Anger and Revolutionary Justice: Martha Nussbaum

When there is great injustice, it is very tempting to think that righteous anger is the best response, and even a necessary response. On the other hand, it is noteworthy that the three most successful revolutionary freedom movements in the past century have been conducted in a spirit of non-anger (distinct from, though sometimes joined to, non-violence): Gandhi’s independence movement, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s role in the U. S. civil rights movement, and Nelson Mandela’s freedom movement in South Africa. Studying the thought and practice of these three leaders, I argue that non-anger is both normatively and practically superior to anger, and that an analysis of the structure of the emotion can help us to a deeper understanding of why this is so.

Prof. Martha Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. She is also an Associate Member in Classics, Divinity, and Political Science, a Member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, the Coordinator of the Center for Comparative Constitutionalism, and a board member of the Human Rights Program.

Nussbaum received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Prior to joining the University of Chicago faculty, she was a University Professor at Brown University. From 1986 to 1993 she was a research advisor at the World Institute for Development Economics Research, Helsinki, a branch of the United Nations University, where she worked with Amartya Sen to establish the Human Development (or “capabilities”) approach to the measurement of welfare. She and Sen are the two Founding Presidents of the international Human Development and Capability Association, which held its 2008 annual meeting in Delhi.

Her longstanding connection with India includes an appointment as Visiting Professor of Political Science at JNU, a consultancy with the UNDP-Delhi on gender and governance, and work on gender equality and law with The Lawyer’s Collective (Delhi). She is also an honorary Professor of the Institute for Development Studies Kolkata (IDSK). Her book Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (2000), focuses on the struggle for gender equality in India.

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