Chapter 1

All societies are full of emotions. Liberal democracies are no exception. [Some

emotions] take as their object the nation, the nations goals, its institutions and leaders, its

geography, and ones fellow citizens seen as fellow inhabitants of a common public space.

Such public emotions, frequently intense, have large-scale consequences for the nations

progress toward its goals. All societies, then, need to think about compassion for loss,

anger at injustice, the limiting of envy and disgust in favor of inclusive sympathy.

In the type of liberal society that aspires to justice and equal opportunity for all,

there are two tasks for the political cultivation of emotion. One is to engender and

sustain strong commitment to worthy projects that require effort and sacrificeThe

other related task for the cultivation of public emotion is to keep at bay forces that lurk

in all societies and, ultimately, in all of us: tendencies to protect the fragile self by

denigrating and subordinating others.

Great democratic leaders, in many times and places, have understood the

importance of cultivating appropriate emotions. Liberal political philosophy, however,

has, on the whole, said little about the topic. Locke made no attempt to delve into the

psychological origins of intolerance. Kant concluded that the liberal state itself was

highly limited in its war against radical evil. Rousseau believes that the civil religion will

solve problems of both stability and altruistic motivation in the society he envisages. It

will achieve that goal, however, he argues, only if it is coercively enforced in a way that

removes key freedoms of speech and religious expression. Here lies the challenge this

book takes up: how can a decent society do more for stability and motivation than Locke

and Kant did, without becoming illiberal and dictatorial in the manner of Rousseau?

Since emotions, in my view, are not just impulses, but contain appraisals that have

an evaluative content, it will be a challenge to make sure that the content of the endorsed

emotions is not that of one particular comprehensive doctrine, as opposed to others. My

solution to this problem is to imagine ways in which emotions can support the basic

principles of the political culture of an aspiring yet imperfect society, an area of life in

which it can be hoped that all citizens overlap, if they endorse basic norms of equal

respect: the area of what Rawls has called the overlapping consensus. The careful

neutrality that a liberal state observes and should observe in matters of religion and

comprehensive doctrine does not extend to the fundamentals of its own conception of

justice (such as the equal worth of all citizens, the importance of certain fundamental

rights, and the badness of various forms of discrimination and hierarchy).

If this devotion is to remain compatible with liberal freedom, it will be crucial to

encourage a robustly critical political culture to defend the freedoms of speech and

association. But the space for subversion and dissent should remain as large as is

consistent with civic order and stability, and that space will be a major topic throughout.

One way of addressing several of these worries at once is for the state to give ample

space for artists to offer their own different visions of key political values.

Real people are sometimes moved by the love of just principles presented just as

such, abstractly; but the human mind is quirky and particularistic, more easily able to

conceive a strong attachment if these high principles are connected to a particular set of

perceptions, memories, and symbols that have deep roots in the personality and in

peoples sense of their own history. Another way of putting this point, to which I shall

often return, is that all the major emotions are eudaimonistic, meaning that they

appraise the world from the persons own viewpoint and the viewpoint, therefore, of

that persons evolving conception of a worthwhile life.

Part of justifying a normative political project is showing that it can be reasonably

stable. No such project could succeed if it did not tie the question of public emotions to

a definite set of normative goals. These commitments will limit the ways in which public

emotions can be cultivated.

 Part I of the book introduces the problem of political emotions through three

historical chapters. Before turning to the present day, we need a sketch of where we are

heading, a normative account of a decent society worth aspiring to and sustaining. Part II

begins by proposing such a sketch in Chapter 5. Part II continues by surveying the

resources at our disposal and the psychological problems obstructing our path. Part III

turns to contemporary reality and recent history, still focusing on the United States and

India. Chapter 8 addresses the topic of patriotic emotion, or love of country, arguing

that, despite its many dangers, a decent public culture cannot survive and flourish

without its cultivation in some suitable form. Chapter 9 then turns once again to the

emotion of compassion, so crucial for motivating and sustaining altruistic action and

egalitarian institutions, and to the related idea of tragic spectatorship. Chapter 10

investigates three emotions that pose special problems for compassionate citizenship:

fear, envy, and shame.

