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Making Affect Safe for Democracy?

The past few years have witnessed the rediscovery of an old distinction between "civic" and "ethnic" nationalisms. This renaissance has been driven in part by the new prominence of nationalism on the world political scene in the wake of the events of 1989. Yet the 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 the theory of liberal democracy that antedates the most recent wave of nationalism, namely, the question of the relationship between liberal democracy and the affective dimensions of political life. Skeptical of passion and identification, liberals have tried to exchange the dangerous romance of polis and patria for the calm certitudes of reason, or for the 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 the strong passions of belonging, loyalty, and allegiance, and so it "cannot inspire the moral and civic engagement selfgovernment requires."' The concern, in Scruton's pithy expression, is that "the public sphere cannot stand so serenely above the 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