Politics and the Passions

Graduate / Professional

This seminar explores different paradigms in political psychology. Classical political theory, since Plato and Aristotle, observed that any set of political institutions needs to be supported by corresponding public ethics, and, conversely, promotes, orients, or inhibits certain emotions. What people are afraid of, angry at, indignant about, or hopeful for varies according to political circumstances so that, as Montesquieu and Tocqueville noticed, the passions of a democratic citizen are inevitably different from those of someone living in a hierarchical society. However, more recent political theory tends either to disregard the relation between shared emotions and political institutions or to view it as a social pathology. On the one hand, emotional phenomena are simply dismissed as mere deviations from the behavior expected from the highly abstract ideal of a rational citizen; on the other hand, when appreciated, the impact of emotions on political life is most often interpreted as a pathological feature of current democracies. Departing from both these strands of theory, this seminar explores the emotional foundations of public ethics, political practices, and institutions, as well as the political potential of psychological realism. Focusing on moments of political mobilization, social conflict, and institutional change, which bring to the foreground the emotional component of politics, we retrace emotional transformations together with the evolution of the psychological and moral discourses: How are our emotional experiences related to social expectations? In what way can political movements induce us to reorient our feelings and find new objects for our anger, indignation, fear, or hope? The seminar is structured in three parts. An introductory part compares different methods in the study of emotions and their political relevance. In the second part we study the psychological conditions for the emergence of authoritarianism in 1920s–1930s continental Europe. Based on readings by Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm we discuss questions such as: Is there such a thing as an authoritarian personality? What social conditions foster its development? How can people come to desire to escape from freedom? The third part explores the emancipatory potential of psychological realism: we discuss militant texts from classical feminist (Simone de Beauvoir, Carol Gilligan) and black (James Baldwin, Audre Lorde) political thought, which relate the possibility of a deep and lasting social reform to a transformation of the emotional disposition of the citizenry. W 1:30pm-3:25pm