Populism and Passions

Democratic Legitimacy after Austerity

Paolo Cossarini, Fernando Vallespín

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780815383789
• eBook ISBN: 9781351205450
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

There is a consensus that right, and left-wing populism is on the rise on both sides of the Atlantic, from Donald Trump in the United States, to Spain's leftist Podemos. These may utilize different kinds of populist mobilizations but the fact remains that elite and mass opinion is fuelling a populist backlash.

In Populism and Passions, twelve scholars engage with discourse analysis, democratic theory, and post structural political thought to study the political logic of passion for contemporary populism. Together these interdisciplinary essays demonstrate what emotional engagement implies for the spheres of politics and the social, and how it governs and mobilizes individuals. The volume presents:

• Theoretical and empirical implications for political analysis;
• Chapters on the current rise of populism, both right and left-wing trends, their different ideological features, and their relationship with the logic of passion;
• Theoretical implications for the future study of populism and democratic legitimacy.

A timely analysis of this political phenomena in contemporary Western democracies, Populism and Passions is ideal for students and scholars in political theory, comparative politics, social theory, critical theory, cultural studies, and global studies.

PART I

Ordering the Political Realm

1

POLITICAL AFFECTS IN THE NEUROSCIENTIFIC AGE

Manuel Arias Maldonado

Introduction

It is now commonplace to observe that the last decade, marked as it has been by the unrest triggered by the Great Recession, cannot be understood without taking into account the bursting of political emotions throughout Western democracies. ‘Indignez-vous!’ – such is the unofficial slogan of the collective mobilizations that erupted in the aftermath of the financial meltdown, taken from the pamphlet written by the nonagenarian Stephanie Hessel (2010). Hessel, an ex-member of the French Resistance against the Nazis, encouraged young people to rebel against an unfair social order and sold millions of copies all over the world. Yet outrage itself can be directed towards very different targets: it has led to protests against economic inequality or the lack of participatory channels within representative democracies, but it also underpins the hatred of immigrants and the growing support for so-called illiberal regimes. Political emotions, in short, are more ambiguous than it seems. And that is why they should be carefully approached.

Therefore, it is not enough to claim that such mobilizations – as well as related political phenomena such as populism or nationalism – make use of an emotional language in order to stir political passions that are conducive to their goals. Political theorists should go beyond that truism, shedding light on the particular way in which this happens and the reasons why this strategy seems to work. Drawing on the abundant literature on affects which has been produced in the last two decades by different fields of expertise, allows for a more rigorous understanding of the way in which emotions, in all their variety, operate. How are they elicited? What role do they play in individual decision-making? How manageable are them? Are they pre-conscious impulses or a mixture of instinct and language? Are they beneficial or harmful to democratic politics? How can they be mobilized? If we are to talk about populism and passions, or about the role that specific passions play in the populist strategy, these questions must be answered. Political reality cannot be explained without human affects, but affects do not explain themselves.

As a matter of fact, the need to deal with them after years of theoretical neglect has ended up producing an ‘affective turn’ in the social sciences and the humanities, which can be succinctly described as the recognition that emotions are an important driver of human behavior (see Clough and Halley 2007; Greco and Stenner 2008; Thompson and Hoggett 2012). A certain model of human subjectivity, that of the autonomous and reasonable individual, is thus questioned. Far from being rational beings that make informed calculations while trying to maximize our preferences, we seem to be something else, i.e. psychobiological creatures whose decisions are predated by all kinds of cognitive biases and emotional influences. We are, in short, less rational than expected. And this realization, which owes a great deal to research conducted outside the social sciences – mostly in the fields of psychology and neurobiology – contributes to a new understanding of political phenomena.

This needs to be emphasized: neither populism nor political emotions constitute a novelty. New is, properly speaking, the body of knowledge provided by the affective turn. The latter makes it possible to speak of political emotions in a novel way, using new concepts, opening up unprecedented theoretical possibilities. Much is yet to be understood and many of the recent findings must be deemed provisional, as methodological difficulties abound in a field where it remains arduous to tell causation from correlation, the material from the ideational, and the description from the prescription. However, despite the shortcomings that may still afflict the study of a subject as complex as human emotion, it is not possible to talk about it – or discuss its role in populism and other political phenomena – without taking the affective turn into account.

