Passions and Politics

Paul Ginsborg, Sergio Labate

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781509532742, 9781509532735
• eBook ISBN: 9781509532766
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

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.

1
The Debate on Passions

The ancient history of passions

Until today the term ‘passions’ has been used in a generic sense. We might say that passions were defined on the basis of their supposed opposite, reason. Now it is time to identify them with greater precision and trace their individual development in terms of meaning and use, especially if we want to find out how they can positively influence modern politics. Clearly, we cannot hope to cover exhaustively a theme of such long historical tradition or aspire to provide a complete typology of passions. Our aim is rather to construct an analytical method that may contribute to reinstating the passions at the centre of the political sphere.

Faced with such a difficult task, we may perhaps be forgiven for intoning the refrain of an old Beatles song: ‘All you need is love, love, love’. Without doubt we need love; but love is not enough by itself, nor is it free of ambiguities, as we shall see.

When we start to list the main denominators of our field of inquiry, we immediately realise that this is in fact a minefield. ‘Passions’, ‘emotions’, ‘affects’, ‘feelings’ and ‘desires’ are all terms used at a time when philosophers and political scientists have conducted intense debates, without, however, producing any consensus on their usage and meaning. Taking this into consideration, we have adopted an eclectic approach, preferring to use the terms ‘passions’ and ‘emotions’ interchangeably and sometimes opting for ‘affects’, though on each occasion we take care to highlight the differences of meaning and context.¹

Both in antiquity and in the middle ages, philosophers’ and thinkers’ definition of the passions proceeded by way of a fundamental series of opposites. Affective life was represented in general as a combination of positive and negative passions. In his Rhetoric Aristotle cited anger and gentleness, love and enmity, fear and confidence, shame and respect, kindness and unkindness, piety and contempt, envy and emulation. Cicero’s list, on the other hand, is much more restricted – it contains only four fundamental passions: pain and joy, fear and desire. Augustine sided with Cicero but radically redesigned the list in a Christian key. In his City of God he claims that all the passions mentioned by Cicero obey a higher prototype, namely love. Desire is the love that yearns to possess the loved; joy is the love that enjoys the possession of the loved; fear is the love that rejects its opposite; pain is the love that feels hostility and opposition to one’s self-realisation. Again from the Christian tradition – more precisely, from the pen of Thomas of Aquinas in his Summa theologiae (written between 1265 and 1274) – we get an extraordinarily systematic analysis in this regard, and indeed one with an enormous impact. In his schema, conscious activity finds its greatest expression in God, and all actions and passion are evaluated on the basis of proximity to this source. As James writes, Thomas of Aquinas’ theses find their greatest expression ‘in the description of fallen humanity, in the balance between the divine and the worldly, between animals and angels’.²

In Thomas’ classification, the first great divide takes place within what he calls ‘the sense appetite’, divided between a concupiscible and an irascible part. The concupiscible appetite is directed at objects and objectives of easy acquisition that are sources of pleasure or pain; the irascible, at goods that are difficult to access. Each of these major groups contains specific passions, combined, according to tradition, through a contrast between good and evil. Thus the concupiscible appetite, which is not affected by any particular doubt or difficulty over the object for which it yearns, consists of six paired passions: love (amor) and hatred (odium); the more unusual pairing of desire (desiderium) and flight (fuga, or abomination); and, lastly, joy (gaudium) and sadness (tristitia). By contrast, the irascible appetite – which is directed at more difficult objectives and forced to confront multiple obstacles – is composed, with a certain asymmetry, of five passions. There are two antithetical pairings: first hope (spes) and desire (desiderium), then audacity (audacia) and fear (timor). The final, isolated irascible passion is anger (ira) – but it is not understood in the modern sense of this term. Ira breaks out when it is necessary to defend a present good; it has the flavour of the Italian Resistance. Let us again quote Natalia Ginzburg: ‘We were there to defend the patria and the patria was those streets and those squares, our loved ones and our childhood, and all the people who went by.’³

The fact that Thomas’ typology sets ira apart, as an isolated case, warns us of the difficulty – not to say impossibility – of pairing passions in a clear antithesis between good and evil. It also makes us aware of the different meanings that one and the same term may have depending on the author who uses it. For example, anger in the sense Seneca deploys in his De ira – without doubt, a treatise known to Thomas – takes a much more dramatic value:

