Making Affect Safe for Democracy?

The past few years have witnessed rediscovery of an old distinction between and nationalisms. This renaissance has been driven in part by new prominence of nationalism on world political scene in wake of events of 1989. Yet distinction between civic and ethnic nationalisms, however timely, has been taken up with special eagerness by political theorists because it also speaks to a problem in theory of liberal democracy that antedates most recent wave of nationalism, namely, question of relationship between liberal democracy and affective dimensions of political life. Skeptical of passion and identification, liberals have tried to exchange dangerous romance of polis and patria for calm certitudes of reason, or for underrated pleasures of what Hobbes calls peaceable, sociable, and comfortable living.' In turn, liberalism's critics have charged that its aversion to affect is unsustainable. Modern procedural liberalism has no room for strong passions of belonging, loyalty, and allegiance, and so it inspire moral and civic engagement selfgovernment requires.' The concern, in Scruton's pithy expression, is that the public sphere cannot stand so serenely above loyalties that feed it.3 The distinction between civic and ethnic nationalisms has offered liberals an attractive answer to this charge because it promises to isolate a kind of