Political Emotions: Aristotle and the Symphony of Reason and
Emotion. By Marlene K. Sokolon. DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press,
2006. 227p. $38.00.
The thinking about emotion has thrived over the last decade; in the
most various disciplines, from neuroscience to rhetoric, philosophy to
anthropology, we are in the midst of a renaissance in the study of
emotion. The result has surely been a more accurate account of cognition,
persuasion, and group dynamics. Political science has been a bit slower to
awaken. Happily, with Aristotle for inspiration, we have more new work to
digest. In this book, Marlene Sokolon continues to reflect on just what
Aristotle has to contribute. Several books have already worked this area,
and so Sokolon ends up reiterating parts of this literature, but the book
serves as an excellent resource for surveying the politically relevant
emotions discussed in the Rhetoric and for encouraging
conversation between current empirical political science and political
theory.