Ordinary Passions in Descartes and Racine
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Description
Not even the most circumspect political theorist can refrain from making controversial assumptions, however latent or inchoate, about elemental human endowments and proclivities. The choice between pessimistic and optimistic assessments of mankind's capacity for rational behavior reminds us that unspoken psychological premises may also have sweeping political implications. The anti-utopian liberalism of Montesquieu, Constant, and Tocqueville, for instance, is deeply indebted to classical French moral psychology. Liberal political theory, as they developed it, depends less on a fantasy model of rational egoism than on seventeenth-century theories of violent and mindless passions and the extraordinary unlikelihood of self-control. As Bernard Yack has remarked, such apprehensions were also central to Judith Shklar's “liberalism of fear.” Her political theory—like that of her liberal heroes—was founded on an unflattering but plausible conception of human character and motivation. In this chapter I will examine, in a modestly Shklaresque vein, the account of destructive and self-destructive behavior contained in two of the most provocative and influential works of classical French moral psychology. Descartes's theory of mental fixation, coupled with Racine's portrait of emotional dissonance and its consequences, helps give strikingly precise contours to the irrationality postulate underlying so much of modern liberal thought.
Source Publication
Liberalism Without Illusions: Essays on Liberal Theory and the Political Vision of Judith N. Shklar
Source Editors/Authors
Bernard Yack
Publication Date
1996
Recommended Citation
Holmes, Stephen, "Ordinary Passions in Descartes and Racine" (1996). Faculty Chapters. 812.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/812
