ABSTRACTPhilosophers and psychologists have come to recognize contempt as a crucial concept for understanding moral and social life. Yet its conceptual history remains understudied. I argue that contempt underwent an important conceptual shift at the end of the 1640s with the publication of René Descartes’ Passions de l’âme. Prior to Descartes, early modern philosophers excluded contempt from their taxonomies of the passions, treating it instead as a form of indifference. To have contempt for something was to be free of passion (...) in the face of it. Following Descartes’ intervention, however, philosophers increasingly included contempt among the passions, those unruly perturbations of the mind that could have benign or dangerous effects depending on how they were moderated. This was a change that harboured practical as well as philosophical implications. For what had once been an emblem of self-mastery was now itself a passion in need of regulation. The contempt displayed by aristocrats, in particular, now signified a dangerous lack of self-control rather than a cool display of superiority. I conclude by drawing out the affinities between this mid-seventeenth-century reconceptualization of contempt as a passion and the current attempt by philosophers to redeem contempt as a morally justifiable attitude. (shrink)

InDemocracy in America, Tocqueville described the ideal wife of a democratic citizen as a capable domestic helpmeet who enables the citizen‐husband to endure the daily trials of political activity. Tocqueville's biographers have presented Tocqueville's own wife Mary Mottley as having approximated this ideal. Mottley's importance, it is claimed, lay in providing the domestic calm and psychological support that Tocqueville needed to think, act, and write as he did. My aim in this article is to challenge this interpretation by offering an (...) overdue reassessment of Mottley's life and work, uncovering the hidden labors she performed in Tocqueville's circle and giving scope, where possible, to her own political views and activities. Mottley, I argue, refused to confine herself to the domestic‐management and emotional‐support roles typical of a Tocquevillian citizen‐wife. Instead, she carved out a role for herself as Tocqueville's political and intellectual interlocutor. (shrink)

McCabe's interpretation of Mill as a socialist is convincing but does not render his writings any less available to liberals. The term ‘socialism' was a slippery one in nineteenth-century Britain. For the likes of Arnold Toynbee, even self-proclaimed Tories could become socialists if they embraced the right policies. The existence of such ‘Tory socialists’ serves as a reminder of the hybridity of political identity at the time Mill was writing (hyphenated socialists were socialists nonetheless). Several aspects of Mill's socialism – (...) his rejection of class antagonism, his discomfort with revolutionary change, and his focus on small-scale socialist experiments rather than achieving a socialist state – will reassure liberal readers that his socialism did not overwhelm his more liberal commitments. McCabe's book might thus be best read as supplementing the liberal reading of Mill rather than supplanting it. I conclude by suggesting that a Liberal-Socialist hybrid inspired by Mill could prove useful to the effort (begun recently by Axel Honneth) to re-found socialism on a non-Marxian basis. (shrink)

In her Vindication of the Rights of Men, Mary Wollstonecraft accused Edmund Burke of having contempt for his political opponents. Yet she herself expressed contempt for Burke and did so unapologetically. Readers have long regarded Wollstonecraft’s decision to match Burke’s contempt with one of her own as either a tactical blunder or evidence that she sought merely to ridicule Burke rather than argue with him. I offer an interpretation and defence of Wollstonecraft's rhetorical choices by situating the Vindication within eighteenth-century (...) debates about the dangers of elite contempt and the best methods for stifling it. Rather than countering Burke’s contempt with more of the same, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication marks a distinction between two forms of contempt. The first expresses the false sense of superiority experienced by elites who owe their social elevation to arbitrary differences of wealth or family. As such, it represents both an abuse of privilege and an anxious recognition among elites that their... (shrink)