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This chapter explores the origins of enthusiasm and its different varieties. The frame for this investigation is C. M. Wieland’s question on how to distinguish between enthusiasm and fanaticism. The chapter begins with a summary of Wieland’s own articulation of the problem and his working definitions, as well as the place he saw for enthusiasm in an increasingly rationalized world. Wieland himself considered his essay an initiation of debate on enthusiasm’s meaning. This chapter follows Wieland’s lead, contextualizing the previous articulations of enthusiasm on which his definitions and arguments rely. Further, in order to help place Wieland’s essay into the existing literature on this topic, this chapter divides Wieland’s concise history of enthusiasm into three categories: religious enthusiasm, enthusiasm as a bodily disease, and moral enthusiasm. The chapter discusses how these conceptualizations differ and why such differences are important for elucidating the concept of enthusiasm itself. The chapter concludes by noting how this context clarifies how enthusiasm can be reconceived as a political concept.
The chapter introduces the concept of enthusiasm and its place in the history of political theory. It describes how enthusiasm has, over time, become a misunderstood concept in contemporary politics, and the very real consequences that this has for democracy and for how political actors understand themselves and their own political agency. Going beyond the usual debate regarding the dangers of enthusiasm to collective identity and democratic politics, this chapter also describes the way enthusiasm has emancipatory potential for resistance movements. Building on Foucault’s schematic reflections, this chapter also discusses the necessity of reconsidering the concept of enthusiasm beyond its previous historical manifestations. The chapter provides an overview of the subsequent chapters of the book, showing how each help illuminate the meanings of political enthusiasm.
This chapter explores the development of enthusiasm as a political concept. It offers a close reading of Kant’s thinking on enthusiasm and the politics that comes from it. This reading pays close attention to the political anxieties associated with enthusiasm. Kant is usually read as defending a detached, impartial spectator as the ground for a more sober politics. This chapter offers a distinct counter-reading of Kantian enthusiasm that moves past the purified spectator, immune to political engagement. This reading of enthusiasm makes sense of Kant’s own anxiety regarding enthusiasm as the “most dangerous” political idea, showing where Kant gives us the terms to think through how to cross the boundary between actor and spectator, and the place of enthusiasm in constructing that pathway. While Kant struggled to come to terms with the significance of enthusiasm, this chapter argues that we see the grounds for a radical reading of enthusiasm within his thinking; a performance that motivates revolutionary action.
This chapter illustrates how enthusiasm can become both ideological and apolitical. As enthusiasm developed from a religious to a political phenomenon, the result was a bifurcation of its meanings, where enthusiasm was sometimes experienced as an affect that accompanied zealotry, and at others as a more benign swooning. Focusing on the political thought of Hannah Arendt, this chapter pays particular attention to the affective basis of zealotry. It examines the role of the spectator in democratic politics, and the place of the spectator’s enthusiasm in public discourse. While sympathetic to Arendt’s aims, this chapter also presents a critique, noting that she inherits a binary notion of enthusiasm, one that turns political enthusiasm into a depoliticizing affect. Paying attention to this contrasting logic, this chapter shows how Arendt’s reading of enthusiasm fuels an exclusionary and secularized affect, while vacating the concept of its potency. The aim of the chapter is to highlight and push against the binary logic underlying Arendt’s thinking on enthusiasm, and the culmination of that logic in a kind of depoliticization. By delineating varieties of the binaries of enthusiasm, this chapter works to form a new ground for the rethinking of enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm has long been perceived as a fundamental danger to democratic politics. Many have regarded it as a source of threatening instabilities manifest through political irrationalism. Such a view can make enthusiasm appear as a direct threat to the reason and order on which democracy is thought to rely. But such a desire for a sober and moderate democratic politics is perilously misleading, ignoring the emotional basis on which democracy thrives. Enthusiasm in democracy works to help political actors identify and foster progressive changes. We feel enthusiasm at precisely those moments of new beginnings, when politics takes on new shapes and novel structures. Being clear about how we experience enthusiasm, and how we recognize it, is thus crucial for democracy, which depends on progression and the alteration of ruler and the ruled. This book traces the changing ways enthusiasm has been understood politically in modern Western political thought. It explores how political actors use enthusiasm to motivate allegiances, how we have come to think on the dangers of enthusiasm in democratic politics, and how else we might think about enthusiasm today. From its inception, democracy has relied on a constant affective energy of renewal. By tracing the way this crucial emotional energy is made manifest in political actions – from ancient times to the present – this book sheds light on the way enthusiasm has been understood by political scientists, philosophers, and political activists, as well as its implications for contemporary democratic politics.
