or abused in the interest of an elite). 5. ‘Theory in Context’: the challenge of change, through economic innovation, war, internal unrest. Stimulating conditions (inspirational or traumatic) provoke an emotional reaction, which then has a social impact. Such is the theme, in economics, politics and society (vision and division), of the following chapters.