Whether it be according to nature will become evident if we consider man’s nature, than which what is more gentle while it is in its proper condition? Yet what is more cruel than anger? What is more affectionate to others than man? Yet what is more savage against them than anger? Mankind is born for mutual assistance, anger for mutual ruin: the former loves society, the latter estrangement. The one loves to do good, the other to do harm; the one to help even strangers, the other to attack even its dearest friends. The one is ready even to sacrifice itself for the good of others, the other to plunge into peril provided it drags others with it.⁴

Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza

How have these first distinctions and typologies evolved and changed over time? What meanings have they taken on in more recent centuries? A particularly rich debate developed in seventeenth-century Europe.⁵ It was marked by the interventions of thinkers of the stature of Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza. Except for Spinoza, who was probably the most modern-minded among them, these philosophers considered the passions to be a source of unlimited harms, just as their predecessors had. They held that passion, in sharp contrast with the pure light of reason, ‘blinds’ people, reducing them to wayfarers cut adrift in the mist after having lost their bearings. It is a familiar argument: the philosophers of the seventeenth century attributed especially to women this peculiar incapacity to put the brakes on their passions and to think rationally. Hence the need to confine them to the domestic and reproductive sphere.

This generalised fear in the face of passions demanded that various strategies be thought up in order to contain them. The relationship between passions and politics, too, remained trapped inside this assumption, as Hobbes and Descartes show in exemplary fashion.

In Hobbes we find a reduction of passions to their elements. There is no need to waste time listing them or distinguishing the terms, nor is there too much difference between them: all passions are quantitative variations of conatus essendi, our desire to exist. What does ‘quantitative variations’ mean? That the passions are always sensations: they concern the body.

This elementary materialism of the passions has a valuable consequence for our own discourse: it reduces any attempt to reflect on passions or to govern them to a merely private feat. Each person has her own passions and reconstructs, evaluates, feels and projects these passions over time on the basis of her own imagination or memory.⁶ Similar passions can be governed in different ways, on the basis of each person’s specific traits. If we were not forced to articulate our passions together with our needs, these infinite hues in the modes of interpreting our passions would surely be no problem. Unfortunately, however, at the very moment in which each person discovers that she cannot do without meeting other human beings along her own path, this extremely simple autonomy in governing one’s own passions becomes a menace. It is at this point that Hobbes, in spite of himself, does take up a list of passions, indicating which ones should be at the base of our social relations: ‘First, Competition; Secondly, Diffidence; Thirdly, Glory.’⁷ How relevant does this list of passions appear today, if we compare it with the passions that we now consider it natural to use in our political relations?

Let’s try to summarise. For Hobbes passions are not, in themselves, an object of inner discernment or moral judgement: we need not discuss them, still less write a little book like our own. They are sensations, perceived in peaceable fashion by the matter of which we are made. However, as soon as we enter into society this proprietary, peaceful individualism transforms itself into a competitive individualism. I can no longer treat passions in the same way as I do some object I possess; I am no longer free to do what I want with it. Certain passions no longer bring us peace but drive us to war. Curiously, Hobbes defines the difference between humans and animals precisely starting from these passions. He asks himself why animals don’t go to war: because their passions remain exclusively confined to individual satisfaction (perhaps Hobbes did not see enough of the interminable mimetic fights that drive the rivalry among the cats in our gardens). Forced to compete with others, the human being feels that wholly human sensation that Hobbes himself labels ‘anxiety’. Hobbes thus offers a description of this emotional state that remains highly relevant today. As a sort of perennial experience of low-intensity warfare, anxiety is an exclusively human passion.

If, in individual life, every passion descends from our desires, in social life it is envy that takes the place of desire. And it is at this point that passions – the unpolitical matter par excellence, because they are tied to the individual – do legitimise politics. No person involved in social competition can govern her own passions with fairness.

Hobbes thus provides an interpretation of the relationship between passions and politics (more precisely, between a theory of affects and a theory of power) that still conditions our common experience. He suggests, above all, that the natural sphere of passions be limited to a simple, private affair. He then defines, indirectly, the passions that colonise our social and political relations and that ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Debate on Passions
• 2. Political Romanticism and Neoliberal Romanticism
• 3. Politics and Passions, Today
• 4. Familial Passions and the Passion for the State
• Conclusion
• Postscript
• Index
• End User License Agreement