Abstract

This dissertation traces Aristotle's treatment of thumos, most often translated as spiritedness, showing how it represents a theory of political emotion available to contemporary challenges to rationalistic explanations of political community. I proceed by first recounting the use of thumos in Homer's Iliad and in Plato's Republic, Aristotle's two most important sources, eventually arguing that he borrows from each but goes substantially beyond them. I then demonstrate how Aristotle uses thumos in three ways, developing at greatest length the third way where thumos is understood as the capacity for emotion. Being a technical term for Aristotle, capacity, or dunamis, embraces both activity and a characteristic disposition. With the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics, I look at the activity of thumos--how a person with a good thumos acts and in the context of which institutions. With the Poetics I look at the characteristic disposition of thumos--what patterns and objects typify a person's emotional capacity in the best regime. ;Based on this interpretation of Aristotle, my dissertation makes the larger argument that while few canonical political philosophers and even fewer contemporary political theorists make use of the possibilities that the Aristotelian treatment of political emotion offered, they have nonetheless been marked by the marginalization or misrepresentation of emotion. In particular, they have assisted the modern study of politics to focus on rationality understood as self-interest, thereby neglecting the role of other-regarding motives. If we are to follow the signposts left to us by Aristotle, the best way to proceed is to integrate what is to be learned from the study of thumos with feminist theory. The Aristotelian conception of political emotion needs to be integrated with an understanding of the congruence between the institutions of gender and views of emotion. Feminist political theory, which has identified the connection between gender and emotion, needs a broader theoretical backing to make its critique of women's supposed emotionality function as a critique of political institutions