Description
Book SynopsisThe Feeling of Inequality shows how inequality reaches far beyond quantifiable differences in income or capital and considers how widespread socio-economic inequalities affect our ability to relate to each other emotionally and intellectually.
Trade ReviewThe Feeling of Inequality is an engaging and timely treatment of a much-neglected issue: the emotional dimensions of inequality. It addresses both the felt dimensions of inequality and how emotions can produce and maintain inequality. The book's clear and non-technical prose make it accessible to a wide audience: philosophers, political theorists, and sociologists will find it indispensable. * Frederick Neuhouser, Barnard College, Columbia University *
Try to imagine a work that combines moral and political psychology, political philosophy, history of philosophy (especially Hume and Adam Smith), and cognitive science and then mixes social theory and analytic philosophy with feminism and a light dose of literature. Even if you think you can, until you read Martin Hartmann's The Feeling of Inequality, you can't conceive of such intellectual alchemy. Hartmann's erudition is always functional: his is a penetrating and lively study of conceptualizing living in a greatly unequal society-our own-nominally committed to equality. While the analysis is sober, every page is enlivened by a quiet dagger aimed at the reader's intellectual and moral complacency. This is a major study in relational equality, and democratic theory. * Eric Schliesser, Professor of Political Theory, University of Amsterdam *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Toward a Relational Democratic Equality Part One: Empathy and Empathy Gulfs 1. Empathy as Non-Moral Psychological Mechanism 2. Against Empathy: Criticizing the Critiques 3. The Role of Imagination 4. Empathy Gulfs Part Two: Agents of Differentiation: Hume's Account of Positional Feelings 5. Sympathy and Imagination 6. The Principle of Comparison and the Peculiar Self 7. Does the Comparative Urge Disrupt Sympathy? 8. Masters, Servants, and Relational Proximities of Power Part Three:
