Passions and Politics

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. In this short book Paul Ginsborg and Sergio Labate challenge this model and put forward a very different view, developi [...]
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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. In this short book 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 first of all pay close attention to the way that they circulate among us and 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. This way of proceeding enables the authors to cast light on one of the great phenonmena of contemporary history - the triumph of neoliberalism on a world scale. One of the reasons that neoliberalism has worked so well is because it has incorporated its own romantic and individualist version of the passions into its world view, seducing both individuals and families by 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.