Political Emotions: Aristotle and the Symphony of Reason and
Emotion, Marlene K. Sokolon, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University
Press, 2006, pp. 217.Marlene K. Sokolon has provided an intellectually stimulating and
highly original work on Aristotle's understanding of the emotions,
mainly as presented in his treatise the Art of Rhetoric. The
central thesis of Sokolon's book manifests itself in her analysis of
the emotion of anger. According to Sokolon, for Aristotle anger is the
paradigmatic human emotion, defined as the desire for revenge for a
dishonourable and undeserving public insult against oneself or those one
loves. Of this desire for revenge, Sokolon argues that “for
Aristotle, unique human anger is not ‘at’ something, but more
properly ‘with’ what some other person did or intends to do.
Anger and the other political emotions are certain kinds of judgments or
perceptions about sociopolitical circumstances. Anger judges specific
kinds of events with an acknowledged political, or what we now call
‘cultural,’ meaning” (p. 55). Thus, Sokolon argues that
for Aristotle the emotional experience of anger occurs in social and
political contexts where there are evaluations of worth in situations
involving relations of power. But if anger is the paradigmatic
human emotion, this means that anger is not simply representative of
various political emotions, but illustrates that human emotion as
such is an essentially political phenomenon. Sokolon's thesis,
therefore, is that for Aristotle, “man is by nature a political
animal” not simply because he possesses reason, the apparent claim
of the Politics, but also because he experiences emotions.
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