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  • The Reason-Passion Nexus that Liberalism Needs
  • Laurie E. Naranch (bio)
Cheryl Hall. The Trouble with Passion: Political Theory Beyond the Reign of Reason. New York : Routledge, 2005. 159pp. $22.95 (pbk). ISBN 0-415-93406-0.

For mainstream liberalism, passion has long needed (and still needs) a containment strategy. Assuming passion to be disruptive to reasonable debate, liberals have sought to control the factional effects of passion with institutional mechanisms and procedural rules. Such a strategy is not only misguided but impossible, argues Cheryl Hall in The Trouble with Passion: Political Theory Beyond the Reign of Reason. Hall’s goal is twofold: to reveal both the impossibility of eliminating passion from political life in the name of reason, and to show that such a dichotomous separation of reason from passion denies our reliance on passion in how we take account of our ideas of the good — that is, of the intimacy between reason and passion in evaluations both personal and political. Hall, like others who are interested in cognitive theories of emotions, sees passion as ineliminable and necessary in evaluations of the good(s) of democratic life. The trouble with passion has been, Hall writes, that “on the one hand, it can contribute to belligerence, intolerance, and persecution; on the other hand, it is both ineradicable and necessary for democracy” (4). Instead, Hall suggests the real challenge is to take account of the objects of our passionate attachment and how we value what is good or just for a political community. This will require educating the passions in a way that “channels” our reason-passion nexus (as opposed to simply celebrating reason and eliminating passion) into an enthusiasm for the good of democracy. Hall’s project is a solid contribution to revealing the importance of passion within liberalism both as a resource for democracy and a necessary attribute of evaluative judgments. It works best in clearly articulating how passion infuses what we know about who we are (or contesting what “we” has been) and what we desire (or should desire) as democratic subjects. While Hall claims that she is not attempting to envision a reconstructed liberalism, but rather “to envision a democratic politics enlivened by passion” (5), her work is most persuasive as a critical encounter with those liberals who would deny the place of passion in relation to reason and politics.

“Reason,” “passion” and “democracy” are notoriously contested terms within political thought. Seeking to rightly undermine the dichotomy between reason and passion, Hall links the two expressly as part of any cognitive evaluation of those contested terms: “This cognitive/emotional nexus of evaluation and enthusiasm is what I mean by passion” (2). Noting that passions can be negative or positive, Hall points to the challenge of evaluating which is which by way of thinking about the object and ideals being valued, i.e., nationalist fervor or patriotic dissent. Chapters 2 and 3 address this intimacy between reason and passion, setting out quite clearly that passion can’t be eliminated from politics (as some federalists thought), nor ignored as a resource for evaluation and knowledge about what is good (in the plural) in life. Both of these chapters are useful and succinct criticisms of liberal dismissals of passion. They are valuable for those working in political theory and those teaching about the importance of reason-passion as a democratic resource.

In Chapter 2, “The Passions and the Reasons: Conceptualizing Capacities,” Hall situates herself within a framework of cognitive and evaluative theories of emotions to begin her claim that passion is not opposed to reason. Chapter 3, “Public Reason, Private Passion: The Trouble with Passion in Liberal Theory,” is one of the most original contributions of the text, using John Rawls’ famous “justice as fairness” framework as a case study of reasonable formulations of the right and the good. Finding passion at the heart of Rawls’ work in A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, Hall points out the familiar Rawlsian move to place passions in the realm of the private, but she also reveals that his theory of justice “actually depends on the development of a certain passion” (35): the human capacity for reasonableness is linked to “the passion...

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