ABSTRACT
Emotion and affect clearly play a role in politics.1 For many contemporary political theorists, particularly liberal and deliberative types, they actively hamper it. As Michael Walzer puts it, where ‘[i]nterests can be negotiated, principles can be debated, and negotiations and debates are political processes’ containing the behaviour of those involved in politics, ‘passion, on this view, knows no limits, [it] sweeps all before it’. It is ‘impetuous, unmediated, all-or-nothing’ (Walzer, 2004: 110-111). It leads (ostensibly) to violence, conflict and war. Refreshingly, William Connolly offers a different take on the connections
between emotion and political values, judgments and actions (see also Krause, 2006). Specifically, his aim is to demonstrate how affect-imbued ideas (might) help to nurture the ethos of generosity he is seeking to affirm. He is thus concerned with how emotion and affect actively contribute towards the development of a particular normative project, rather than hindering it. As will become clear, Connolly’s point is not, however, that affectivity and emotion serve simply as auxiliaries to a rationally derived ethos, the ‘glue’ binding us to our political values and judgements. They are, rather, constitutive elements in the generation, nurturance and consolidation of that very ethos.2
