The Monarchy of Fear

ldquo;Nussbaum is one of the most accomplished political and moral philosophers of our time…there is almost no domain of political and moral life and thought that her work and apparently endless curiosity have not explored.” —William Adams, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts

Auteur

Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, appointed in the Philosophy Department and the Law School of the University of Chicago. She gave the 2016 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities and won the 2016 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy. The 2018 Berggruen Prize in Philosophy and Culture, and the 2020 Holberg Prize. These three prizes are regarded as the most prestigious awards available in fields not eligible for a Nobel. She has written more than twenty-two books, including Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions; Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice; Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities; and The Monarchy of Fear.

Texte du rabat

From one of the world’s most celebrated moral philosophers comes a thorough examination of the current political crisis and recommendations for how to mend our divided country.

For decades Martha C. Nussbaum has been an acclaimed scholar and humanist, earning dozens of honors for her books and essays. In The Monarchy of Fear she turns her attention to the current political crisis that has polarized American since the 2016 election.

Although today’s atmosphere is marked by partisanship, divisive rhetoric, and the inability of two halves of the country to communicate with one another, Nussbaum focuses on what so many pollsters and pundits have overlooked. She sees a simple truth at the heart of the problem: the political is always emotional. Globalization has produced feelings of powerlessness in millions of people in the West. That sense of powerlessness bubbles into resentment and blame. Blame of immigrants. Blame of Muslims. Blame of other races. Blame of cultural elites. While this politics of blame is exemplified by the election of Donald Trump and the vote for Brexit, Nussbaum argues it can be found on all sides of the political spectrum, left or right.

Drawing on a mix of historical and contemporary examples, from classical Athens to the musical Hamilton, The Monarchy of Fear untangles this web of feelings and provides a roadmap of where to go next.

Échantillon de lecture
The Monarchy of Fear

Preface

Election night 2016 was bright daylight for me—in Kyoto, where I had just arrived for an award ceremony, after a joyful sendoff from my colleagues at home. I was feeling pretty anxious about the bitterly divided electorate, and yet reasonably confident that appeals to fear and anger would be repudiated—although there would be a lot of difficult work ahead to bring Americans together. My Japanese hosts came in and out of my hotel room, explaining the schedule of the various ceremonial events. In the background of these conversations, but in the foreground of my mind, the election news kept coming in, producing, first, increasing alarm and then, finally, both grief and a deeper fear, for the country and its people and institutions. I was aware that my fear was not balanced or fair-minded, so I was part of the problem that I worried about.

I was in Kyoto to accept an award established by a Japanese scientist, businessman, and philanthropist—also a Zen Buddhist priest—who wanted to recognize “those who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural, and spiritual betterment of mankind.” While I loved the fact that Dr. Kazuo Inamori recognized philosophy as one of the disciplines capable of making a major contribution, I felt the award as more a challenge than an accolade, and was already wondering how, at this fraught moment in US history, I might actually live up to my laurels!

By the time the election result was clear, I had to go out to have my first official meeting with the other two laureates (both scientists) at the offices of the Inamori Foundation, so I dressed up in a cheerful suit, fixed my hair, and tried to express happiness and gratitude. The first official dinner was a chore. Social conversation with strangers, filtered through an interpreter, offered no distracting charms. I wanted to hug my friends, but they were far away. Email is great, but not like a hug for comfort and consolation.

That night the combination of political anxiety and jet lag made sleep somewhat intermittent, so I began thinking—deciding, around midnight, that my previous work on emotions hadn’t gone deep enough. As I examined my own fear, it gradually dawned on me that fear was the issue, a nebulous and multiform fear suffusing US society. I got some ideas, tentative but promising, about how fear is connected to, and renders toxic, other problematic emotions such as anger, disgust, and envy. I rarely work in the middle of the night. I sleep soundly, and my best ideas usually come to me gradually, sitting at my computer. But jet lag and a national crisis have a way of changing habit, and in this case, I had a joyful sense of discovery. I felt that some insight might possibly be the fruit of this upheaval—and who knows?—it might be insight that would give others some good ideas, too, if I could do the work well. I went back to sleep with a calming sense of hope.

The following day—after a cleansing morning workout—I plunged into formal ceremony. I donned my evening dress and smiled as best I could for the official portrait photo. The onstage ceremony was aesthetically beautiful and hence distracting, and listening to the biographies of my fellow laureates and their short speeches about their work was genuinely fascinating, since they were in fields (self-driving cars and basic cancer research) about which I know little, and I was filled with admiration for their achievements. Giving my own short speech, I was able to express some of the things I really care about and to thank people who had helped me throughout my career. At least as important, I could also express love of my family and close friends. (All this had to be written in advance for the sake of the translator, so no ad hoc modification was possible, but being able to express love was still extremely consoling.)

Kyoto prize banquets end punctually and extremely early, so by 8:30 I was back in my room, and I sat down at my desk and wrote. By that time the ideas I had had during the night had taken form, and as I wrote, they became more and more developed and more and more convincing (at least to me!). By the end of two evenings of work, I had a long blog piece that a journalist friend of mine in Australia posted, and that blog piece simultaneously took a different shape as a book proposal.

But who am I, you might ask, and how did I come to take such a keen interest in the emotions of political unity and division? I am, of course, an academic, living a highly privileged life in the midst of wonderful colleagues and students, and with all the support I could wish for my work. Even at this time of grave threat for the humanities and the arts, my own university still strongly supports the humanities. As a philosopher without a law degree, I have the great delight of serving partly in a law school, where I can learn every day about the political and legal issues of this nation, meanwhile offering courses about justice and political ideas. So, it’s a fine vantage point, but it might seem too detached to participate in the anxieties of most Americans.

I was a privileged child, too, but in a far more complicated way. My family, living on Philadelphia’s elite Main Line, was upper middle-class and fairly affluent. I had lov…