The Reconstitution of Emotions in Political Life: A Critique

This dissertation begins with the query: how can the exclusion of emotions, and the presence of a dichotomy of reason and emotion, be accounted for in political life? Using the social history method of political theory—a method premised upon the interdisciplinary and socially-embedded character of political ideas and theoretical works—I investigate the premises of the notion of the reason-emotion dichotomy through a historical, philosophical, and political examination of the passions/emotions and rationality within the framework of the divide between the private realm and the political realm, or the public-private dichotomy. Working through Jürgen Habermas’s influential conceptualisation of the bourgeois public sphere, and placing it in dialogue with the history of the “countervailing passions” theory of early modern moral and political philosophy, I discovered a historical tendency by which the conception of reason is narrowed to comprise self-interested calculative behaviour, set against that which is irrational or passionate. A deep historical investigation into the origins of the concept of “emotions” reveals a second related tendency, by which what is deemed “emotion” is reduced through the broadening of the category to be divorced from and oppositional to the rational. My work demonstrated that these two tendencies are intertwined with the foundational public-private dichotomy of modern politics, by which the political is deemed wholly rational, and the irrational/passionate/emotional must remain outside of politics, in the private realm. These two dichotomies, of reason and emotion and the public and the private, are fundamental tenets of liberal political philosophy, thus posing an insurmountable challenge for contemporary political philosophy which seeks to include emotions in liberal politics. I demonstrate that the exclusion of the emotions, the crux of the reason-emotion dichotomy, is not based on a general exclusion of emotions in themselves, but is actually based upon the social exclusion which is a necessary determinant of liberal politics. My analysis of emotion in liberal politics, and critique of contemporary projects of political emotions, challenges dominant understandings of democracy and of inclusionary versus exclusionary political ideas, theories, structures, and institutions.