This chapter is organized as follows. First, an overview of the affective turn in the social sciences will be provided. Second, a description of the postsovereign subject that constitutes its main corollary is offered – by way of elucidating the main reasons why it can be said that we are not purely rational beings. Third, the normative relevance of neurosciences will be discussed, with the aim of providing a balance between two opposing claims – one saying that neuroscience provides meaningful criteria to discern what is good or desirable, the other denying that they have a say on these matters. A brief recapitulation of the chapter serves as a conclusion.

Turning to the Affective: A New Direction for Political Thought

Since the beginning of the new century, an affective turn can be discerned in the social sciences and the humanities – one that runs parallel to the rapid development of neurobiology and has ended up leaving its trace in popular culture, where new representations of the intricate relations between affect and behavior, as well as body and mind, have emerged. This shift entails a rebuke to rationalist accounts of human behavior and decision-making, which have dominated the Western epistemological tradition, thus subjugating passions to reason. Unsurprisingly, one of the most common metaphors employed for describing the relations between reason and emotions is that of master and slave, i.e. reason as charged with the task of repressing and controlling the dangerous impulses of emotion. We think, therefore we are – free of sensations and feelings. For Elizabeth Grosz, a recurrent ‘somatophobia’ can thus be discerned in Western thought, at least as far as back as Plato (Grosz 1999). Such hierarchical dualism, not only separating but also placing reason above emotions, helps to explain why political philosophy is linked still today to the superiority of reason over affect. Passions are taken not just as a hindrance to reason, but also as the basis of intellectually inferior and socially irresponsible attitudes (Freeden 2013, 85). The affective turn can then be seen as a belated reaction against an aggressive hyper-rationalism that has downplayed the emotional dimension of human existence in the past.

How to make sense of this? There is, to begin with, the preponderance of a reductionist epistemology in the social sciences, namely that of rational choice – whose foundations can be found in the neoclassical economic theories before Anthony Downs systematized it back in 1957 (Downs 1997). To a great extent, the success of such paradigm owes much to the methodological ease it offers, as opposed to the epistemological complications that accompany emotions: they are elusive, hard to observe, and harder to measure. Furthermore, as the new interest in affects is also a return to the material and the corporeal, it can be seen as a reaction against the long reign of poststructuralism and its idea that human subjectivity is almost exclusively made up of language or discourse (Terada 2001). Pinker’s The Blank Slate symbolizes the moment in which anti-constructivism gained public ground, defending the idea that there is a universal human nature with innate features that interacts with the environment and culture – instead of us being infinitely plastic creatures shaped by culture alone (see Pinker 2003). And finally, there is the perverse influence of the Enlightenment project, as it was somehow assumed that modernization and public education would diminish the impact of affects in the political process, thus allowing reason to take the lead in democratic decision-making. A hurried conclusion, to be sure. Finally, as Demertzis (2013, 1) has pointed out, passions are hard to integrate in the neutral-procedural conception of politics, Habermas-wise, that has been calling the shots in normative theory in the last decades.

It goes without saying that this affective turn does have precedents in the Western tradition (see Solomon 2008). David Hume proclaimed reason to be a slave to passions, Adam Smith emphasized the role of ‘moral sentiments’ in human behavior, and Spinoza rebelled against Cartesian dualism. Later on, thinkers such as Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger or Sartre understood the centrality of affects – in the form of passions, moods or sensations – for human experience, not to mention the influence of psychoanalysis and its complex view of the human psyche. All of which was, somehow, already present in Greek theatre: human affects have always been a persistent shadow of reason.

That said, the current rise of emotions as a scientific object exhibits a new intensity and shows a number of distinctive features. It is markedly multidisciplinary: apart from the social sciences and the humanities, valuable contributions are made by neurology, psychology, and economics (see Damasio 1994; Elster 1999; Forgas 2000; Stets & Turner 2006; Lewis et al. 2008; Kingston and Ferry 2008; Nussbaum 2001; Barbalet 2002). Actually, this revival owes much to the impact of neurosciences, which have provided new evidence of those brain processes linked to the production of emotions and, more generally, stressed the preconscious activity that underpins our affective life. Selim Berker has written that the first decade of this century will come to be known as “the age of the magnetic resonance” (Berker 2009, 293), whereas Cass Sunstein points to its practical consequences when he anticipates that it will be that of “behavioral economics and psychology” (Sunstein 2016, 1). As we shall see later, this does not mean that the news provided by neurologists must be accepted as such on the other side of the ‘two cultures’ divide. Yet it would be equally absurd to deny that psychology and the neurosciences have put emotions back on the table and their contributions cannot be ignored. Rather, they must be weighed and discussed.

