Aristotle's Political Psychology: Rhetoric, Affect, and International Relations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Given the recent fascination with affect and the political emotions, this paper addresses the relationship between affect and theories of sovereignty. Taking its bearings from the Practice or Phronetic turn in International Relations theory — and this literature’s explicit use of Aristotle’s concepts of habit, practice, and persuasion — this paper addresses the relationship between emotional or affective reactions to the political, and the response the institution of sovereignty represents to these reactions as manifested in the idea of the security state. The science and theory of sovereignty (first articulated in Hobbes's Leviathan) is built upon a specific political understanding of emotion, of one's affective reaction to what is “foreign” or “outside” of one's immediate experience. This link between sovereignty and affect has already made its way into security studies via the integration of political psychology into International Relations; however, this initial link between affect, psychology, and sovereignty is premised on the idea that affective responses represent a problem for which sovereignty is the solution, or that emotions are a problematic disturbance to the rational order of politics, and are a security threat as such. Consequently, the capacity for affect and the political emotions to be the site of a critique of sovereignty rather than a threat to sovereignty has yet to be fully developed. This paper treats affect as a site of critique by returning to the first systematic presentation of political psychology in Aristotle's Rhetoric — the source for Hobbes's theory of sovereignty as guarantor of security — arguing that sovereign power is itself better understood as an “affect of the political” rather than as a attempt to moderate, control, and manage political emotions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".