George E. Marcus

This book challenges the conventional wisdom that improving democratic politics requires keeping emotion out of it. Marcus advances the provocative claim that the tradition in democratic theory of treating emotion and reason as hostile opposites is misguided and leads contemporary theorists to misdiagnose the current state of American democracy. Instead of viewing the presence of emotion in politics as a failure of rationality and therefore as a failure of citizenship, Marcus argues, democratic theorists need to understand that emotions are in fact a prerequisite for the exercise of reason and thus essential for rational democratic deliberation and political judgment. Attempts to purge emotion from public life not only are destined to fail, but ultimately would rob democracies of a key source of revitalization and change. Drawing on recent research in neuroscience, Marcus shows how emotion functions generally and what role it plays in politics. In contrast to the traditional view of emotion as a form of agitation associated with belief, neuroscience reveals it to be generated by brain systems that operate largely outside of awareness. Two of these systems, "disposition" and "surveillance," are especially important in enabling emotions to produce habits, which often serve a positive function in democratic societies. But anxiety, also a preconscious emotion, is crucial to democratic politics as well because it can inhibit or disable habits and thus clear a space for the conscious use of reason and deliberation. If we acknowledge how emotion facilitates reason and is "cooperatively entangled" with it, Marcus concludes, then we should recognize sentimental citizens as the only citizens really capable of exercising political judgment and of putting their decisions into action.

The histories of great American dynastic fortunes, such as those of the Rockefellers, DuPonts, and Guggenheims, have been told repeatedly as family stories. They have been tales of the passions, jealousies, distinguished achievements, and eccentricities among generations of parents and children, brothers and sisters. The essays in this book, developed from the perspectives of contemporary anthropology and cultural studies, establish a different field of vision for understanding private concentrations of great wealth and their legacies in the late twentieth-century United States. Over time, a family becomes dynastic by growing into an organization with a massive store of wealth rather than kinship at its center. A dynasty then takes on a set of values and a mystique that depends on a diverse range of experts, institutions, mass media, and ordinary middle-class people to empower it. The mature dynasty is as much the sum of complex interests in the culture and production of wealth as it is the story of the prominent family at its origins. This volume examines the full range of interests in the perpetuation of a dynasty and provides a clearer picture of the long-term cultural legacies of such capitalist clans. Ultimately, Marcus and Hall address the question of what makes diversely involved and situated descendants adhere to their ancestral code of family authority, and their answers are fully informed by an understanding of the more complex organization of dynastic culture and wealth. A family story in itself cannot encompass the workings of a mature fortune, because the power and roles of descendants are so often subordinated to the institutional legacies and myths of celebrity that engulf them. The research for this book includes ethnographic studies of old family fortunes in Gulf Coast Texas as well as archival work and actual experience within high-culture philanthropic institutions created by dynastic fortunes. The Getty and Rockefeller legacies are given special, detailed attention in light of the broad cultural perspective of dynasties and old wealth that the authors establish.

Your colleague's husband's sister can make you fat, even if you don't know her. A happy neighbor has more impact on your happiness than a happy spouse. These startling revelations of how much we truly influence one another are revealed in the studies of Drs. Christakis and Fowler, which have repeatedly made front-page news nationwide. In CONNECTED, the authors explain why emotions are contagious, how health behaviors spread, why the rich get richer, even how we find and choose our partners. Intriguing and entertaining, CONNECTED overturns the notion of the individual and provides a revolutionary paradigm-that social networks influence our ideas, emotions, health, relationships, behavior, politics, and much more. It will change the way we think about every aspect of our lives.