10.1177/0090591703258609REVIEWPOLITICAL THEORY / February 2004Martel / REVIEW ESSAY

THE ROLE OF EMOTION

IN POLITICAL LIFE

THE SENTIMENTAL CITIZEN: EMOTION IN DEMOCRATIC POLITICSby George Marcus. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,2002. 171 pp. $19.95 (paper).

FEMINISM AND EMOTION: READINGS IN MORAL AND POLITICALPHILOSOPHY by Susan Mendus. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. 197pp. $65.00 (cloth).

As citizens of a democracy, must we fear our passions? Two recent booksby George Marcus and Susan Mendus argue that we need a better apprecia-tion of the relationship between emotion, reason, and politics. Romanticreactions aside, these authors argue that emotion has often been seen asopposed and even dangerous to reason, which is itself held up as the modelfor politics and citizenship. Both books would like to revisit this under-standing by arguing that emotion is necessary for reason, with importantimplications, both for moral philosophy and for notions of citizenship anddemocracy.

In The Sentimental Citizen, George Marcus argues that reason and theconscious mind are only one part of the overall structure of human motiva-tion. Turning to neuroscience for his evidence, Marcus distinguishesbetween the mind (our consciousness) and the brain (the larger system thatstructures our responses to the world). Marcus tells us that we have several“emotional” systems that, unbidden—and often unwanted—serve as thegrounds upon which our conscious minds operate, the most important beingthe disposition and surveillance systems.

The disposition system simplifies and routinizes complicated tasks. Wereit not for this system, Marcus argues, the simplest acts—such as catching amarble rolling down a slope—would become hellishly difficult. Our con-scious mind, which can handle only a relatively small amount of data, wouldbe overwhelmed without the disposition system’s attendance to the basicdetails of life, leaving the conscious mind to do what it does best: focus on aparticular question. When we go along with our dispositions or habits, we

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feel a sense of enthusiasm. When we go against them, we may feel despair.These emotions are thus not exactly “our own” in the sense that they are theproduct of our conscious mind, but rather they are a kind of communicationwith our brain. These emotional states structure and enable reason to operatewithin their guidelines.

The surveillance system monitors our external world for signs of threat orchange. When all is well, the surveillance system is silent and we feel calm.When something strange is happening, we feel anxiety. Anxiety, Marcus tellsus, is underappreciated because it performs the important task of informingour mind that something is wrong and that we may need to change the way wedo things. With anxiety, we can either be reconfirmed in our beliefs or we canchange them. Without anxiety, we are stuck with our dispositions and reasonis powerless to do anything about it.

At times this book suggests an almost Nietzschean decentering of self.That is probably not the author’s intention, but the entire relationshipbetween mind and brain is a fascinating complication of human agency. Theauthor’s announced intention is more modest, however: to alter the way weunderstand the role of emotion in reason and politics and convince us that weare better citizens (therefore) than we might think. Marcus’s point is that weberate ourselves for being too passionate in our political lives (by respondingto negative ads and the like) when we are in fact, in our enthusiasm, despairand anxiety, actually being extremely reasonable—when we understand“reasonable” to include these emotional states that precede, structure, andsustain reason itself. Although this book sets itself up as a critique of ourpractices, it turns out that the way we are doing business is not as bad as itseems. The author just argues that some awareness of the way emotions workwould make us even more reasonable, that is to say, more in keeping with ouremotional states and what they do to, and ask of, us.

Perhaps inevitably, Marcus has set up some straw men in his quest toredeem emotion. What Marcus calls “the dream of independent reason”(p. 143), that is, the source of our bias against emotion, is exemplified for himby thinkers like Kant and especially Descartes. But even Kant saw the needfor emotions (albeit mainly ones he preferred, like respect and awe) and cau-tioned that “reason should not flap its wings impotently . . . and thereby loseitself among mere phantoms of the brain.”1 And Descartes—author of thequintessential text of doubt—seems to exemplify precisely the kind of anxi-ety that Marcus applauds. This last point may serve to illuminate one of thegreatest strengths of this book, namely, that The Sentimental Citizen offers usa powerful—indeed nearly irresistible—metaphor for who and what we are.For in seeking to extend the findings of neuroscience about “human nature”to political questions, Marcus is using an extensive, and indeed emotional,

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metaphor in which internal emotions are related to collective, political pas-sions. Marcus himself tells us that “a rhetoric that attempts to be sterile so thatemotion is excluded cannot [gain our attention or win our hearts]” (p. 147).This statement surely also applies to Marcus’s own book. Indeed Marcus’sbook can be seen as engaging in some elegant rhetorical maneuvers: it is notonly a straightforward statement of a neuroscientific thesis; its action uponthe reader illustrates the author’s own proposition. That is, the readerbecomes, like the mind described in the book, a helpless witness to the emo-tional systems that surround him or her. We are, by definition, unable to knowif these systems are “true,” because our self is only a small part of the verysystems we are trying to discern. Thus, we are left with our dispositions andanxieties, exactly as Marcus describes us.

