How does it feel to be a citizen?

Abstract

Our starting point is the idea that different models of citizenship entail different ethos that define the ideal citizen, which in turn presuppose different emotions. We examine four models of citizenship: classic liberal, civic republican, deliberative democratic, and radical democratic. We suggest that their ideal citizens will be guided, respectively, by love of law (nomophilia), love of community or of country (oikophilia), love of truth (epistemophilia) and of justice, and love of the groups one belongs to and of power (kratophilia). Other political emotions ―such as anger― and emotional processes ―such as empathy― are also directed towards different objects and actors in different ways, as channeled differentially by those forms of love.