On the evening of November 8, 2016, a group of friends and I gathered in front of the TV in our house’s living room to watch election returns. We all shared a feeling of optimism about our country’s political future. But by the end of the night, that optimism was replaced by an intense fear — fear for our immigrant parents, for our reproductive rights, and for the state of our democracy. In the introduction of her book, The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis, Martha Nussbaum writes about observing similar fears in her students after the 2016 election. But she is critical of the intensity of this fear, writing that it “all too often blocks rational deliberation, poisons hope, and impedes constructive cooperation for a better future.” As such, in what feels like an oversimplification, she diagnoses fear as the root cause of the partisanship, cynicism, and bitterness that define our current political moment.
Nussbaum, a professor of philosophy and law at the University of Chicago, is one of those rare academics who is accustomed to writing for a non-academic audience. Having published over twenty-two books, she is no stranger to the public sphere. The Monarchy of Fear is her latest attempt to offer a philosophical perspective on an area of life that tends to reject the purely theoretical. In an era where it seems like everyone has their own take on our country’s political situation, what can a philosopher say that hasn’t already been said?
To Nussbaum, the question is less about what a philosopher can say than how they can say it. She writes that philosophy is about leading the examined life, about turning inward in order to help us make sense of the world around us. As such, her book is not a policy proposal but rather, an in-depth examination of how fear manifests in ourselves and our politics, and how we can overcome it. But Nussbaum also presents philosophy as a method of critical thought and argumentation that she considers to be lacking in much of the political discourse currently taking place in the US. Philosophy, according to her, “doesn’t make bare assertions, but instead, sets up a structure of thought in which a conclusion follows from premises the listener is free to dispute.”
Nussbaum certainly embodies this credo throughout the book. She writes with the incisive clarity of a well-trained philosopher without the unnecessary opacity that is sometimes characteristic of philosophical writing. But her analysis of fear and its accompanying emotions, though detailed and insightful, feels like a re-hashing of the countless op-eds, think pieces, books, and Twitter threads that also “diagnose” the problems with American politics and offer a vision of hope for a better future. The central narrative of The Monarchy of Fear is one that many of us are already intimately familiar with — the narrative that present-day American politics are dominated by bitter partisanship and scapegoating, and that in order to rescue our democracy from ruin, we must overcome our fear of “the other side.”
What is different about Nussbaum’s approach, however, is her style of argumentation. She takes her time delving into fear, anger, disgust, and envy, drawing upon a breadth of psychoanalytic, philosophical, and historical sources. At the beginning of the book, she traces fear all the way back to infancy — babies feel fear acutely because they cannot fend for themselves. The feeling of wanting something – food, milk, a diaper change – and not being able to get it oneself leads to a particular feeling of powerlessness that is primitive, yet has considerable political implications. Citing Rousseau, Nussbaum writes: “Human life…begins not in democracy but in monarchy.” This is to say that the fear babies experience forces them to make slaves of others who do their bidding. Fear is thus inherently narcissistic — it is a natural human instinct that we must work to overcome if we want to govern ourselves democratically. Doing so requires us to learn how to relate to others as whole people, rather than as mere extensions of our own needs. Though Nussbaum argues that this process begins during childhood, when imaginative play helps children “make a map of the world’s possibilities and of the insides of other people,” it continues through adulthood. Informed public debate and the arts teach us to empathize with other people and imagine the world from their perspectives.
Nussbaum makes an interesting point here. Her observation that a healthy democracy requires citizens to think about interests other than their own is especially prescient in our deeply unequal society. But her analysis of the emotions seems too simplistic, too quick to define and categorize and assign value to “good” and “bad” emotions. In her chapter on anger, she argues that a widespread problem with anger is the desire to impute blame even when there is nobody to blame. This tendency can certainly manifest in dangerous ways, such as blaming immigrants for taking jobs away from other Americans. But when Nussbaum writes, “Economic woes are sometimes caused by an identifiable person or persons’ malfeasance, and sometimes by clearly stupid or unfair policies; but more often their cause is obscure and uncertain,” she risks delegitimizing anger and the sense of injustice that often accompanies it. Suggesting that bad things like economic woes or illness just happen without any wrongdoing is true in some cases, but in a country plagued by staggering income and health care inequality, Nussbaum’s statement sounds woefully out of touch.
Nussbaum’s ideas feel similarly out of touch in a later chapter on disgust. Her analysis yields interesting insights about the ways in which people project bodily disgust onto marginalized groups such as transgender people and dalits in India. But in suggesting solutions to this projection of disgust, she again misses the bigger picture. Her suggestion to test police officers for implicit biases is one that I wholeheartedly support, but Nussbaum seems to ignore the fact that racial (and other) biases are often reinforced on a systemic level, particularly in institutions like law enforcement and the criminal justice system. Overcoming individual biases is only one step in combating the harmful effects of disgust, anger, envy, and fear. Granted, Nussbaum makes it clear that her role as a philosopher is to set her readers on a course of self-examination, not to propose specific policies. In the same chapter, she acknowledges that legal reform and other larger-scale changes must take place as well. But in a political era in which more people are becoming aware of and affected by systemic discrimination, Nussbaum’s focus on combatting stigma through mass media and individual interactions with those who are different from us feels too narrow.
Despite my doubts about Nussbaum’s analysis of fear, she deserves credit for carefully parsing out what she considers to be the cause of our current political crisis. Her skill as a philosopher is evident throughout the book, as she builds her arguments and attends to counterarguments with great care. But the book can also feel long-winded at times — it could have done with one less example from Ancient Rome or fewer Lucretius quotes. When Nussbaum finally arrives at her conclusion – that we should channel our sense of injustice into hope, faith, and love – she evokes a sense of optimism that many readers might find refreshing. But I can imagine a reader with no philosophical background finding Nussbaum’s conclusion to be too lofty and theoretical for the urgency of our political moment. Nussbaum helps her readers look inward, but doesn’t quite succeed at convincing them why they need to do so.