Civil Passions

In this book Sharon Krause argues that moral and political deliberation must incorporate passions, even as she insists on the value of impartiality. Her work provides a systematic account of how passions can generate an impartial standpoint that yields binding and compelling conclusions in politics.

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Throughout the history of moral, political, and legal philosophy, many have portrayed passions and emotions as being opposed to reason and good judgment. At the same time, others have defended passions and emotions as tempering reason and enriching judgment, and there is mounting empirical evidence linking emotions to moral judgment. In Passions and Emotions, a group of prominent scholars in philosophy, political science, and law explore three clusters of issues: “Passion & Impartiality: Passions & Emotions in Moral Judgment”; “Passion & Motivation: Passions & Emotions in Democratic Politics”; and “Passion & Dispassion: Passions & Emotions in Legal Interpretation.” This timely, interdisciplinary volume examines many of the theoretical and practical legal, political, and moral issues raised by such questions.

Senior New Testament scholar F. Scott Spencer focuses on a neglected area in the study of Jesus and the Gospels: the emotional life of Jesus. This book offers a fresh reading of the Gospels through the lens of Jesus's emotions--anger, grief, disgust, surprise, compassion, and joy. These emotions motivate Jesus's mission and reveal to Gospel readers what matters most to him. Amid his passions, Jesus forges his character as God's incarnate Messiah, wholly embodied and emotionally engaged with others and thoroughly embedded in the surrounding environment.

The dominant model of democratic politics emphasizes reason at the expense of the passions. Passions have been treated as dangerous, the opposite of reason and the enemy of virtue. Paul Ginsborg and Sergio Labate challenge this model and put forward a very different view, developing an account of modern democratic politics in which both passions and reason play a crucial role. To do justice to the role of passions in politics, we must pay close attention to the way in which they circulate among us; then we must develop a suitable language to describe them – an ‘alphabet of the passions’ that enables us to understand how they combine with one another and connect with certain states of mind in order to shape political outcomes. Adopting this approach enables the authors to shed new light on one of the major phenomena of our time – the triumph of neoliberalism on a world scale. Neoliberalism has worked so well because it has incorporated its own romantic and individualist version of the passions into its worldview, seducing both individuals and families with the allure of consumption. By developing a new model of democratic politics based on the interplay of passions and reason, Ginsborg and Labate provide a much needed framework for understanding the crucial role that passions play in the unfolding of political life. At a time when populist leaders are on the ascendancy and political processes are shaped as much by anger, resentment and fear as they are by reason and argument, this refocusing of political analysis on the role of the passions could not be more timely.

This book centres on Samuel Pufendorf’s (1632–1694) moral and political philosophy, a subject of recently renewed interest among intellectual historians, philosophers and legal scholars in the English-speaking world. Pufendorf’s significance in conceptualizing sociability in a way that ties moral philosophy, the theory of the state, political economy, and moral psychology together has already been acknowledged, but this book is the first systematic investigation of the moral psychological underpinnings of Pufendorf’s theory of sociability in their own right. Readers will discover how Pufendorf’s psychological and social explanation of sociability plays a crucial role in his natural law theory. By drawing attention to Pufendorf’s scattered remarks and observations on human psychology, a new interpretation of the importance of moral psychology is presented. The author maintains that Pufendorf’s reflection on the psychological and physical capacities of human nature also matters for his description of how people adopt sociability as their moral standard in practice. We see how, since Pufendorf’s interest in human nature is mainly political, moral psychological formulations are important for Pufendorf’s theorizing of social and political order. This work is particularly useful for scholars investigating the multifaceted role of passions and emotions in the history of moral and political philosophy. It also affords a better understanding of what later philosophers, such as Smith, Hume or Rousseau, might have find appealing in Pufendorf’s writings. As such, this book will also interest researchers of the Enlightenment, natural law and early modern philosophy.