Chapter 5 offers a refocusing on enthusiasm in democracy and especially the contemporary affective strategies and conditions faced in democratic life. As an entry into the contemporary view of democracy, this chapter explores Rancière’s essay “Hatred for Democracy” as a site to begin to consider these affective dimensions. At the heart of this affective life, according to Rancière, is the condition of hatred. This chapter shows how Rancière deploys a “democratic” rhetoric that does not seek to destroy this logic of hatred, but rather finds a means of existing in a world where hatred(s), including hierarchies and xenophobia, are a profound reality to be resisted – springs to take energy from. This move, from the hatreds that plague democratic life (hatred of democracy), to a political engagement with hatred that acknowledges its reality (hatred for democracy), depends on developing a grammar that begins to reflect these democratic forces between subjectivities. This chapter shows that, at the heart of this grammar of hatred, there lurks a persistent enthusiasm, one that helps make sense of such hatreds and the specific ways they damage democracy.
This chapter explores how to distinguish enthusiasm in political action. Considering Walter Benjamin’s essay Critique of Violence (1921), this chapter explores acts of enthusiasm, and especially the general strike. Benjamin’s discussion of the general strike draws the political imagination to what he named a “pure” politics, beyond mediation. This chapter reads the strike as a principle of political intrusion – one that is a lurking, though sublimated, enthusiasm. This reading productively problematizes the force of the strike. It extends Benjamin’s thesis, beyond any historical imagination of the general strike as the mere force of labor, instead reading the strike as an act of enthusiasm that extends and complicates Kant’s thinking, and in different ways from the Arendtian inheritance. This chapter also moves to more contemporary examples of enthusiastic acts, considering immolations, hunger strikes, and other “suicides” as similarly “general” politics, rupturing the violence of the state according to its own pathways of power.
Forty years before Covid-19, socialists in Britain campaigned so that workers could have the right to make ‘socially useful’ products, from hospital equipment to sustain the NHS to affordable heating systems for impoverished elderly people. This movement held one thing responsible above all else for the nation’s problems: the burden of defence spending. In the middle of the Cold War, the left put a direct challenge to the defence industry, Labour government and trade unions. The response it received revealed much about a military-industrial state that prioritised the making and exporting of arms for political favour and profit.
The British left and the defence economy takes a fine-grained look at peace activism between the early 1970s and Labour’s landslide general election defeat in 1983, incorporating activism, politics and the workplace to demonstrate the conflict over the economic cost of Britain’s commitment to the Cold War. Moving away from the perception that the peace movement was ‘post-materialist’ or above the crises of postwar deindustrialisation and unemployment, this book asserts that the wider left presented a comprehensive, detailed and implementable alternative to the stark choice of making weapons or joining the dole queue.
This book will be invaluable to lecturers and students studying the history and politics of postwar Britain. It challenges many widely accepted conclusions, including the ‘abandonment’ of social democracy and Britain’s inability to ‘find a role’ after the loss of its empire. This account provides a glimpse at an alternative future, one based on human-centred, environmentally friendly production with lessons for our own times.
"The influence of the left and its ability to unify behind a single candidate propelled the unlikely figure of Michael Foot to the party leadership. The left continued to occupy central positions on the National Executive Committee while the annual party conference expressed its influence by committing the party to unilateral nuclear disarmament and industrial conversion. International relations between the superpowers had entered a dangerous phase, sometimes referred to as the ‘second Cold War’. This vision for peaceful production also chimed with the lengthening dole queues that had been apparent since the late 1970s, but dramatically increased in length during Thatcher’s first few years in Downing Street as the Conservatives’ free-market ‘monetarism’ came at the cost of over three million people out of work by 1982. Despite the economic downturn during Thatcher’s first two years in government, there was evidence to suggest that a form of economic recovery was on the horizon. Then there was the so-called ‘Falklands factor’, where the Conservatives received a boost in the polls after victory in the war in the south Atlantic. Despite the attempts to make the case for a conventional defence, the left struggled to achieve a clear or persuasive narrative on national security, something that the Conservatives pounced on mercilessly. The landslide defeat in 1983 was an unedifying end to the campaign for socially useful production. With its origin traced back to the early 1950s, the 1983 general election is an appropriate point on which to conclude."
The epilogue demonstrates how the defence economy continued long after the Cold War and continues to exert an influence on contemporary affairs as the Conservatives, led by Boris Johnson, use military procurement as a way of stimulating the economy.
The epilogue concludes that the forces that cultivated the defence economy were led by an interpretation of social democracy. In the British postwar sense this social democracy saw in the defence economy a way to achieve full employment and upskill the working population while deterring the Russians and satisfying the Americans. The ‘bitterest enemies of communism’ on the right of the Labour movement were among the most supportive of the defence industry and they, combined with most of the Conservatives and the civil service, made for a powerful consensus. In his history of the British nation in the twentieth century David Edgerton asked, ‘what would it take to show that the UK could usefully be described as social democratic after 1945’ and did it follow ‘a social democratic foreign policy, or defence policy’? He concluded that ‘interestingly, it is highly unlikely anyone has ever made this claim’. Yet this is just the claim that The British left and the defence economy has made. Defence was never just a matter of military considerations; it was an economic and social imperative. If war was a tool of politics, then the defence economy was a function of British social democracy.