How does compassion play in politics?

20 March 2025
20:00-
21:30
Museum MAS, Hanzestedenplaats 1, 2000 Antwerpen

Political philosophers and Allegra Reinalda and Dirk De Schutter (KU Leuven) will discuss the political implications of compassion.

This talk (in Dutch) is a part of the series 'Compassion in Context', a project in collaboration with Museum MAS.

How does compassion play in politics?

This session will be in Dutch.

This talk is a part of the series ‘Compassion in Context’, a project in collaboration with Museum MAS.

Allegra Reinalda

Allegra Reinalda is a researcher at KU Leuven studying the central role compassion plays in modern liberal-democratic polities. Not only does the spectacle of fellow citizens suffering stir feelings of sympathy, so too can the suffering of unknown others beyond national borders.

Compassion can be mobilised in struggles for the recognition of existing rights as well as the creation of new ones, as citizens and social movements develop new emotional languages to draw attention to the neglect of suffering groups. A democratic society in which people did not make such pleas for compassion would not only be very cold; it would likely be less just. Yet a society in which compassion trumped the legitimacy of reason or the impartiality of institutions would be a very illiberal, not to mention a terribly unjust, one. This is a paradox for contemporary liberal-democratic polities: citizen engagement is motivated by compassion and yet expressions of compassion must be limited. She will zoom in on Hannah Arendt’s critique of compassion in politics.

Allegra Reinalda

Dirk De Schutter

Dirk De Schutter studied literary studies and philosophy at the University of Leuven and at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. He obtained his doctorate in philosophy in 1986 with a thesis on Martin Heidegger. Until his retirement, 1 October 2015, he was a professor at KU Leuven (Brussels Campus) and the University of Antwerp. He regularly publishes on nineteenth and twentieth-century philosophy and literature.

His fields of study are the history of metaphysics, philosophy of culture, political theory, anthropology, philosophy of art, and philosophy of literature.

Dirk De Schutter

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