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‘The Politics of Love’1

Tony Milligan

Worries about the inclusion of love

As a result of discrimination, prejudice and gender inequality, sex and politics are deeply

entwined. We have a clear idea of what sexual politics might involve. Love, by contrast,

seems strictly personal, situated at some distance from the political domain and only brought

together with the latter in ways which are forced and artificial. So, for example, it might be

claimed that liberally-minded person x should not love person y because of the latter's

illiberal politics. This is a type of claim about which we may be suspicious. After all, the

heart wants what the heart wants. We do not get to choose who we love, or at least, we do not

choose them in the way that we choose who to vote for in an election. Prominent liberal

thinkers who have otherwise been persistently fascinated with love, such as Hannah Arendt

(1996, 3) and Iris Murdoch (1993, 14), have also been insistent that we must distinguish

between the individual as citizen and the individual as loving agent. (Between what Jan

Bransen (2014, 144) calls a 'Loving Attitude' and a 'Citizen Attitude').

Those who buy into such a separation typically do so for reasons which concern

impartiality, love's distance from the rational and the fact that love can be too powerful to

control. In brief, we love partially, beyond reason and sometimes rather dangerously. And so

it seems that love, which is an inextricable part of private life, is not something which we

ought to unleash upon the political domain. What follows will suggest that each of these

1 Forthcoming in Gary Foster A Textbook on the Philosophy of Sex and Love (OUP, 2015).

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reasons touches upon worries which cannot be entirely silenced but which can be

constrained, trumped or otherwise out-weighed.

1. Loving Partiality

Consider, first, the problem of impartiality. Love is, or at least paradigmatic forms of love

are, all about special relationships which involve favoring one person over another. By

contrast, liberal politics aims to place everyone on an equal footing. Equality and the

partiality of love seem to conflict directly. This is one of the reasons why Arendt regarded

love as politically suspect. When, as a result of her controversial claims about the role of

Jewish community leaders in the Holocaust, she was charged with a lack of love for the

Jewish people, Arendt's response was that she loved only her friends. Loving a people, or a

nation, or one set of people in contrast to another paves the way for loving them at the

expense of another. And that is a problem for democracy. As we are human, there must

always be a place for love in our lives, but that place is safely (protectively) outside of the

political domain (Arendt, 2007, 466-7; Nixon, 2015, 17).

If we accept this idea that love must always be partial, or that the kind of love which

is in danger of spilling over into the political domain may well be partial, it is still open to us

to point out that not every kind of loving partiality amounts to 'prejudice' (Merrill 2014, 177).

It would be odd to refer to the parent who prepares meals for their children rather than other

children as someone engaged in unfair discrimination. There may be a defensible, loving

partiality although admittedly, Arendt may have been right about the dangers which it carries.

Yet it is not obvious that she was equally right about shunning such dangers. After all, who

ever thought that politics was comprehensively safe? This may count as one of those contexts

in which a certain kind of risk is a precondition of accomplishment.

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Alternatively, we may reflect that not every kind of love is partial. The tradition of

love which is associated with St Paul and Christianity (love as agape) praises it as an

unconditional response which reaches out even to strangers, tax-collectors and enemies. But a

familiar concern about such love is that it may be rather too inclusive, pathologically

forgiving or simply unavailable. Perhaps, if a creator God existed, then such a being might

still love Hitler or Pol Pot or Jack the Ripper (in the way that a parent may continue to love

an errant children). But as political agents, our situation is rather different. We are not, with

regard to the perpetrators of evil, in loco parentis and it may be hubris to think otherwise. It

would certainly be very odd to suggest that Holocaust victims who did not love Hitler were

guilty of a moral failure. There, are, in any case, other ways to acknowledge the humanity of

those who have carried out great evil, without loving them. Something closer to respect may

be enough. Respect can offer recognition without forgiveness and without the vulnerability

which seems to be inseparable from love.

Such an example may however, be something of an 'outlier.' We may wonder just

what these extreme cases tell us about everyday ethical or political requirements. Most of our

fellow citizens are not Hitler or Pol Pot. Yet most of them are strangers and it is difficult to

make sense of the practicality or intelligibility of love for those we do not know. We can be

compassionate or civil towards them but it is not obvious that this really amounts to a form of

love which deserves the name. After all, we strongly associate love with intimacy or at least

with familiarity and a shared history (Grau, 2010, 249). And while we may, sometimes speak

of 'love at first sight,' which suggests the possibility of love without history, what this

amounts to, under analysis, may be something else: the striking feeling that we are starting to

fall for someone, the sense that here is someone with whom we could be open, caring and

content. Accepting the possibility for actual love for strangers would also come at a price. We

would lose one of the most familiar features of love: its intimate connection with grief. We

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can feel sorrow at the death of those we do not know, but we cannot grieve over them. And

without vulnerability to grief, talk of love seems misplaced (Milligan 2011, 127-32).

