The goal of this project is to develop a Kantian account of political emotions. The project combines two growingly prolific research agendas. The first is a reappreciation of the role emotions play in Kant’s broader philosophical framework. The second focuses on the emotions involved in political life. I propose that the integration of these two areas of study enriches both of them. First, the project aims to uncover the social and political aspect of many of the emotions accounted in Kant’s philosophy, which have often been overlooked in the existing scholarship. Secondly, we propose that a Kantian perspective on political emotions will make a valuable contribution to contemporary debates by articulating a novel relation between emotions, reasoning and collective psychology. The upshot of the proposed account is that Kantian political emotions are embedded in the values and normativity essential for finding orientation in political life.
According to a common caricature, Kant’s practical philosophy emphasizes reason above all else and is therefore severely strict and cold-hearted. Emotions and feelings are seen as hinderances to rationality or at best as irrelevant. In recent years this simplistic picture faded as new scholarship evolved to examine the wealth of Kantian texts on moral psychology and anthropology dealing with a variety of emotions and resulting in illuminating accounts of the nature of emotions and their tight relation to practical reasoning. These works reveal a more nuanced account of the interdependence between emotions and rationality. Yet most of the resulting accounts focus on the personal aspect of emotional responses and moral deliberation. The social and political aspects of Kant’s account of emotions are yet to be fully appreciated in a systematic way. We suggest that the Kantian account has the resources to articulate collective emotions as responsive to the emotions, intentions and states of other members of society. A somewhat similar trend emerged in political thought, also in the kind of liberal theory inspired by Kant. On the surface, liberal political theory aims to seek rational solutions to collective problems and emotions are often regarded as harming public discourse by inviting intractable conflicts. However, more recent political thought has begun to acknowledge the positive role emotions play in motivating social movements, sustaining liberal democratic institutions and preventing their erosion. These parallel trends in Kantian ethics and political theory show that the Kantian framework can be particularly suitable to investigate the notion of political emotions and their function in public life.
The project is divided into the following three sub-projects. In the first I will develop accounts of political guise of the various emotional attitudes discussed by Kant, positive and negative, such as hope, respect, disinterested pleasure, guilt, envy, fear and love. In the second sub-project I will build upon these analyses to construct a systematic Kantian theory of political emotions. Finally, in the third subproject, I will apply my account to contemporary debates on political emotions, such as those concerning polarization, populism, and democratic resilience.
