Passion and politics

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 28, Issue 6, 2002, Pages 617-633

  Walzer, Michael ^a  

^a INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY   (United States)

Author keywords

conviction; interest; liberalism; passion; politics; Yeats

Indexed keywords

EID: 84997908321     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/019145370202800602     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. ‘The Second Coming’, in Selected Poems of William Butler Yeats, ed. M. L. Rosenthal (New York: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 91–2.
2. The translation appears in W. B. Yeats, Ausgewahlte Werke (Zurich: Coron-Verlag, 1971), p. 135. I owe this reference to Martina Kessel.
3. Yvor Winters, Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English (n.pl.: Alan Swallow, 1967), pp. 213–14.
4. The critique of enthusiasm (also religious zeal, fanaticism, and so on) is pervasive in the History, roughly from Chapter 50 forward. See the analysis in David Miller, Philosophy and Ideology in Hume's Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 57, 103, 116–17, 151.
5. Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne (New York: Modern Library, 1941), pp. 171, 172 (‘An Anatomie of the World: The First Anniversary’, 1611).
6. Anti-Duhring, no trans. given (Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1935), p. 292.
7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Circles’, in Essays: First Series, in The Complete Essays and Other Writings, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1940), p. 290.
8. Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977).
9. See Joseph A. Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes (New York: Kelley, 1951).
10. Machiavelli, The Discourses, Book One, Ch. 5.
11. Hirschman, Passions and Interests, pp. 57–9.
12. The quote is from Boswell's Life of Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1933), Vol. I, p. 567.
13. Hume, along with other 18th-century writers, recognizes and approves of another passion, ‘benevolence toward strangers’, but this is ‘too weak’, he argues, ‘to counterbalance the love of gain’. This latter passion can be directed; it cannot be replaced; it drives economic and political life. See David Hume, Moral and Political Philosophy, ed. Henry D. Aiken (New York: Hafner, 1948), p. 61 (A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part II, Ch. 2).
14. See Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Vol. II, Part II, Chs 8 and 9.
15. See Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) for an argument that stresses this aspect of Marxism.
16. For a representative example, see Bogdan Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia, rev. edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
17. See Diane Rothbard Margolis, The Fabric of Self: A Theory of Ethics and Emotions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), Ch. 5, for an account of how emotions of attachment and repulsion figure in what she calls the ‘obligated self’ and the ‘civic self’.
18. Emergency Exit, trans. Harvey Fergusson (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), Ch. 7.
19. For an account of Sartre's idea of seriality, more accessible than his own, see R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper, Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy, 1950–1960 (New York: Pantheon, 1971), pp. 121ff.