Mardi intime de la Chaire Hoover par Michael Keary, Manuel Valente & Devon Cass

12.45 - 13.50 Michael Keary (RIFS Potsdam), Emotions and Political Order: Towards Justice or Instability? 

The stability of a political order depends on the emotional climate in which it operates. Rawls was conscious of this, and in Theory of Justice devoted considerable space to demonstrating the pacificatory emotional impact of his model. Despite this, and following Schmitt’s critique of liberalism, Rawls’s realist critics have charged that he fails to properly account for order, stability, conflict, and emotions. They argue that his work presents too reasonable a view of individuals and societies to be a basis for normative thought. Further, they claim that taking people as they are means that, to ensure stability, justice must play a lesser role in any polity and coercion a greater one. Others, like Wolin and Mouffe, argue that instability must be accepted as a fact of politics, with an ad hoc ‘art of politics’ tasked with maintaining order instead of a specific conception of justice. These criticisms are valid, but in the manner they are made, entirely unjustified. In this paper, I show that Rawls considers carefully the meaning and nature of stability and order, is aware of conflict as a destabilising force, and provides a schema of emotions to underpin this analysis. Nevertheless, Rawlsian stability (and that of Nussbaum, whose 2004 work expands on Rawls’s efforts) is balanced precariously on Basic Emotions Theory, which posits a small number of fixed, universal, and knowable emotions and allows for their manipulation in a liberal schema. This theory, long viewed sceptically by historians of affect, is now increasingly rejected by neuroscience, which advances a theory of constructed (dynamic) emotions. The consequence of the latter for political theory is to prove the realists right: ‘inherent stability’ is likely unachievable and political thought must look to more ad hoc means of developing resilience in democratic orders.

13.55 - 15.00 Manuel Sá Valente (University of Minho & UCLouvain) & Devon Cass (University of Manchester), Old-Age, Social Status, and Equality

In many societies, the elderly have a special social status: formal policies and informal practices favour them in particular ways. Formally, through the provision of greater income and housing security, discounts for a range of goods and services, priority in queues, and so on; and informally, through certain modes of address, deference, and politeness. These forms of treatment invite mixed reactions. On the one hand, older people face certain hardships and vulnerabilities that younger people do not, and they may be thought to deserve a certain form of respect based on their experience and longstanding contribution. On the other hand, they tend to be better off than younger people in key dimensions—e.g. in terms of having more wealth and political influence, especially when we consider their lives as wholes—and so special social status for the elderly across the board may seem to involve unfairness and an objectionable form of social hierarchy. In this paper we examine this issue, assessing 1) whether there is indeed a special social status due to the elderly on the basis of age (and not simply their contingent vulnerability or esteem-worthy achievements); and 2), if there is, whether it is compatible with social or ‘relational’ equality.