Passion and politics were linked concerns across early-modern philosophy

Evidence

It is certainly not because the dissonance of that pairing has always been the case. Attending to the relationships between affective disposition and political control, between the art of governance and the passions, between politics and sentiment were defining concerns of philosophy and a “broader preoccupation” throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Moral and political philosophers of the “long” eighteenth century were deeply intent on identifying connections between the two. The relationship between what Bernard Mandeville in 1714 called the “private vices” and “publick benefits,” between affective life and political life, between individual passions and social welfare, was central to the philosophical queries and concrete agendas of Bacon, Spinoza, Locke, and Hume, and lesser luminaries such as Mandeville, Hutcheson, and Shaftesbury. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 435

Categorization

• XREF: The passions as central to early-modern political thought connects to the reader’s knowledge of Hume’s and Locke’s moral psychology and Hirschman’s passions-and-interests thesis.