The rational state producing affect was once not seen as contradictory.

Evidence

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. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 440

Categorization

• XREF: Builds on Hirschman’s ‘The Passions and the Interests’, connecting to earlier readings on passions and political economy.