Moving Hearts: Cultivating Patriotic Affect in Rousseau’s Considerations on the Government of Poland

Abstract

Rousseau’s embrace of ceremony and festivals in his Considerations on the Government of Poland demonstrates one way for republican political thought to develop a substantive treatment of civic virtue. Differentiating the narcissism of spectacle and theater that Rousseau critiques in the Letter to d’Alembert from the Considerations’ call for a generous affect, I demonstrate that the latter is compatible with a republican ethos premised on civic virtue and patriotic attachment to the nation-state. Rousseau argues for the instantiation of political practices that constantly cultivate political virtue and their associated affective orientations. His treatment of civic ceremonies in the Considerations should be read as an attempt to inculcate patriotic affect in republican citizens via constitutional measures.