The Ties that Bind

Passion is a curious thing. In the modern world, if one speaks of passion, undoubtedly the first thing that comes to mind is erotic entanglement. My undergraduate students understand passion as irremediably tied to sex and intimate relations, and they regard it as irrational, disruptive and profoundly unpolitical. There are some accounts by political thinkers that would back them up on this. Insofar as passion is tied to love, and not merely bodily lust, the 20th-century political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that “love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others,” and hence, is “perhaps the most powerful of antipolitical forces.” Rebecca Kingston disagrees. In Public Passion: Rethinking the Grounds for Political Justice, she argues, contra Hannah Arendt, that passion may be at the heart of political forces. Public Passion requires some suspension of the conventional opinions in our highly...