
Contents
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Emotions as a Way of Knowing Emotions as a Way of Knowing
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How Ordinary People Think How Ordinary People Think
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The Man within the Average Joe’s Breast The Man within the Average Joe’s Breast
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2 James Q. Wilson and the Rehabilitation of Emotions
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Published:April 2021
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Abstract
Chapter 2 examines how James Q. Wilson, perhaps the most distinguished neoconservative social scientist, drew from sentimentalist Scottish Enlightenment philosophy to raise the status of popular moral emotions in American public debate during the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Relying heavily on previously unused archival material, the chapter argues that Wilson added considerable force to a neoconservative, populist reading of Adam Smith’s and David Hume’s ideas of the “moral sense” and “moral sentiments.” Wilson took it as his task to explain to the American people why their moral sentiments on contemporary moral issues were justified and that the moral sense of the so-called average American was a viable alternative to the American intellectual elite’s morally silent, social scientific way of knowing. Neither one of Wilson’s greatest Enlightenment heroes—Smith and Hume—ever used their ideas on human moral nature to launch an attack on contemporary cultural “elites.” While Wilson clearly admired Smith’s and Hume’s philosophical works as such, as a culture warrior, he applied their concepts and perspective to public issues that would have been alien to them. The chapter argues that Wilson’s borrowing from the Scottish philosophers was a reinvention of their thought in populist terms.
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