Emotions are commonly seen as disruptive and potentially dangerous in the political process, likely either to distort judgment and understanding in debate, or to lead to wild demagoguery, mob action and protest. Yet, if Joshua Hordern is right, emotions, or, more properly, the affections, have vital roles to play in politics, a role needing to be nurtured in a variety of contexts to ensure among other things compassion in legal judgments, to address the democratic deficit, and to work, in eschatological joyful hope, to narrowing the gap between the realization of the Kingdom and the current fractured and fallen political situation. His book's precise rationale is that ‘a conceptual understanding…of the affective dimension’ of the political process would be ‘an important step towards renewing the sources of civic participation [of] internally diverse political societies in reflective, deliberative, and active pursuit not only of their own good but also that of their neighbours’ (p.1).
Key to understanding Hordern's approach is appreciating the new and revived conceptual understanding of the emotions that arose in the latter part of the twentieth century. New, in that the neurosciences and philosophy have at last begun to accept emotions’ cognitive-evaluative dimensions; revived, because the pre-modern theological tradition always offered a much richer concept of the passions, the affections, and the desires acting teleologically, in concert with reason, than the reductive notions of emotion common in much modern philosophy and early twentieth-century psychology. Far from disrupting reason, affections, when properly ordered, act as ‘attracted, participative understandings of the world which endure through the power of memory and the stability of the moral order’ (p.1). The first two chapters explicate this idea and its associated, sophisticated, theological model in some detail.
In common with Martha Nussbaum, Hordern takes seriously the cognitivist turn in emotion scholarship; like Nussbaum he also appreciates the importance of compassion as a political emotion. He maintains, however, that ‘the role of joy in political life is seriously underplayed by Nussbaum’ (p. 5). Taking this argument forward, chapter 3 considers joy in ‘the earthy festivals of Israel's life’ and evident in Luke-Acts, and puts such a religiously grounded concept of affection ‘to work amidst the institutions of representation and law through an extended conversation between Oliver O'Donovan and Nussbaum’ (p.7).
In chapter 4 the circle of dialogue partners is extended further to include Jurgen Habermas and Roger Scruton. Here, Hordern considers the nature of the democratic deficit in Western nation-states. Again, he is receptive to elements from both thinkers, especially the tension that Habermas identifies between the local and universal, with its ‘constant movement between the valleys and the heights…a life between facts and norms’ (p. 214), and Scruton's critique of self-deception in the political sphere, but claims they do not go far enough through their lack of attention to affect. By contrast, the affective dimension developed in his account ‘demonstrates that affections may be politically intersubjective, deeply localized, and appropriately transnational’ (p. 8). But the current political situation fails to realize this fully, and the question remains as to ‘how theologically coherent, critically patriotic, localized civic participation is to be galvanized’ (p.9). Addressing this in chapter 5, Hordern argues that ‘local churches can play a uniquely important role’ (p. 9), where ‘the strange stability of Christian affections is embodied in a localized life of joyful, praising, intersubjective, reconciled communion amidst temporal politics which witnesses to the Christ who will one day descend to bring ultimate peace, reconciliation and justice to the world’ (p. 10). This approach he contrasts with Hauerwasian virtue ethics and the view of sacraments as quasi-Aristotelian practices. As far as I can judge, at least as discussed here, the claim is that virtue ethics fails to address fully Hordern's wish to accommodate the situated episodics of emotional response. I was less convinced by these arguments though perhaps I failed to grasp their subtleties.
On the whole the core argument is carefully unfolded, and the book merits close study by political scientists, theologians and church people interested in the public square and the common good – which should be all of us! If I have a mild complaint it is that its conceptual complexity is astonishingly high in places and sentence structure highly demanding on working memory. More concrete examples would also have undoubtedly helped enliven the frequently abstract prose. That said, the detailed arguments evidence good and thoughtful scholarship. Pertinently, Hordern's choice of dialogue partners is well chosen. He is hospitable and constructive in his engagements with them and, by carefully building on rather than attempting to challenge or completely destroy their more secular arguments, he is much more likely to achieve leverage in wider socio-political debates.
My difficulty with Political Affections has been hard to pin down. The book's soft conservatism aside, my mild unease may have resulted from a suspicion that a praise-centred, evangelical response alone, as outlined here, might prove insufficient to transform the political landscape in ways many of us would like. A fuller or complementary treatment, though not necessarily Hordern's to offer of course, could engage more fully with the theology of the Body of Christ. Such an account might then deal in more detail with the universal-particular paradox, and more critically and crucially explore the role of affections in promoting subsidiarity and solidarity through praxis, and a truly (theologically and politically) participatory, decision making. And maybe, just maybe, the global ecclesial context is now right for a revived, affectively grounded, embodied but not materialist, liberation theology to remind us of the compassion, joy, faith, hope, and love needed to exercise properly the preferential option for the poor, deal effectively with pressing global issues, and strive for the local and global common good. Perhaps, however, Hordern's thoughtful book will prove but the first born of the family of ‘theologically affective politics’, not I hope its only child. As such it is to be warmly welcomed.
