Public Passions

Download or read book Public Passions written by Eugenia Lean and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-04-24 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1935, a Chinese woman by the name of Shi Jianqiao murdered the notorious warlord Sun Chuanfang as he prayed in a Buddhist temple. This riveting work of history examines this well-publicized crime and the highly sensationalized trial of the killer. In a fascinating investigation of the media, political, and judicial records surrounding this cause célèbre, Eugenia Lean shows how Shi Jianqiao planned not only to avenge the death of her father, but also to attract media attention and galvanize public support. Lean traces the rise of a new sentiment—"public sympathy"—in early twentieth-century China, a sentiment that ultimately served to exonerate the assassin. The book sheds new light on the political significance of emotions, the powerful influence of sensational media, modern law in China, and the gendered nature of modernity.

Download or read book Public Passion written by Rebecca Kingston and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2011 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether in the reception of rousing political oratory like that of de Gaulle or Martin Luther King or in the motivations of demonstrators in popular uprisings like those in Tunisia and Egypt, there is no denying that emotion and politics are connected. Nonetheless, criticism of political debate and discourse as emotionally (rather than rationally) based is ubiquitous and emotion is often presented as a negative factor in politics.Public Passionshows that reason and emotion are not mutually exclusive and restores the legitimacy of shared emotion in political life.Public Passiontraces the role of emotion in political thought from its prominence in classical sources, through its resuscitation by Montesquieu, to the present moment. Combining intellectual history, philosophy, and political theory, Rebecca Kingston develops a sophisticated account of collective emotion that demonstrates how popular sentiment is compatible with debate, pluralism, and individual agency and shows how emotion shapes the tone of interactions among citizens. She also analyzes the ways in which emotions are shared and transmitted among citizens of a particular regime, paying particular attention to the connection between political institutions and the psychological dispositions that they foster.Public Passionpresents illuminating new ways to appreciate the forms of popular will and reveals that emotional understanding by citizens may in fact be the very basis through which a commitment to principles of justice can be sustained.

Download or read book Political Passions written by Rachel Judith Weil and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ideas about marriage, gender and the family were central to political debate in late Stuart England. Newly available in paperback, this book shows how political argument became an arena in which the proper relations between men and women, parents and children, public and private were defined and contested. Using sources that range from high political theory to scurrilous lampoons, she considers public debates about succession, resistance and divorce. Weil examines the allegedly fraudulent birth of the Prince of Wales in 1688, the uses to which Williamite propagandists put the image of the paradoxically sovereign but obedient Mary II, anxieties about the influence of bedchamber women on Queen Anne, the political self-image of the notorious Duchess of Marlborough, the relationship of feminism and Tory ideology in the polemical writings of Mary Astell and the scandal novels of Delariviere Manley. Solidly grounded in current historical scholarship, but written in an engaging manner accessible to non-specialists, this book will interest students of literature, gender studies, political culture and political theory as well as historians.

Download or read book The Individual Without Passions written by Elena Pulcini and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The innovative characteristic of the book lies in its tackling an extremely timely and important issue--mainly individualism--from the original point of view of a theory of passions. It underlines the importance of the problem of the passions both in forming individual identity and in building the social bond. Drawing inspiration from classic authors who represent fundamental milestones along the route of modern individualism (from Montaigne to Hobbes, from Locke to Smith, from Rousseau to Tocqueville etc.), it puts forward new hypotheses that contrast with the consolidated views of contemporary reflection, both modern and postmodern. The main argument is that passions are crucial not only when they are strong (homo oeconomicus), but also when absent or weak (homo democraticus), in both cases producing pathological effects on the Self and the social bond. Finally, the book underlines, in a normative perspective, that the image of the modern individual does not end with the egoistical passions and that it is possible to reactivate empathetic and solidaristic passions; furthermore, it proposes the hypothesis that the (solidaristic) passions go to fight the (egoistical) passions. This is most evident in the phenomenon of the gift (as interpreted by Marcel Mauss and his contemporary heirs), the "hidden" testimony of a desire for belonging that enables one to think of a new figure of the individual: homo reciprocus.

Download or read book Bringing the Passions Back In written by Rebecca Kingston and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2008-05-20 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rationalist ideal has been met with cynicism in progressive circles for undermining the role of emotion and passion in the public realm. By exploring the social and political implications of the emotions in the history of ideas, contributors examine new paradigms for liberalism and offer new appreciations of the potential for passion in political philosophy and practice. Bringing the Passions Back In draws upon the history of political theory to shed light on the place of emotions in politics; it illustrates how sophisticated thinking about the relationship between reason and passion can inform contemporary democratic political theory.

Download or read book Civil Passions written by Sharon R. Krause and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-08 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Sharon Krause argues that moral and political deliberation must incorporate passions, even as she insists on the value of impartiality. Her work provides a systematic account of how passions can generate an impartial standpoint that yields binding and compelling conclusions in politics.

Download or read book Writing in Public written by Trevor Ross and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2018-11-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the role of literary writing in democratic society? Building upon his previous work on the emergence of “literature,” Trevor Ross offers a history of how the public function of literature changed as a result of developing press freedoms during the period from 1760 to 1810. Writing in Public examines the laws of copyright, defamation, and seditious libel to show what happened to literary writing once certain forms of discourse came to be perceived as public and entitled to freedom from state or private control. Ross argues that—with liberty of expression becoming entrenched as a national value—the legal constraints on speech had to be reconceived, becoming less a set of prohibitions on its content than an arrangement for managing the public sphere. The public was free to speak on any subject, but its speech, jurists believed, had to follow certain ground rules, as formalized in laws aimed at limiting private ownership of culturally significant works, maintaining civility in public discourse, and safeguarding public deliberation from the coercions of propaganda. For speech to be truly free, however, there had to be an enabling exception to the rules. Since the late eighteenth century, Ross suggests, the role of this exception has been performed by the idea of literature. Literature is valued as the form of expression that, in allowing us to say anything and in any form, attests to our liberty. Yet, paradoxically, it is only by occupying no definable place within the public sphere that literature can remain as indeterminate as the public whose self-reinvention it serves.