The task of elucidating the role of emotions in a just society might be akin to a labor of Hercules, or perhaps two. Developing the theory resembles cleaning the Augean stables, and responding to critics is comparable to battling the Hydra. Martha Nussbaum has undertaken just such a Herculean task in her engaging book, Political Emotions. Anyone investigating the role of emotions in political society will have to read the work carefully and respond to its claims. She deftly interweaves a wide-ranging discussion—from philosophy to opera, Lenny Bruce to Gandhi, Delhi’s architecture to Stephen King—to defend her central claim that political principles “need emotional support to ensure their stability over time, and all decent societies need to guard against division and hierarchy by cultivating appropriate sentiments of sympathy and love” (pp. 2–3). Without properly cultivated emotional lives, citizens will not be motivated to act in ways that society will often require of them; nonetheless, emotions can lead to dangerous, illiberal actions toward others, and political culture must safeguard against these tendencies.

Nussbaum frames her work as investigating how a decent society, for her a form of “political liberalism,” can engender the proper emotions without becoming illiberal or dictatorial. Setting the work’s parameters in this way focuses it on establishing how “emotions can support the basic principles of the political culture in an aspiring yet imperfect society” (p. 6; emphasis mine). This is not a theory for the role of emotions in any society. A second parameter concentrates the project “on society’s political culture, not the informal institutions of civil society” (p. 16). While Nussbaum acknowledges that civil society may pervasively shape citizens’ emotions, this is not what she investigates. Some may find her argument unpersuasive because they disagree with these underlying presuppositions; while this is legitimate, even those who disagree with her parameters can find important claims in the work.

The argument unfolds in three parts. Part I examines civil religion, patriotism, and the religion of humanity found in the works of Rousseau, Herder, Comte, J. S. Mill, and Tagore. These theorists provide important insights, and while Nussbaum’s proposals are sympathetic with the “spirit” of both Mill and Tagore, the theories all suffer from shortcomings that lead her to develop an alternative. In Part II, she begins this alternative by sketching her version of political liberalism, and developing her own theory of the ways in which political emotions can be “a source of stability for good political principles, and of motivation to make them effective” (p. 134). Compassion is a key to achieve this, but humans also demonstrate radically evil pathologies that undermine compassion—genocide, sadistic torture, ethnic cleansing—that arise from helplessness, narcissism, and contamination. Drawing upon the work of Donald Winnicott, she argues that we can combat these pathologies by developing people’s love, the “play that expresses and deepens love” (p. 181), and imagination. Imagination and play can also help overcome the threat posed by disgust (pp. 182–91). Finally, the tendencies “to yield to peer pressure even at the cost of the truth” and “to obey authority, even at the cost of moral concern” (p. 191) can prop up radical evil. Nussbaum is not overly pessimistic about these tendencies and believes that a public culture can overcome them by educating for independence and critical thinking, nourishing and rewarding dissent, maximizing personal accountability, reinforcing the perception of others as full individual human beings, and developing cultures of empathy (pp. 191–98).

Part III surveys the emotion-related areas of patriotism; tragic and comic festivals; and fear, envy, and shame. Patriotism requires steering between the Scylla of the “danger of misplaced and exclusionary values” and “burdening minority conscience by the imposition of ritual performances” and the Charybdis of the “danger of ‘watery’ motivation” (p. 207). Patriotic love “can in some sense cultivate an impartial altruism, by asking people to love the nation as a whole, and thus all of its people,” but it must get “people to love something that is all their own, and, preferably, the only one they have” (p. 225). Public culture must insist, however, “that the truly patriotic attitude is one that repudiates orthodoxy and coercive pressure and celebrates liberties of speech and conscience” (p. 218). Tragic dilemmas can “shape compassion and address some of its likely errors,” and demonstrate “that some costs, some losses” are “bad in a distinctive way” (p. 271). Comedy engages disgust and the body in playful, joyous ways (p. 275). Fear, envy, and shame can all threaten compassion. The public culture must temper fear with optimism, and overcome envy by inculcating “a sense of a common fate, and a friendship that draws the advantaged and less advantaged into a single group, with a common task before it” (p. 345). Shame can fill “a healthy role . . . when it does not divide or stigmatize but spurs people on to higher achievements,” but it too often fractures “social unity, causing society to lose the full contribution of the shamed” (p. 364). The law can curb the damaging aspects of shame, but public culture must help combat hostile shaming and stigmatization.

Through this expansive journey, Nussbaum supports her claim that love matters for justice. Love is a relationship that “includes a delighted recognition of the other as valuable, special, and fascinating; a drive to understand the point of view of the other; fun and reciprocal play; exchange, and what Winnicott calls ‘subtle interplay’; gratitude for affectionate treatment, and guilt at one’s own aggressive wishes or action; and, finally and centrally, trust and a suspension of anxious demands for control” (p. 176). This type of love is not “an uncriticized foundation for political principles [that] can achieve anything good on its own, without arguments and general norms” (p. 319); all citizens do not “have to be moved by political love” all the time (p. 319). Instead, the public culture “must have enough episodes of inclusive love, enough poetry and music, enough access to a spirit of affection and play, that people’s attitudes to one another and the nation they inhabit are not mere dead routine” if good principles and institutions are to survive (p. 320). This kind of love is possible in a decent, politically liberal society because it requires “imagining emotions that do not presuppose full agreement on principles and institutions or even agreement that these lack major flaws” (p. 393). It is akin to a love that endures among friends or lovers despite their flaws and shortcomings.

Nussbaum’s argument is challenging and compelling, and will evoke numerous accolades and criticisms, extensions and interrogations. One of the questions that remained for me involved the development of the capacity for love. The author claims that “love propels the infant into creative reciprocity and the sort of empathetic perspective taking that makes action an expression of genuine concern rather than rigid formulae” (p. 176). This development in infancy is a fundamental foundation upon which the political culture can build citizens with properly cultivated emotional lives. Yet if so much of the capacity for love develops in infancy, well before the educational and cultural recommendations given by Nussbaum can have an effect, how can a decent political liberalism accommodate the need to cultivate love in its citizens without risking becoming illiberal?

Another question is whether the kind of patriotism Nussbaum advocates is possible or as politically neutral as she suggests. Some would argue that patriotic love is incompatible with the critical thinking that she argues is required of a decent, liberal society. Beyond this, however, some would posit that the kind of patriotism she advocates is not as uncontroversial as she claims. Normally, I dislike critiques that highlight what an author has not addressed, but it is disappointing that she does not engage the Moral Foundations work of Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues. While there are many legitimate criticisms of that work, it still has been important in framing the debates surrounding political emotions and justice. That work indicates that the kind of patriotism she defends, as well as some of her claims regarding other emotions such as disgust, are not just politically liberal but liberal in a deeper, more comprehensive way. We can only hope that she might address these possibilities in the future. And yet, while these Hydra-like critical heads will continue to arise, we should all be grateful that Nussbaum has taken great strides toward cleaning the Augean stable that is the role of political emotions in society.