Post-Traumatic Societies: On Reconciliation, Justice and the Emotions.

Source: (2008) European Journal of Social Theory. 11(3):283-297.

The articles collected here all share a concern with investigating the emotional
foundations required to establish stable liberal democracies in the face of past
conflicts and social divisions that systematically denied or destroyed liberal values
of political equality and individual liberty. This broad concern with the emotional
foundations of political order has a long history in Western philosophy, stretching
back to Plato’s claim that the just city is based on an education that carefully
calibrates its citizens’ anger (thymos) and extinguishes their sense of tragic grief
or compassion (eleos). Plato’s political philosophy understood the regulation of the
emotions as central to the bios politikos (not the bios theoretikos), and conceived
political questions of justice and order as inseparable from the normative evaluation
of specific emotions. (excerpt)