Martha C. Nussbaum’s Political Emotions

Abstract

Martha Nussbaum’s new book Political Emotions is a contribution to political philosophy and, simultaneously, a moral-psychological study of the emotions. In it, she revisits some of the most prominent themes in her 2004 book Hiding from Humanity and her 2001 treatise, Upheavals of Thought. As Nussbaum points out in the opening pages of Political Emotions, one of her goals in this work is to answer a call issued by John Rawls for a “reasonable moral psychology” (9) that would be conceptually refined and empirically grounded, since a complete theoretical account of the just society must be informed by a suitably complex, accurate conception of human emotions. On the whole, Political Emotions is a remarkably successful book that combines several areas of philosophical research in which the author’s proficiency is well known. It shows how problems that lie on the more intimate side of ethics, pertaining for instance to friendship and family life, have relevance for social justice and public culture; along the way, it also incorporates insightful readings of literary texts. Nussbaum’s book therefore ought to introduce readers of her work in one area (such as social philosophy) to aspects of her work in another (such as the philosophy of mind, or literary criticism). It explores the nature of human emotions, as they form early in life and develop in the context of personal relationships, in order to clarify some of the conditions of possibility for a just liberal democracy. Political Emotions asks: which emotions are essential for such a society to flourish, and which are apt to undermine its values and goals? In order to offer an account that can answer this question, Nussbaum draws upon her influential cognitive theory of emotion and, in the process, reformulates it in subtle yet significant ways. For the sake of this book symposium, I concentrate mainly upon how human emotions are depicted and explained in Political Emotions, and on what Nussbaum’s latest work reveals about her considered view about the nature of emotion. First, I address her analysis of some types of emotion that are specifically important to her project, voicing a few critical worries about how Nussbaum describes certain emotions that can undermine a just society; then, in the latter (and larger) part of this essay, I make several related observations about how Political Emotions appears to modify Nussbaum’s theory of emotion, making some friendly suggestions about which Phenom Cogn Sci (2014) 13:643–650 DOI 10.1007/s11097-014-9389-4