Unpacking Emotional Baggage in Political Inquiry

In the literature of both political science and political theory, increasing attention has been devoted to the role of emotion in political judgment, and a number of recent treatments have claimed that emotions are physiological events which both complement and underlie conscious cognition and reasoning. The contemporary turn, in various dimensions of political inquiry, to the findings of neuroscience manifests significant conceptual and theoretical problems, but, in at least two related respects, it also represents a challenge to a concept of democratic judgment. The attempt to locate judgment in non-discursive aspects of human behavior has been characteristically associated with programs of social control, and there are elitist implications attaching to the claim that it is possible to find a naturalistic trans-conventional ground for explaining and critically assessing political judgment. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s treatment of emotion provides an important theoretical antidote to the often unreflective enthusiasm for embracing the idea that emotion is a neurological phenomenon, and his work suggests that the language of democracy is closely tied to the democracy of language, that is, to the theoretical autonomy of discursive performance. Emotion is an aspect of judgment, but it is a public rather than subliminal phenomenon.