ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Hannah Arendt’s critique of political emotions, taking compassion in the French Revolution as its vantage point. To Arendt, genuine compassion has astounding qualities, as the empathy it involves allows one person to ease someone else’s pain by feeling it like their own. Most salient to Arendt’s theory of the connection between politics and emotions is her account of the role compassion played in the French Revolution. While in Kant’s perception, the French Revolution successfully established a legacy of political freedom, Arendt makes the opposite argument, claiming that the French Revolution failed in its attempt to create a new political order based on democracy and freedom. For Arendt, substituting compassion for the process of debate and deliberation is by no means an innocent change of parameters. It proves fatal for the political, as it marks a transformation of the framework that defines political legitimization.
