Power and Emotions: Some Remarks on Compassion and Solidarity

Starting from the investigation of Martha Nussbaum's and Hannah Arendt's antithetical visions of the matter, the comment briefly analyses B. Paragi's contribution by focussing on the limited value and role that is assigned to compassion and solidarity, as well as to their adequate cultivation, in modern and contemporary liberal political thought. In this light, it critically discusses the ways in which the very limited attention that has been paid by most liberal thinkers to the political value of emotions has contributed to create the conditions, particularly in the external projection of the liberal project through humanitarian and foreign aid, for a paternalistic, victimizing, pietistic, self-interested and purely rhetorical use of such emotions and principles.