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I am very grateful to Richard Tuck, Michael Frazer, Michael Rosen, Danielle Allen, and six anonymous reviewers for their helpful advice and constructive criticism. I wish also to thank the participants of the Political Theory Workshop at Harvard University, and those of the XIII International Conference organized by the Max-Scheler-Gesellschaft at the University of Verona.
In the past two decades political theorists have once again become intensely concerned about the place of emotions in political life.1In reaction to what is seen as an undue emphasis on deliberative politics, philosophers have sought to understand the undeniable--and salutary--role of rhetoric in the public sphere,2as well as the importance of nondeliberative forms of participation in democratic politics.3Furthermore, these concerns have an important counterpart in political science and sociology more broadly, as seen, for instance, in recent research on populism, mobilization, and alternative forms of representation.4
From different perspectives, all these efforts point to the importance of both sympathy and emotional identification as key political phenomena. Contemporary political theory has often approached such themes with the help of the Enlightenment sentimentalists, such as Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith, hoping they can illuminate our current political experiences on this score.
In the early twentieth century, however, Max Scheler (1874-1928) offered a critique that cast serious doubt on the salutary character of sympathy as it was conceived by that tradition, on the grounds that it provided an unsatisfactory, and ultimately perverse, foundation for human association. In the context of a wider set of investigations intended to provide a phenomenological basis for ethics (NS, li),5he set out to identify what he saw as sympathy's true character, and its legitimate place within human emotional life, distinguishing it from related but nonetheless different phenomena, which he thought eventually led to the corruption of human relationships.
Concerns about the noxious influence of sympathy have certainly not been absent in contemporary political theory. For instance, both Arendt and Rawls questioned sympathy's aptness as a political principle, owing to its illiberal, even violent, potential.6Adam Smith's account of sympathy--in my view, both the most subtle one among the sentimentalists, and the most aware of its political import--has been defended against these charges,...