Sympathy, Suffering and Strangers: Adam Smith and Benjamin Constant on Compassion in Modern Polities

My PhD project looks at the central role compassion plays in modern liberal-democratic polities. Not only does the spectacle of fellow citizens suffering stir feelings of sympathy, so too can the suffering of unknown others beyond national borders. Compassion can be mobilised in struggles for the recognition of existing rights as well as the creation of new ones, as citizens and social movements develop new emotional languages to draw attention to the neglect of suffering groups. A democratic society in which people did not make such pleas for compassion would not only be very cold; it would likely be less just. Yet a society in which compassion trumped the legitimacy of reason or the impartiality of institutions would be a very illiberal, not to mention a terribly unjust, one. This is a paradox for contemporary liberal-democratic polities: Citizen engagement is motivated by compassion and yet expressions of compassion must be limited. In order to address this paradox, in my project I look at two early liberal thinkers who recognised the central place of compassion in modern society: Benjamin Constant and Adam Smith. By engaging with their work, the project aims to (1) reassess liberalism’s capacity to confront communitarian critiques of modern society as cold and selfish, (2) understand early liberal theories of compassion in reference to their theoretical and practical contexts, and (3) intervene in contemporary normative debates about the role compassion should play in politics.