Chapter 11

1. The type of imaginative engagement society needs, Part II argued, is nourished by

love. Love, then, matters for justice especially when justice is incomplete and an

aspiration (as in all real nations), but even in an achieved society of human beings, were

such to exist.

First, our hunch was confirmed that good proposals for the cultivation of public

emotion must be attentive to their place, their time, and the specific cultures of the

variety of citizens who are their intended audience. The second general insight of the

material before us lies here. think less rigidly about masculinity and femininity. The

third general insight yielded by Part III is that political love is and should be

polymorphous. In short, while the goals and ideals of the society we have imagined do

place constraints on the emotions that citizens should be encouraged to feel, they permit

and actively encourage different citizens to inhabit the public sphere differently, as best
suits each persons age, gender, goals, values, and personality.

2. Ideals are real: they direct our striving, our plans, our legal processes. The ideal is

real in another way: if it is a good ideal, it acknowledges human life as it is, and expresses

a sense of how real people are. The ideal, then, is real. At the same time, the real also

contains the ideal. Real people aspire. This has not been a cynical book, but it has been a

realistic book. It has tried to face squarely the problems that a realistic human psychology

shows us, and its heroes are real people, not dreams.

3. [H]ow to balance loves inherent particularism and partiality with the need to create

and sustain policies that are fair to all. One important fact about the conception of

political emotion defended here is that it is not totalizing: it leaves spaces for citizens to

have particular relationships with people and causes they love, in the part of their lives

that is carried out apart from politics, under the aegis of whatever comprehensive view

of life they favor, since the society I imagine is a form of political liberalism. The

political is in that sense narrow, merely one part of what people are asked to care

about.Political love exists in an uneasy oscillation between the particular and the

general, in which the particular is never repudiated, but is seen in a way that promotes

inclusiveness, and in which the general becomes motivationally powerful through its link

to particular symbols and songs and sculptures. The dangers of bias inherent in

particularistic emotion are kept in check through the rule of law and through a strong

critical culture.

4. It must be such as to become, over time, the object of aoverlapping consensus

among the many reasonable overall views of life that the society contains. In one way, the

project attempted in this book is distinctly helpful to the goals of political liberalism, for

it shows over and over again that, and how, real people of many different religions and

other identities may be brought together around a common set of values through the
power of art and symbol.

5. Invite, not coerce. That disagreement is actually part of the ideal. But isnt society

jeopardizing critical freedom every time it urges citizens to have strong emotions of one

sort rather than the other? Surely not. First of all, as I just said, the critical spirit itself is

one thing toward which it is important to cultivate emotional attachment, urging people

to care about it and fight to clear away the obstacles to it. Second, it is just wrong to

think that an invitation to strong emotion must be coercive. A prominent part of these

protections, as we saw in Chapter 8, must be protection for young dissenters in schools,

where peer pressure is particularly likely to be coercive even when law is not.

Any good society has definite ideas of what is good and bad: for example, that

racism is bad and equal respect is good. There is nothing illiberal about that

definiteness so long as the free speech of dissenters is protected. It would be simply

bizarre to suppose that Martin Luther King Jr. was against the freedom of speech

because he passionately opposed racism and did not include a proracism argument along

with his antiracism arguments. As for public artworks, monuments, and parks, its not

even possible for them to be emotionally neutral: they have to be organized in one way

rather than some other way, and if they have any emotional impact at all, it must be of

some definite type. The only thing that would endanger freedom would be the

suppression of divergent opinions.

6. If we once achieved our political goals, and had well- grounded confidence that

they would be stably sustained into the future, would we have no further need of political

love? When we enter the contested terrain of emotions such as compassion and love,

when we talk of tragic grief and comic celebration, we have an easier time bringing

everyone on board if we say that these forms of public observance, and the emotions

they cultivate, are like that Swiss army knife, useful for getting a job done, but not

necessarily valuable in and of themselves. As to that deeper question, each person must
judge for him- or herself, in accordance with his or her overall conception.