Nussbaum’s fundamental idealism is undiminished by the coarseness of our time: she still believes in a 'loving, imaginative vision (through poetry and music...) and a spirit of deliberation and rational critique embodied in … good political discourse.' If Germany is right now 'one of the most fear-resistant and balanced nations in the world, it may well be because instead of snarky backbiting, politicians on both sides actually sit down and think' ... She believes that other kinds of stigma—based on class, race and age—are equally susceptible to cure by the kind of mass integration of young citizens that universal national service would require. The subtext of her idea is that 'young people would see the diversity of people in their country as soldiers in World War II learned to do during their service, only my young people would be trying to help, not to kill.' That is one of several noble notions in this book. Everyone who still believes we can rescue the republic should embrace all of them. 'Hope really is a choice,' says the author, 'and a practical habit.'

Readers will notice that the path Nussbaum charts from destructive to generous emotions unfolds along the political principles of the secular left. To be sure, Nussbaum calls for open public dialogue that includes a diverse range of voices. But then she dismisses religionists’ theological convictions as a distraction from political activism and waves away conservatives’ worries about family life. But even readers skeptical about Nussbaum’s political orientation will welcome this call for an emotionally healthier public life.

...one of the virtues of this slender volume is how gradually and scrupulously it moves, as Nussbaum pushes you to slow down, think harder and revisit your knee-jerk assumptions ... The book starts out strong, as she breaks fear down into first principles in order to show how feelings of insecurity and powerlessness can render an otherwise useful emotion like anger, or a desire for fairness, into something more vengeful and poisonous. She’s a skillful rhetorician, gracefully navigating her way around partisan land mines by talking about babies and ancient Greece ... Her cool approach to incendiary topics is part of what makes her work so brilliant and so frustrating. To counter the 'toxic brew' of fearful anger, envy and misogyny, she proposes...'strategies.' She’s not necessarily wrong, but does she have to sound so bloodless and Apollonian about it? ... When it comes to seeing the small, scared child in everyone, though, Nussbaum can be illuminating.

Most of what Nussbaum writes in The Monarchy of Fear has the ring not just of truth but sometimes also of truism. Do we really need a philosopher to point out that the current president’s base fears the many changes convulsing our world, changes that make them feel powerless and sidelined? ... it hardly requires a philosopher of Nussbaum’s stature to point these things out, and at times her classical background causes her to gloss over significant observations. Anger may, in almost every human society, carry with it a desire for revenge, but not every society encourages retribution the way America’s does ... Realistically, the only citizens paying her the attention and respect of reading her thoughts on this will be those who share her own liberal orientation, and in that respect The Monarchy of Fear seems like a missed opportunity. Understanding what motivates Trump supporters is a lot less difficult than figuring out how to live with them. A nation, unlike a social media feed, can’t be curated to erase all the people whose beliefs we find risible. The Monarchy of Fear doesn’t help much in this respect. It does assert something important: Anyone campaigning for an alternative to the current regime must talk about the America they want to create more than they focus on the people they’re trying to thwart.

With The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis, Nussbaum adds to her own fearsome reputation ... Her writing manages to deeply engage the texts she explores—ranging from Aeschylus and Seneca to George Eliot and John Rawls—all the while fully engaging the attention of specialists and non-specialists alike. Like David Hume, who insisted on the need for modern philosophers to serve as 'ambassadors [to the] conversable world,' Nussbaum bridges the worlds of the academy and society ... Nussbaum’s accounts of envy and disgust, as well as sexism and misogyny, are...subtle and sound. These qualities are praiseworthy and pivotal to the life of civil discourse. Still, as a historian, I regret the absence of historical perspective and occasional glossing in her book ... More to the point, I am uncertain what Nussbaum qua philosopher brings that is truly noteworthy to this look at our political crisis ... Still, Nussbaum’s message is worth hearing. It may not be as philosophical as one might expect, but it is important and powerful.

The book’s subtitle—'A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis'—leads one to think that Ms. Nussbaum’s analysis of today’s volatile and uncertain politics will offer a needed element of precision. It doesn’t. The book is rife with sloppy arguments and arresting but unsubstantiated claims. Ms. Nussbaum doesn’t argue but merely states, for example, that monarchies are based on fear (hence the title), whereas democracies are based on trust ... The more interesting failure of The Monarchy of Fear is that it exhibits just the very uninformed fear it laments ... Unsupported generalizations abound ... Maybe she’s right—though, as she noted on the book’s first page, the fear she senses is probably her own.

Nussbaum develops her analysis of fear, anger, disgust and envy with a rich array of examples from literature and the law (two longstanding areas of interest for her). And the results are illuminating. However, her second answer to the question of the role that philosophy can play in a time of crisis is rather less persuasive. If Nussbaum is to be believed, not only is the philosophical method of weighing arguments analytically powerful, it is also nothing less than a model for active or engaged citizenship ... It would certainly be nice if, as Nussbaum suggests, we were all able to figure out what we think on matters of fundamental political principle before entering 'contentious and difficult' debates. But what do we do in the meantime?

Her latest book...figures as a kind of case study, exceptionally topical and plainly written, applying some of what she has understood to a singularly distressed moment of America’s common culture ... the book unspools elaborate arguments readably ... The reader comes away from The Monarchy of Fear relieved by having heard so many unsavory and puzzling phenomena of our moment accounted for, yet a little disheartened by Nussbaum’s concluding nostrums. She counsels hope—tinged in many minds by disappointment in the Obama presidency—as the antidote to consuming fear. Here I disagree: relaxation, no less difficult to achieve, is the opposite and anodyne to panic and fear ... That the exemplars she cites—Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela—were moral geniuses makes liberation from the monarchy of fear seem noble and desirable but also inimitable, all but unattainable.

She tries to keep Trump at arm's length and focus instead on what philosophers and psychologists going back to antiquity have had to say about fear, its role in stoking anger, disgust, and envy, and how those emotions in turn perpetuate divisive politics (sexism and misogyny especially). That approach gives this important book both up-to-the-moment relevance and long-view gravitas ... An engaging and inviting study of humanity’s long-standing fear of the other.

Nussbaum’s erudite but very readable investigation engages figures from Aristotle to Donald Trump in lucid and engaging prose, though some readers may feel she psychologizes politics without grappling sufficiently with positions’ substance. Still, Nussbaum offers fresh, worthwhile insights into the animosities that roil contemporary public life.