Mostly, the spectacular rise of neurosciences suggest that intellectual pioneers such as Nietzsche or Hume got it mostly right when they cast doubts on human rationality. It looks like humans are more dependent than expected on passions, feelings, the unconscious or whichever term we employ to describe that aspect of human subjectivity that cannot be consciously controlled – at least, not without some effort. Therefore, it looks like an epistemological transition is taking place from the ideal self of the Enlightenment, conceived as a rational being, to the actual self described by the affective turn: an entity conditioned by a number of affective influences of different kind, whose rational method for processing information is also distorted by a number of biases and cognitive shortcomings. In short, we would have ceased to be sovereign agents, as the self cannot exert full control of its own agency (see Krause 2011; 2015). Properly speaking, this is not a novelty – just a new way of formulating an old suspicion about human limitations.

As it happens, the political implications of psychology’s findings, which are in fact breathing new life into the subfield of political psychology, run in two directions – because it is not only the epistemological foundations of liberalism that are threatened, but also those of Critical Theory (see Rosenberg 2014). On the one hand, it is becoming clear that most citizens lack an integrated or consistent view of politics and do not have the ability to understand and appraise political events, so that the latter are mostly approached through an emotional engagement and cognitive shortcuts. Yet, on the other hand, it cannot be simply assumed either that human beings are a tabula rasa on which any kind of content can be inscribed, since there actually exists an inner organization of subjectivity that conditions the way in which exogenous inputs are received. Moreover, social meanings are reconstructed by each individual according to their own experience.

In sum, the affective turn in the social sciences entails an expansion of the latter’s scope, as their attention is now turned to feelings, memories, and materiality (Whetherell 2012, 2). And, despite the occasional protest on the part of old-school humanists, this turn should be welcomed – lest the anthropological foundations of social theories diverge too much from the descriptions provided by the experimental sciences. Between the hyper-rational individual described by the Cartesian-cum-Kantian dualism and the death of the subject announced by poststructuralism, a postsovereign subject in which reason and affect interact in intricate and subtle ways does look like a reasonable proposal. All the more since, according to an emerging consensus, emotions are not exactly antithetical to reason but a product of natural evolution that is to play a constructive role in human behavior and decision-making (see Evans and Cruse 2005).

Affected Selves: Understanding the Postsovereign Subject

In what sense can we say that human beings are postsovereign subjects? For this claim to be sustained, affects must operate in a way that involves a limit to, or an influence on, cognitive processes. Needless to say, such constraint would in itself possess political implications, since the claim that citizens are rational should have to be qualified. This is not to say that such citizen would always behave irrationally – the relation between cognition and affect is a complex one. In fact, emotions cannot be removed from human subjectivity without turning the individual into some kind of zombie that lacks any motivation to pursue ends or express preferences. To speak of affected selves is to describe an intricate psychobiological complex that cannot be so easily reduced in neither direction: a matter of degrees rather than absolute categories.

In any event, the “sovereign liberalism” that Judith Butler (2015) finds in the liberal tradition – making something of a strawman out of a current of thinking that includes David Hume – seems now untenable. To Butler, this sovereign liberalism inoculates the fiction that we can live and act as if we were not influenced by outer forces. On the contrary, we are, and affects are among those forces. “I am affected before I can say ‘I’”, she writes (Butler 2015, 2). Communitarian thinkers had said that much earlier, focusing on the cultural space that shapes us as we grow (see McIntyre 1981, Sandel 1982). This problem – that of the relation between the subject and her environment – has always been present in Western thought: “give shape” as opposed to “be given ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Populism, Democracy, and the Logic of Passion
• PART I: Ordering the Political Realm
• PART II: Passionate Logic and Discourse in Times of Austerity
• PART III: Passions and Democratic Legitimacy
• Index