The Sentimental Citizen
Subtitle: Emotion in Democratic Politics
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
Published: August 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 171
ISBN-13: 9780271022116
Subjects: Neurosciences; Political structures: democracy; Political Science; Politics / Current Events; Politics/International Relations; History & Theory - General; Political Ideologies - Democracy; Political Ideologies - Nationalism; Public Policy - Social Policy; Democracy; Emotions; Political participation; Reason; United States
Description: "This book challenges the conventional wisdom that improving democratic politics requires keeping emotion out of it. Marcus advances the provocative claim that the tradition in democratic theory of treating emotion and reason as hostile opposites is misguided and leads contemporary theorists to misdiagnose the current state of American democracy.

Instead of viewing the presence of emotion in politics as a failure of rationality and therefore as a failure of citizenship, Marcus argues, democratic theorists need to understand that emotions are in fact a prerequisite for the exercise of reason and thus essential for rational democratic deliberation and political judgment. Attempts to purge emotion from public life not only are destined to fail, but ultimately would rob democracies of a key source of revitalization and change."--BOOK JACKET.