Martha C. Nussbaum is the author of The Fragility of Goodness, The Monarchy of Fear, and Citadels of Pride, among other works. She is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, where she is in the Law School and Philosophy Department. She has received three of the world’s most significant awards for humanities and social science: the Kyoto Prize, the Berggruen Prize, and the 2021 Holberg Prize.
[Nussbaum] maps out the routes by which men and women who begin in
self-interest and ingrained prejudice can build a society in which
what she calls ‘public emotions’ operate to enlarge the
individual’s ‘circle of concern’… Those who would extend the
sympathy individuals feel to include fellow citizens of whatever
views, ethnicity, ability or disability must ‘create stable
structures of concern that extend compassion broadly.’ Those
structures cannot be exclusively rational and philosophical—as they
tend to be in the work of John Rawls and other Kantian liberals—but
must, says Nussbaum, be political in the sense that they find
expression in the visible machinery of public life… It is one of
the virtues of Nussbaum’s book that she neither shrinks from
sentimentality (how could she, given her title and subtitle?) nor
fears being judged philosophically unsophisticated.
*New York Times*
Continuing her philosophical inquiry into both emotions and social
justice, Nussbaum now makes the case for love, arguing that
emotions rooted in love can foster commitment to shared goals and
keep fear, envy and disgust at bay…To sustain democratic
institutions, Nussbaum claims, a liberal society should cultivate
the emotions that underpin imagination and sympathy for others, and
the way to do this is through education and the arts. Imaginative
capacities will be developed very early in the family, and should
be furthered via art, poetry, music and literature. These skills
enable us to see each person’s fate in every other’s, and to
picture it vividly as an aspect of our own. For Nussbaum, the
liberal tradition should not cede emotion to anti-liberal forces
(fascism, for example, was particularly good at using emotions for
political ends). But all political principles need a proper
emotional basis to ensure their stability over time, and all decent
societies need to guard against division by cultivating appropriate
sentiments of sympathy and love. This is why political emotions,
narrative imagination, and love matter for justice.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Martha Nussbaum has been a productive and creative commentator on
the questions raised by A Theory of Justice, and her book Political
Emotions is a long and thoughtful discussion of one of them: How
can we engage the citizens’ emotions…on behalf of a more just, more
inclusive, gentler, and more imaginative society? …Nussbaum takes
Rawls’s account of justice as her starting point, but she greatly
extends its range. She wants to turn away from hypothetical and
bloodless contractors behind the veil of ignorance to focus on our
actual flesh-and-blood selves.
*New York Review of Books*
Impressively erudite.
*Financial Times*
There’s no more interesting or persuasive writer on the wider and
connected subjects of emotions and social justice than Martha
Nussbaum… Here she brings together strands that go back to her own
The Fragility of Goodness (1986), and in the process delivers a
book as important in its way as John Rawls’s definitive but
slightly bloodless A Theory of Justice. Here, she draws on
aesthetics as well as philosophy to make her point… It’s a great
book, though, and goes straight on the shelf beside John Rawls.
Political morality for the new age.
*Glasgow Herald*
Martha Nussbaum’s is one of the most influential and innovative
voices in modern philosophy. Over the past four decades, a steady
stream of books and articles has issued from her prodigious mind.
She stands out among her contemporaries for insisting that
philosophy must be rigorous and, above all, useful… The book
demonstrates how people of different identities can be brought
together around a common set of values and political principles
through the power of art and symbol… As a culmination of her
monumental contribution to academia, in Political Emotions she has
produced an incandescent work that will not only be an inspiration
to scholars and lay readers alike, but be a beacon for societies
that aspire to justice and goodness.
*The Hindu*
Nussbaum [is] one of the finest theorists on law and ethics… Her
journey is a tour de force that travels through Greek and Indian
epics, the music of Mozart in ‘The marriage of Figaro,’ the poems
of Rabindranath Tagore and Walt Whitman, the rhetorical speeches of
Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., the
writings of John Stuart Mill, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, B.R. Ambedkar,
Auguste Comte and John Rawls to make a case for establishing just
societies by foregrounding emotions that can be developed through
critical reasoning… Then she, with incisive brilliance,
investigates three emotions that pose special problems for
compassionate citizenship: fear, envy and shame and also explain
that some societies instead of combating them make the situation
worse… Her magnum opus.
