Sophie de Grouchy's Letters on Sympathy

Sandrine Bergès is Associate Professor in Philosophy at Bilkent University in Ankara. Her books include: The Routledge Companion to Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (2013) and A Feminist Perspective on Virtue Ethics (Palgrave, 2015). She is also co-editor of The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft (Oxford University Press, 2017) and the forthcoming The Wollstonecraftian Mind with Eileen Hunt Botting and Alan Coffee (Routledge).Eric Schliesser is Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam and Visiting Scholar in the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University. He has published widely on early modern philosophy and sciences, including political economy as well as recent philosophy of economics. He is author of Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public Thinker (2017) and editor of Sympathy: A History (2015), The Oxford Handbook of Isaac Newton (forthcoming), and Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy (2016), all for Oxford University Press.

Bergès and Schliesser also include a fascinating and helpful review of Grouchy's aesthetics, including her account of how our tendency to sympathize with charismatic or beautiful speakers causes us to fall under the spell of bad actors. Domination and demagoguery have never felt like more timely topics, and Bergès and Schliesser's succinct but well-considered analysis shows that Grouchy's work is a fertile source for philosophers interested in questions about the affective underpinnings of liberty and of social epistemic vice.