IS ENTHUSIASM AN EMOTION?

Jon Elster

1. Introduction

I do not have an answer to the question in the title. I wrote this paper in the

hope that the participants in this symposium for Olav Gjelsvik will help me resolve

the puzzle one way or another. I shall not disguise the fact that I hope the answer will

be positive, but a piece of the puzzle is missing.

In textbooks, handbooks, and scholarly articles dealing with emotions,

enthusiasm is virtually never mentioned, let alone discussed at any length. Poggi

(2007) is an isolated example; for reasons I need not consider here, her discussion is

not very helpful. A specialist on the psychology of emotion, Jennifer Lerner

(personal communication) confirmed my impression that the psychological literature

has ignored the topic. (She also directed my attention to an article by two political

scientists (Marcus and Mackuen 1993). Their idea of enthusiasm trivializes it, as one

also observes in the near-obligatory use (in the United States) of “enthusiastic” in

letters of recommendation.) The neglect of enthusiasm by emotion theorists could of

course be, as the phrase goes, “a much-needed gap”. I cannot prove that it is not, but

I shall at least try to make the beginning of a case.

Historically, enthusiasm has been an ambiguous idea. In the early modern

period, it mainly connoted religious extravagance, fanaticism, and intolerant zeal. In

his History of England, Hume has numerous references to enthusiasm, virtually all of

them pejorative. In one of his essays he characterizes it as follows:

[In addition to superstition, the] mind of man is also subject to an unaccountable elevation and presumption, arising from prosperous success, from luxuriant health, from strong spirits, or from a bold and confident disposition. In such a state of mind, the imagination swells with great, but confused conceptions, to which no sublunary beauties or enjoyments can correspond. Every thing mortal and perishable vanishes as unworthy of attention. And a full range is given to the fancy in the invisible regions or world of spirits, where the soul is at liberty to indulge itself in every imagination, which may best suit its present taste and

disposition. Hence arise raptures, transports, and surprising flights of fancy; and confidence and presumption still encreasing, these raptures, being altogether unaccountable, and seeming quite beyond the reach of our ordinary faculties, are attributed to the immediate inspiration of that Divine Being, who is the object of devotion. In a little time, the inspired person comes to regard himself as a distinguished favourite of the Divinity; and when this frenzy once takes place, which is the summit of enthusiasm, every whimsy is consecrated: Human reason, and even morality are rejected as fallacious guides: And the fanatic madman delivers himself over, blindly, and without reserve, to the supposed illapses of spirit, and to inspiration from above. Hope, pride, presumption, a warm imagination, together with ignorance, are, therefore, the true sources of ENTHUSIASM (Hume 1742).

In the first part of the passage, Hume seems to see enthusiasm as a form of

sentimental rapture, or Schwärmerei. Although the further step from sentimentalism

to fanaticism may not seem particularly plausible, I shall not pursue that question.

Instead I shall cite some of Kant’s writings, in which he clearly distinguishes

between Schwärmerei and Enthusiasmus. Whereas he dismisses the former as

dangerous, he praises the latter. In his comments on the French revolution in The

Conflict of the Faculties, he describes what one might call observer enthusiasm:

“This revolution […] finds in the heart of all spectators (who are not engaged in the

game themselves) a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm, the

very expression of which is fraught with danger; this sympathy, therefore, can have

no other cause than a moral predisposition in the human race” (Kant 1996, p. 302).

Since the danger he refers to arose from expressing enthusiasm for the French

Revolution in authoritarian Prussia, the emotion is not idling.

In other writings, Kant praises participant enthusiasm. In The Critique of

Judgment, he wrote that “The idea of the good with affect is called enthusiasm. This

state of mind seems to be sublime, so much so that it is commonly maintained that

without it nothing great can be accomplished” (Kant 2000). In a pre-critical writing

on the “maladies of the head” (Kant 1764, p. 267) he made the same statement,

without the qualification “it is commonly maintained”. In this text he also

distinguishes the enthusiast sharply from the “fanatic (visionary, Schwärmer)”,

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asserting that “human nature knows no more dangerous illusions” than those of the

latter.

Yet Kant’s praise of enthusiasm is qualified. In The Critique of Judgment, he

asserts that enthusiasm, like any other affect, is “blind, either in the choice of its end,

or, if this is given by Reason, in its implementation; for it is that movement of the

mind that makes it incapable of engaging in free consideration of principles” Kant

2000, p. 154). This statement is somewhat opaque, but I shall take it to mean that the

enthusiast who is guided by reason chooses morally good ends but is incapable of

choosing the best means to realize them. In her monograph Kant et la Schwärmerei,

Béatrice Allouche-Pourcel (2010, p. 105) hits the nail on the head when she writes

that enthusiasm illustrates the proverb that the best can be the enemy of the good.

Kant’s notion of reason is unfathomable, at least for me. I shall rely on a more

transparent idea of reason as pursuit of the public good, transcending private

interests. One could also stipulate, as I did in Elster (2009 a), that reason requires the

rational pursuit of the public good. As the preceding paragraph implies, I shall not

impose this requirement here. Reason (as I shall understand it here) is consistent with

emotion-induced irrationality in the choice of means and in the assessment of facts.