*The Hindu*
This volume is impressive for its breadth of references in liberal
political philosophy to literature and art theory, but all the more
impressive for the care and enthusiasm expressed for the subject
matter. The heart of the book, and what makes it a rather novel
contribution, is Nussbaum’s attention to the psychology of
emotions, particularly in how she draws upon the lessons of
attachment theory to inspire lessons for building a caring, loving
society and a rich notion of political justice… Political Emotions
is an exciting contribution to liberal political theory. Nussbaum’s
recent forays in bridging political philosophy with attention to
aesthetic affect, emotion and attachment have genuinely enriched
the terrain of liberal theory. Hopefully the discussions Nussbaum
introduces here will help to enrich our collective public life as
well.
*Metapsychology*
[Nussbaum] reinstates the role of emotion in politics and draws
attention to and rejects any kind of false emotionalism vis-à-vis
nationalism. She examines how figures like Rabindranath Tagore and
B. R. Ambedkar, through their emotional appeal on relevant issues,
were able to build the right kind of nationalism. In the very
contemporary context of Hindutva and its very particular link to
patriotism, I would recommend this book to everyone.
*Outlook India*
Genuinely bracing.
*The Tablet*
Political Emotions is an important work, and Nussbaum has created
valuable space for love and human imperfection to be weighed more
heavily in the search for justice.
*Times Higher Education*
Reading [Political Emotions] has reinforced, but more importantly
broadened, my understanding of love’s significance in political
life and how it can be fostered there… I find much political wisdom
in Nussbaum’s book.
*LA Progressive*
Nussbaum stimulates readers with challenging insights on the role
of emotion in political life. Her provocative theory of social
change shows how a truly just society might be realized through the
cultivation and studied liberation of emotions, specifically love.
To that end, the book sparkles with Nussbaum’s characteristic
literary analysis, drawing from both Western and South Asian
sources, including a deep reading of public monuments. In one
especially notable passage, Nussbaum artfully interprets Mozart’s
The Marriage of Figaro, revealing it as a musical meditation on the
emotionality of revolutionary politics and feminism. Such chapters
are a culmination of her passion for seeing art and literature as
philosophical texts, a theme in her writing that she profitably
continues here. The elegance with which she negotiates this diverse
material deserves special praise, as she expertly takes the reader
through analyses of philosophy, opera, primatology, psychology, and
poetry. In contrast to thinkers like John Rawls, who imagined an
already just world, Nussbaum addresses how to order our society to
reach such a world. A plea for recognizing the power of art,
symbolism, and enchantment in public life, Nussbaum’s cornucopia of
ideas effortlessly commands attention and debate.
*Publishers Weekly (starred review)*
Justice is hard. It demands our devotion as well as our
understanding. For that reason, it must grip our emotions. We must
feel its absence and its presence with the depth of feeling that we
associate with love. That is the compelling message in Martha
Nussbaum’s remarkable—and remarkably original—account of political
emotions. She explores the place of love in a decent society that
aspires to be just. And she explains—with great intellectual and
emotional force—how we can cultivate a political love with the kind
of complexity that does justice to our humanity.
*Joshua Cohen, author of The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other
Essays*
In her sweeping panorama of society and culture, Nussbaum
skillfully and flexibly uses her understanding of public emotions
to produce a book of considerable wisdom and merit. Her study is
anchored in a well-rounded view of a complex but largely unexplored
theme in the West as well as in South Asia.
*Mushirul Hasan, author of Faith and Freedom: Gandhi in
History*
Political Emotions is a remarkable synthesis of two of the most
distinctive strands of Martha Nussbaum’s thought—a conception of
the emotions as essential to our understanding of the world and a
political liberalism attuned to the fostering of human capacities.
Readers will not fail to be enlightened and moved.
*Charles Larmore, author of The Autonomy of Morality*
Martha Nussbaum rises above all the disciplinary boundaries. This
wise and engaging study of what patriotism is and how to cultivate
it is written by a philosopher, a political theorist, a
psychologist, a literary critic, and a historian—all of them at
their best and all of them one amazing person.
*Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study*
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