You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In Politics, Identity, and Emotion, Paul Hogget has written what strikes me as three books: one a primer on collective emotion and the role of identity in political life; a second, showing how psychoanalytic concepts are essential to a deep understanding of politics; and a third advocating an approach to political action that integrates emotion and reason, rather than sacrificing one for the other as is so often the case. Each one an absorbing account in its own right; what I found remarkable is how he weaves them together to offer a fascinating exploration of contemporary political life that builds on a psychodynamic perspective.
There is much to enjoy and learn from here. I found my own thinking expanded by his treatment of several themes, including the challenges of extreme and emotionally charged political dialogue, how psychodynamic ideas link with other important social and political theories, the expression of anxiety in governance, and about the newly ‘market-orientated’ social service organisations that seem increasingly numbed and insensitive to human need in spite of the surface narrative of efficiency, performance, and streamlined service delivery. (In this regard, he draws an interesting link between social defence theory and Susan Long's (2008) work on perverse states of mind.)
Others, I suspect, will be particularly drawn to how he establishes a framework for ‘decoding’ aspects of political life in the first two chapters, where he develops his viewpoint on how emotion and identity serve as underpinnings for social and political life. This