Even so, it is difficult to dismiss the idea of a universal love and all the more so given

that it is not a theme which appears only in the Christian tradition. It is not a localized

religious artefact. It has counterparts in other traditions (metta in Buddhism and ahimsa in

Hinduism, where both are read in a particular way which reaches beyond the avoidance of

harm). It may be an idea which we can send quickly into exile by means of a clever

argument, but keeping it in exile could be more difficult. There is also a way to save the

concept without doing violence to our ordinary understanding of what love involves. Perhaps

the object of such love might be humanity, the moral community as a whole, and not

particular individuals. Such an attitude might express itself in our ways of responding to

individuals but they would not be the true objects of the love. This does make at least some

sense in terms of political motivation. Gandhi, for example, continuously appealed to

humanity as both a suitable object of loving concern and as the claimed basis of his non-

violent political tactics. Even so, such love, while not really focused upon individuals, may

remain partial. Communities have an outside as well as an interior. However, it may be

inclusive enough to address Arendt's concern.

2. Loving Beyond Reason

Arendt's suspicions about the partiality of love dovetail with a concern which is exemplified

by Kant’s frequently-repeated claim that love is too pathological an emotion to fall within the

domain of morality. It may function as a useful occasional ally, or as a force which

conveniently joins in on the winning side, but love's allegiance is too fleeting and unstable to

be relied upon by rational agents. This attitude, a qualified pessimism about the nature of

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love, continues to feature in contemporary discussions of the philosophy of love, primarily

through the idea that love is not answerable to reasons (Smuts, 2014, 99-101; Frankfurt,

2004, 39-40). On such a view, if my wife Suzanne does not love me, this may be heart-

breaking, but it cannot involve a failure of her rationality. Nor can I persuade her to love me

solely on the basis of the available facts and sound argumentation. Even if I were a better

person, Saint Francis and the Dalai Llama rolled into one, I still could not do so. Conversely,

if she does love me, this is not a triumph of her rationality over the darker angels of her

nature. There may, of course, be prudential reasons why one person would want to love

another, but wanting to love and loving are not the same, and so there seem to be no reasons

at all for love itself. This disconnection from rational standards places love at odds with the

need for a modern and liberal polity to sustain an open and, above all, rational public

discourse.

Yet, although love involves various ways of feeling or at least dispositions to feel,

love is not just a ‘feeling' and certainly not simply a feeling which can easily be set in

contrast to rationality. When, for example, we are asked why we love one person rather than

another, we are usually not stuck for an answer. I love Suzanne because she has cared for me

in hard times and has not turned away when I have been foolish. I love her because we met at

the end of our teens and sat out together under the stars. I have a shared history with her

which I lack with all others. Moreover, this is a shared history of the right sort for love. We

may also share history with sworn enemies, if we happen to have any of the latter, but it is

not the kind of history that would ordinarily figure in a practice of explaining why someone

is a suitable participant in a loving relationship.

A cautionary note here is that the words which we supply, when stating our reasons

for love, are often place-holders for something else. The person who says, I love him because

of the way he wears his hat and sips his tea, does not literally mean this (Velleman 1999).

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They would not, for example, trade-up for a better hat wearer or sipper of tea. But they do

mean something, and part of what they mean is that their beloved is irreplaceable and that

their love is not arbitrary.

Yet, while we are usually able to offer considerations for why we love, no such

reasons ever seem to be conclusive. It always remains intelligible that the relevant

consideration could be in place without the love. And an agent who did not love because of

the consideration would not thereby be guilty of irrationality. If, in spite of our having sat out

under the stars, Suzanne did not love me, this would, again, not indicate that her rationality

was compromised. But here, what is brought into play is a particular conception of reasons

and not just a conception of love. When someone says that there really are reasons for love,

what they mean (or what they ought to mean) is not that there are 'necessary and sufficient

conditions for loving rationally.' Rather, the reasons for love are characteristically,

'contributory reasons' and these are precisely the reasons which seem to do much of the work

in explaining our responsiveness to others more generally. The reasons explain but they do

not necessitate. They may weigh more or less heavily. They may be outweighed by other

considerations. So, for example, if it turns out that I am guilty of some great crime, or even

persistent neglect, this may be more important than our having shared our lives together and

Suzanne may begin (with good reason) to fall out of love with me.

If this picture is largely correct, it still remains possible to love because of a shared

prejudice, to love because of delusions (as the crowds loved Hitler) or to love in ways which

are allied to irrationality. But the same is true of belief and this does not make either love or

belief into a natural ally of the non-rational or (more worryingly) of the irrational. To guard

the political domain against a slide into unreason is not necessarily to guard it against the

intrusion of love but only to guard it against those forms and instances of love which involve

special kinds of failure such as a failure to be just or to be truthful.

