Passionate Politics: Themes and Methodologies in cross-disciplinary perspective

20 March 2015
This conference will review and compare how different academic disciplines in the social sciences and humanities engage with political passion. 

Passions play a fundamental role in shaping political movements and ideologies, providing the emotional basis of individual and social identities. Our historical understanding of key moments of social change remains impoverished if we fail to take into account the importance of grief, for example, as a response to social upheaval, the role of love and empathy in the creation of political and social solidarities, or the roots of political dissent in anger. The tradition of thinking about politics, stretching from the Stoics to Kant and Rawls, has tended to view the passionate nature of human beings with suspicion if not outright hostility. The passions sit uncomfortably with the idea of a social contract, for example, that is meant to be the product of reason. Until recently, the passions drew the attention of political theorists and philosophers above all because of their capacity to wreak havoc in the social order.

What's more, the passions may also have a disruptive effect in regards to disciplinary borders: a consideration of the passions that accompany all human activity requires the sort of interdisciplinary approaches to conceptualizing affects that have recently opened up news ways of understanding the human. Our project will draw on the unique opportunity that this 'affective turn' has to reconsider the passionate in politics and the political in the passions.

The event on 20 March will bring together historians, political theorists, philosophers, scholars of literature and opera. Invited speakers will give a short position paper (ca.15 minutes), presenting the thoughts about how their respective discipline engages with the theme of passions in politics, followed by a response from a UCL colleague and general discussion.

Provisional programme:

• This event is part of our Passionate Politics Project

• The project is sponsored by UCL's Centre for Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Projects and the UCL European Institute.