The rational-affective state split is recent, not timeless

Evidence

These earlier philosophers debated not only the state’s responsibility to check unruly passions but to harness them in the interests of the public good. Albert Hirschman’s observation that the nineteenth-century modern state would later be “called upon to perform this feat … as a civilizing medium” alerts us to a crucial point: that what is now taken as intuitively incompatible in the heyday of colonialism—namely, a state devoted to reason and defined by its efficacy in producing countervailing passions and affections—was once not thought to be so. Foucault may be credited with reminding us that all sentiments have their histories, but it was Norbert Elias and Albert Hirschman who both suggested in their own way that tracking a sentiment’s history is an inspired way to trace the changing form and content of what constitutes the subject and terrain of politics. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 440

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s work on colonial statecraft literature — the idea that colonial states were once conceived as harnessing passions reframes colonial governance.