Susan Mendus’s book, a series of interrelated essays, approaches thequestion of emotion quite differently. Mendus draws less on science andmore on moral and political philosophy (although both authors have a nicepenchant for using literary figures to exemplify their points). Mendus maybegin with the same straw men as Marcus (at least in respect to Kant), but sheargues even those denigrators of emotion can often be shown to appreciatethe value of what they claim (or are claimed) to dislike. For example, she res-cues Kant from a perceived coldness and antiemotionalism by showing thatKant can be shown to allow for emotions, as long as they are not indulged atthe expense of reason itself. She argues that, for Kant, the duty to “love ourneighbor” is not incommensurate with our inclination to love our neighbor(p. 48). Indeed, she suggests that emotional love is “a necessary preconditionof being able to recognize moral duty at all” (p. 52). In other words, althoughthe idea might not appeal to him, Kant accepts the necessity and uses of emo-tion after all.

Better still for Mendus is John Rawls, who, in his own engagement withKant, reveals himself to be even more keen on the value and need for emotionas a basis for reason (strangely, to make this argument, Mendus more or lessabandons her own reconstitution of Kant, returning him to straw man status).Mendus suggests that Kant cannot bear the slings and arrows of love and for-tune and seeks to protect us from the world by a retreat to the cold isolation ofreason and respect (p. 169). Rawls, however, accepts the moral hazards of lifeand sees love as a necessary way to engage with the world. He sees love (asMendus does) as something risky but transformative, which gets us to careabout something besides ourselves, hence awakening us to the very moralworld that Kant seeks but fails to find because of his concern for self-protec-tion (which amounts to preserving the isolated self).

Mendus repeatedly returns to this argument that emotions are not antago-nistic to reason and justice, that they enable us to survive and even thrive in a

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world characterized by chance and unfairness. Despite her allegiance to a fig-ure like Rawls (at least her version of Rawls), Mendus is very critical of liber-alism itself. In her view, liberalism seeks, like Kant, to render us immune tochance. This informs Mendus’s approach to feminism as well; she resistsboth a hyper-Kantian identity for women that denies the chance and vagariesof gender as well as an identity that fetishizes those vagaries as being itselfconstitutive of a female self.

Mendus describes a peculiarly modern form of tragedy, namely, ourinability to accept its inevitability. Like Willie Loman, (in her beautifullydrawn reading of him), we believe in the possibility of something called “jus-tice” and, when we fail to have it (as we must), we believe that we have notonly failed life, but also have failed to deserve the justice that was denied tous. A greater appreciation for emotion, Mendus argues, allows us to accepttragedy and therefore serves as the bedrock for any possibility of real moralagency.

By forbearing to make claims about “human nature,” Mendus may avoidsome of the baggage that comes with Marcus’ project. Then again, withoutthat baggage, we are left wondering what these emotions are and where theycome from. Like Marcus, albeit in a very different way, Mendus suggests, inher attack on reason’s primacy, a decentering of human subjectivity. Her dis-cussion of love as “constitutive and transformative of our ends” (p. 179) sug-gests as much. But like Marcus, she seems to shy away from pushing thisdecentering too far. After all, the point of both books is to return us to “us,”where that “us” is both tragically configured and imbued with a new respectfor emotions we’ve always had but didn’t value.

Their vastly different approaches notwithstanding, these authors share aset of fundamental assumptions that might help explain why they ultimatelycome to almost exactly the same conclusions and why their books may havesimilar limitations. While Marcus’s turn to science and Mendus’s turn tocanonical texts and moral theory both have their virtues, the project of“redeeming” emotion might better be served by probing the very basis for theemotion/reason binarism that these authors accept without question. Eachauthor calls for a fundamental rethinking of reason’s primacy, and Mendusacknowledges (and critiques) the gendered readings of emotion and reason,yet both authors end up reinscribing this basic relationship, even while chal-lenging its articulation. We might ask instead how we have come to see our-selves as being organized along these particular lines, what this arrangementserves, how it reifies us as political actors, and how an unquestioning belief inthis arrangement leads us down certain paths, making others utterly invisibleto us. By not asking such questions, we may risk naturalizing (like Marcus) orat least failing to contest (like Mendus) an arrangement that, by these authors’

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own admission, has a very unhappy and unsatisfying history and that needsperiodic rescuing by books (however worthy) such as these.

NOTE

1. Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,1981), 61.

—James MartelSan Francisco State University

James Martel teaches at San Francisco State University in the Department of PoliticalScience. Prior to this, he taught in the Rhetoric Department at the University of Califor-nia, Berkeley, and at Amherst College. He is the author of Love Is a Sweet Chain: DesireAutonomy and Friendship in Liberal Political Theory (2001).

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