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3. Loving Dangerously

Finally, from Iris Murdoch, we have a different sort of concern, one which is framed in the

language of Plato rather than (as with Arendt) the language of Kant: love may not be the

intrinsically non-rational or irrational force that is sometimes claimed but it is simply too

powerful and ambivalent to be controlled. Love, as eros, is akin to a self-constituting desire

that makes us what we are, it is a power which can be directed towards this object or that

object. But what if it is directed, Channeled ('cathected,' in more Freudian terms) the wrong

way? Love may ultimately seek out the Good, but what if we are wrong about what is Good?

Fanaticism can ensue: love for the fatherland, or for the leader, or for some imagined political

fantasy. For Iris Murdoch, love is too dangerous, the risk is too high. Love shapes our

personal lives and we must work with and through it. But in the public domain it should be

held in check. Within the latter, axioms and above all happiness (crudely understood) rather

than a loving, perfectionist moral struggle by loving agents holds sway (Murdoch, 1993,

362). This distinction here is not absolute but it is strong enough to support a central claim

that love primarily belongs to the private sphere while axiomatic happiness belongs to the

public sphere.

But here we may wonder whether even a qualified distinction of this sort can make

sense of what it is to be politically engaged in a suitable manner. Simone Weil (2001, 155),

who influenced Murdoch in many respects, thought not. For Weil, if we do not love the right

thing then we will love the wrong thing or else remain demotivated. A similar claim has been

a persistent feature of the politics of dissent since the late-19th century, particularly within the

civil disobedience tradition. From Leo Tolstoy, through Gandhi and Martin Luther King,

accounts of protest beyond the law have been presented as a politicized theory of love, where

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again love is channeled towards some political good (Milligan, 2013, 93-6). The channeling

metaphor, which draws from Plato and Freud, occurs especially in Gandhi and King who

were not naïve enough to ignore or set aside the anger which mass political movements must

tap into. The idea was not to eliminate popular emotional engagement, but to transform it

from anger into something more constructive.

Yet here we may worry about the possibility that such high idealism may be too

demanding for ordinary political agents, in which case it must collapse into pretense or into

some manner of elitism where agents who remain angry are part of a loving movement only

because of the loving attitude of their leaders. Closer familiarity with the great civil

disobedience movements of the 20th century may provide some support for skepticism. In

practice, Gandhi supplemented demanding talk about love with more practical appeals to

civility. And King may have retained his earlier rhetorical commitment to a politics of love

and the winning over of the hearts of the enemy, but in practice this reduced down to using

non-violence as a means of embarrassing the Federal Government into action against publicly

violent racists whose hearts were rarely won over. The underlying Platonic and quasi-

Freudian moral psychology, of channeling emotional upheaval into love, may also be

challenged.

Even so, these ideas are not easy to set aside. As an example of their resilience, we

may think of the pro-democracy campaigners in Hong Kong in 2014 operating under the

banner of an 'Occupy Central with Love and Peace' movement. There are moments in politics

when such movements may at least seem capable of averting great bloodshed and when their

absence promises confrontation of the most destructive sort. However, this is a modification

of the strict Platonic position in which the regular practice of politics is governed by the

Channeling of love as eros. The intermittent Channeling of anger into love represents

politics in a rather different way.

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4. Politicising Love

These objections, although in each instance inconclusive, can help us to make sense of why

modern liberalism has been concerned to keep love and politics apart. Love can be partial,

irrational and dangerous, even if these are only some of love's possibilities. But what may

always seem a little problematic about any overly sharp contrast of the 'citizen attitude' and a

'loving attitude' is, on the one hand, its artificiality (we are, after all, unitary beings) and, on

the other, the recognition that a loving attitude (of the right sort) is better placed to recognize

us as we truly are. Symptomatically, Jan Branson (2014, 156-7) makes the ‘Loving

Attitude’/’Citizen Attitude’ distinction but then favors the latter. Iris Murdoch too, while

holding that ‘Liberal political thought posits a certain fundamental distinction between the

person as citizen and the person as moral-spiritual individual’ accepts that the former, when

thought of apart from the latter, is something of a fiction (Murdoch, 1993, 356-7).

As citizens, others are uniform bearers of rational political agency or, more simply, they are

indistinguishable parts of an electorate or, in more neo-liberal terms, they are taxpayers. They

are not the unique, particular, individuals known through love. Or rather, their particularity is

set aside in the interests of an imagined uniformity.

