Read more
The 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.
List of contents
- Introduction: 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: "We Despise a Beggar": Smith's Defense of Inequality
- 9. Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator
- 10. Limits of Sympathy in Smith
- 11. Going Along with the Rich and Powerful: Establishing Inequality
- 12. The Problem of Imputation: Sympathetic Prejudices
- Part Four: Distances
- 13. Drawing Systematic Lessons from Hume and Smith for an
- Account of Relational Inequality
- 14. Scenarios of Inequality: Domestic Cleaners, Cows,
- Restaurant Kitchens, and the Denial of Existing Relations
- 15. The Materiality of Moral Distance I: Tocqueville's
- Pre-Revolutionary France
- 16. The Materiality of Moral Distance II: Space, Marriage, Taxes
- and Language
- Part Five: Empathy Gulfs and the Question of Critique
- 17. What's Wrong with Empathy Gulfs? Complementary
- Dependence and the Union of Social Unions
- 18. Absolute versus Relative Inequality: A Problematic Strategy
- in Recent Egalitarianism
- 19. The Denigration of Envy and the Inequality of Emotional Impact
- 20. Critique and Comparison
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgments
- Index
About the author
Martin Hartmann is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lucerne. He received a PhD in Philosophy from Goethe University Frankfurt.
Summary
How does socio-economic inequality affect our ability to relate to each other on emotional and intellectual levels? To date, public discourse on the rising level of inequality in many Western nations has been informed by quantifiable terms such as income and capital. Philosophical approaches, conversely, tend to focus on distributional aspects such as welfare, resources, and opportunities. In The Feeling of Inequality, author Martin Hartmann argues that the impact of inequality far transcends the material, highlighting the ways in which the emotional aspects of these disparities serve as engines of social differentiation.
Reinterpreting David Hume's and Adam Smith's respective theories of sympathy, Hartmann sketches a relational theory of democracy that construes equality as a social relationship, placing particular emphasis on the emotions and attitudes that often accompany inequality such as contempt, envy, shame, esteem, pride, and admiration. Hartmann then localizes these 'relative' emotions in social and cultural practices, illustrating the ways in which these emotions result in concrete manifestations of inequality. By breaking down the foundations of the various empathy gulfs plaguing contemporary democratic societies, Hartmann paves the way for a more compassionate approach to thinking about inequality.
Additional text
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.
