Abstract

Barbara Koziak’s wide-ranging Retrieving Political Emotion: Thumos, Aristotle, and Gender criticizes political theory for sidelining emotion and develops an account of political emotion based on Aristotle’s treatment of thumos. Koziak hopes her project will be of particular interest to feminist political theorists—both women and emotion having been badly served by history and often on the basis of a supposed link between being female and being emotional. For, contrary to the scholarly opinion that thumos is the particular trait of spiritedness, Koziak argues that in Aristotle, it is the capacity for emotion in general which, in Aristotle’s psychology, is responsive to reason. What are the consequences of this conception of emotion for politics? Aristotle directs us to educate, rather than ignore or repress, the emotions—not only the aggressive emotions already cultivated by institutions such as the military or the disagreeable emotions of “managed despair, imaginative fear, bourgeois anger, and sexual dread” employed in welfare reform rhetoric, but also pity, sympathy, generosity, and friendship. We may also follow Aristotle in evaluating social arrangements in terms of the emotions they support or hinder: for example, Aristotle argues for private property on the grounds that one needs to have something of one’s own to give away in order to practice generosity, and, as a moral virtue, generosity has a necessary emotional content ; again, he argues against big economic disparities because they create “unfortunate emotions, specifically the emotions of arrogance, malice, envy, and contempt”. An Aristotelian conception of emotion also helps us to acknowledge the emotional “labor”, usually performed by women, which holds society together. Finally, the insights of care feminism can be incorporated into and justified by an Aristotelian framework. Although Koziak’s work opens up many avenues for discussion, I will here concentrate on three: the complaints about political theory’s marginalization of emotion that motivate her book, her interpretation of thumos in Plato, and her appropriation of an Aristotelian conception of the emotions for contemporary purposes.