The thinking about emotion has thrived over the last decade; in the most various disciplines, from neuroscience to rhetoric, philosophy to anthropology, we are in the midst of a renaissance in the study of emotion. The result has surely been a more accurate account of cognition, persuasion, and group dynamics. Political science has been a bit slower to awaken. Happily, with Aristotle for inspiration, we have more new work to digest. In this book, Marlene Sokolon continues to reflect on just what Aristotle has to contribute. Several books have already worked this area, and so Sokolon ends up reiterating parts of this literature, but the book serves as an excellent resource for surveying the politically relevant emotions discussed in the Rhetoric and for encouraging conversation between current empirical political science and political theory.

Sokolon proposes to address three topics: in two chapters, Aristotle's theory of emotion, then contemporary approaches to emotion, mostly from psychology and philosophy; over several chapters, a survey of those emotions most relevant to politics; and finally, in a concluding chapter, the benefit of Aristotle's analysis for contemporary political research. These are general topics, and they stay that way because the author, for the most part, does not argue with anyone else's approach. For example, she cites Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought (2003) and my own book on Aristotle, Retrieving Political Emotion (2000), but does not dispute anything we say. Even when she focuses on the Rhetoric, her concern is with recounting and applying what Aristotle means, not with engaging the disputes over the interconnected issues of composition, audience, and intention, or even arguing with Aristotle. This gives the book an odd feel, at once polite and neglectful. What has the previous work on Aristotle been missing exactly that now needs to be supplemented? Certainly, she updates and expands. Indeed, no one has written a book that surveys every emotion discussed in the Rhetoric, showing how for Aristotle, each impacts individual political action, stability, and conflict in political regimes.

Sokolon provides a helpful schema for classifying the Rhetoric's 14 “salient” emotions: In the first group, the more motivating emotions concern the subject, family, or friends, and are more necessary for virtue (anger, calmness, love, hate, fear, confidence); in the second group, the less motivating emotions are concerned with the wider political community, are less motivating, and less necessary for virtue (shame, shamelessness, benevolence and selfishness, pity, indignation, envy, emulation). In each case, the author considers how the emotion works in Aristotle's political dynamics, and then how each appears in a modern piece of rhetoric. This is surely the heart of the book, revealing the political in each emotion, nicely balancing the emotional theory by pointing to a piece of political oratory or a modern political issue. It is therefore disappointing when she misses an aspect of this application in a way that reveals a wider problem.

Take, for example, the discussion of pity. While she notes that the Poetics and the Rhetoric diverge in the characteristics of pity, Sokolon eschews discussing the Poetics as a work not only of ancient aesthetics but also of political theory. Yet Greek theater was, after all, a political institution, subsidized by the social elites and the state for the benefit of the community, prefaced by the initiation of young citizen soldiers. Aristotle, no less than Plato, understands the formative role of cultural production, whether poetry, epic, or drama. The viewing of tragedies enables the education or, in Plato's case, miseducation of citizens. Rhetoric and culturally prominent stories connect; we would expect the way that orators use pity to recall the narrative performances of pitiful suffering, paradigmatic for that historical time and place. For Aristotle, liberal education, including the ability to view and appreciate such artistic production, shapes both human and regime character. Most recent accounts reject the idea that the effect of tragedy, catharsis, is a “release of emotions,” as Sokolon writes, but instead argue that it clarifies, configures emotional character, or focuses concern. It would be a mistake to miss how cultural institutions, not just conventionally political ones, create political character.

On the other hand, the author sensitively parses the varied issues related to philia—its translation, the differences among philia as emotion, virtue, and the practice—and is good on cataloging the political implications of trying to further philia—the need for private property, reducing economic inequality, the elimination of tyranny. Here, as in each discussion of an emotion, she points to a modern speech that uses the emotion, but these amount to very brief examples—one from Franklin Roosevelt's 1944 State of the Union speech. Still, to really fulfill the promise of an Aristotelian analysis, one needs to interweave several factors—the historical context, the cultural connotations of friendship, the orator's manner of invocation, and the institutional supports.

In a concluding chapter, Sokolon briefly surveys the diverse recent work on emotion in subfields of political science. She does not directly assess this work, but sticks to pleading the case for Aristotle's continuing importance for the endeavor. For example, Aristotle identifies more political emotions than does much contemporary writing, which tends to emphasize anger, fear, and anxiety, distressing emotions that galvanize political action and deliberation. But even Aristotle misses some crucial political emotions—ones that can often appear very personal—grief and romantic love, for example. Public rituals of grief can sustain a community or, on the other hand, challenge political authority, while the suppression of grieving rituals can deter dissent. Though an individualized experience, romantic love, as imagined in the West, not only has historically served to loosen ties of patriarchal families and of marriage itself but also has alternately crabbed women's aspirations and provided them more control over personal life. This suggests that she needs to not only account for historical and cultural context but also to consider and assess more widely what the emotional constitution of the Aristotelian citizen within various regimes would look like.

This last prospect of a genuinely normative account of a whole emotional repertoire and its institutional basis is what an Aristotelian perspective ultimately promises. Sokolon's book stands as a useful induction to this project.