But if the Arendt-Murdoch criticisms of a politicization of love give us only reasons

for caution, defeasible considerations which might lead us only into suspicion about

particular instances of a politicized love, the prospect of some other manner of cautious

politicization remains intact. But just how do we, cautiously, politicize love? Two broad

pathways seem open. One pathway involves the adoption of a modified version of the

Platonic theory with its metaphors of Channeling, and something of this sort may be an

ineradicable aspect of certain kinds of principled political dissent. However, as suggested

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above, this would establish only an intermittent connection between love and politics as, from

time to time, political movements attempted to channel popular anger in a productive,

constructive and loving way.

The other pathway involves making the connection between love and politics in a

more ongoing manner by appeal to resources from Aristotle and to the idea that the political

community is held together, in some way, by bonds of friendship. Without friendships, there

is no community. ‘Democracy has seldom represented itself without the possibility of at least

that which always resembles –if one is willing to nudge the accent of this word- the

possibility of a fraternization’ (Derrida, 2005, viii). Jacques Derrida (2005) has suggested

that a neglect of this somewhat obvious fact is an important and worrying aspect of

contemporary liberal thought, exemplified by free-market neo-liberalism. Liberty and

Equality have been emphasized while Fraternity (understood as various, shifting forms of

social solidarity) has been downgraded. The perceived need for a fraternal connection

between citizens, for a form of politicized mutual-concern, has been displaced by a (usually

negative) liberal equality before the law and the liberty to do as one wishes so long as one has

the required funds and others are harmed only indirectly, through commerce and the market,

rather than by direct physical assault. This is a stark but familiar picture in which care for the

other, or any political conception of interpersonal concern, finds no secure foothold. Martha

Nussbaum too has stressed the way in which love operates on the ground floor of the political

community by undermining barriers to justice such as hostility and disgust and by binding

citizens to the common ground of freedoms and ideals. With regard to this task, respect is not

enough (Nussbaum 2005, p.380). ‘We might say that a liberal state asks citizens who have

different overall conceptions of the meaning and purpose of life to overlap and agree in a

shared political space, the space of fundamental principles and constitutional ideals. But if

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those principles are to be efficacious, the state must also encourage love and devotion to

those ideals’ (Nussbaum 2005, p.7).

I want to close by suggesting a further connection in a similarly Aristotelian vein, an

extension of the intuition which is shared by Derrida and Nussbaum. Like Derrida, I want to

draw attention directly to what Aristotle called political friendship, i.e. phila politike and its

relation to a primary kind of trust (without which any though of community breaks down)

This is a subject matter on which a great deal of ink has been spilt over questions of

interpretation and over the legitimacy of claiming that it is truly a form of friendship. To say

that the citizens of a good polity are bound together by a form of friendship is, after all, to

appeal to a friendship of utility rather than a meeting of hearts. Yet, for Aristotle utility

friendships aspire towards and express a desire for friendship of a fuller sort. And it is this

idea, the idea of fellow citizens as, or akin to friends, which inspires Derrida's suggestion that

something important has been left out of modern liberalism's more restricted, liberty and

equality, approach.

However, an account of philia politike does not require us to buy into any impossibly-

demanding requirement to love everyone individually. Rather, it depends upon the sensible

point that political societies are not made up of the isolated individuals of a pared-back liberal

discourse. They are composed of social beings, connected in clusters to one another by all

manner of personal ties, one of the most important of which is friendship in the fullest sense.

(Not utility friendship, but the genuine, matured, item.) From an Aristotelian point of view,

without a complex overlapping network of agents who are bound together through

friendships, of all sorts and degrees, and through other loving connections as well, we simply

do not have the kind of solidarity which a functional political system requires. So far, I

restate what I take to be a Derrida/Nussbaum point.

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However, this also means that we simply cannot regard anyone as a potential fellow

citizen unless we also regard them as at least capable of fitting appropriately into such

interpersonal relations. The obvious candidates for those who fail to do so are precisely those

who have been guilty of evil beyond vice. We may recognize their continuing humanity, and

so the idea that they are 'moral monsters' may be out of place. But their relation to the

political community is, properly, one of containment by the latter rather than a pursuit of

mutual-flourishing as part of the common good. Drawing upon a visual metaphor which is

shared by both Plato and Aristotle, one which is at the heart of a good deal of the literature on

love, we can only see someone as having the potential to be a fellow citizen if we can also

view them as a potential recipient of a legitimate love by at least some other fellow citizen or

citizens. In at least this limited sense, a loving attitude and a citizen attitude seem inextricably

entwined.

Acknowledgements: Previous versions of this paper were delivered as a lecture hosted by

the UK Love Research Network, hosted by the Open University, London, in September 2014

and at the Human Sciences Symposium at the Magdalen Auditorium, Oxford, in February

2015. Special thanks for improving comments and suggestions go to Tomas Hejduk and

Simon May.

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Tony Milligan

Department of Philosophy,

University of Hertfordshire

Tony-milligan@outlook.com

t.milligan@herts.ac.uk