To the statement by La Bruyère (2007, p. 98) that “ Nothing is easier for passion than

to overcome reason; its great triumph is to conquer interest”, one might add, as a

corollary, that nothing is easier for interest to overcome reason except when reason

allies itself with passion. This alliance is enthusiasm.

To conclude this Introduction, let me cite some dictionary definitions.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary the principal current sense of the word is

“Rapturous intensity of feeling in favor of a person, principle, cause, etc.; passionate

eagerness in any pursuit, proceeding from an intense conviction of the worthiness of

the object”. More succinctly, the French Grand Robert defines it as “Emotion intense

qui pousse à l’action dans la joie”. According to the German Wikipedia, it

“bezeichnet heute allgemein eine Begeisterung oder Schwärmerei [sic] für etwas,

eine gesteigerte Freude an bestimmten Themen oder Handlungen, ein extremes

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Engagement für eine Sache oder ein mehr als durchschnittliches, intensives Interesse

auf einem speziellen Gebiet”. Whereas the French and German definitions are

morally neutral (one could be enthusiastic about soccer or bridge), the OED

definition captures better the phenomena I shall discuss in the following.

I shall now proceed as follows. In Section II, I address the nature of emotion.

This is obviously necessary to answer the question in the title, In Section III I survey

the empirical material that led me to ask that question. In writings by historians and

contemporaries on the American War of Independence, the making of the French

constitution of 1791, and the making of the Norwegian constitution of 1814, I have

constantly come across references to enthusiasm. I conclude in Section IV by laying

out the puzzle.

II. The nature of emotion

There is probably a consensus among scholars that one can establish neither

necessary nor sufficient conditions for an event to be an emotional episode. (I shall

not consider emotional dispositions nor “standing” emotions such as hatred or

contempt for categories of individuals.) In my discussion (drawing on Elster 1999,

Elster 2009 b, Elster 2011, and Elster 2015, Ch. 8), I shall consider only some

frequently occurring features of what, pre-analytically, we think of as emotions,

notably fear, anger, hope, and – perhaps – enthusiasm.

Cognitive antecedents. The first and in some ways the most crucial feature to

which I shall draw attention is the fact, first noticed by Aristotle, that emotions are

caused by a cognitive antecedent. (For my purposes here, I can ignore cases in which

the trigger is perceptual rather than cognitive.) Anger, for instance, is caused by a

belief that another person deliberately and unjustly hurt me. If a person bumps into

me on the subway, I do not get angry if I realize that it was due to the irregular

movement of the train, but my anger is triggered if I am led to to believe he was

elbowing his way through the wagon without caring about his fellow passengers. As

always, there are exceptions: many episodes of anger are due to sheer wish

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frustration, as when car drivers get angry with bicyclists who are slowing them

down. For some other examples, envy is caused by the belief that another person has

something I want, in both senses of the term; guilt by the belief that I have performed

a morally bad action; indignation by the belief that another person behaved badly

towards a third party; and so on.

Impact of beliefs and preferences. In his formal definition of emotions,

Aristotle (Rhetoric 1378a, 21-22) asserts that they are “those things through which,

by undergoing change, people come to differ in their judgments”. In other words, he

focuses on emotions as causes of beliefs rather than as effects of beliefs. In his

discussion of specific emotions, however, he mainly discusses their cognitive

antecedents. Although the tendency for emotions to shape or distort beliefs is less

universal than their tendency to stem from beliefs, the former plays a very important

role in mediating between emotion and action. In addition to the direct action

tendencies of emotions that I consider later, they can influence action indirectly by

shaping the beliefs that are used as premises for action. There are three main causal

pathways. First, by the tendency of emotions to induce urgency, a preference for

acting earlier rather than later (Elster 2009 b), they may cause suboptimal gathering

of information (“marry in haste, repent at leisure”). Second, there is the “hot-cold

empathy gap” (Loewenstein and Schkade 1999): when she is in an emotional state, a

person may not realize that it will eventually subside, due to the short half-life of

emotions (see below). Third, there is motivated belief formation: garden-variety

wishful thinking as well as its less discussed opposite, counterwishful thinking

(Thagard and Nussbaum 2014).

In addition to affecting beliefs in one of these ways, emotions can also affect

preferences. For one thing, they can induce higher rates of time discounting – a

preference for an early reward over a later reward (Tice, Braslavsky, and Baumeister

2001). In practice, this effect may be hard to disentangle from an induced tendency

to prefer early action over later action, but in principle they are distinct. For another,

emotions can modify the risk preferences of the agent. Thus fear makes people more

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risk-averse, while anger has the opposite effect (Lerner and Keltner 2001). At the

same time, anger induces more optimistic risk assessments (a cognitive effect),

whereas fear makes people more pessimistic (ibid.). In practice, when we observe

people in an emotional state state taking higher risks than usual, it may be hard to

disentangle the effect on risk preferences from the effect on risk assessments.

Outside the laboratory, these distinctions easily get blurred.

Arousal. So far I have discussed the effect of emotions on the psychological

state of the agent – her beliefs and preferences. In addition, many emotions affect her

physiological state. In a shorthand formulation, emotions are what keeps us awake at

night. Strong basic emotions such as fear and anger go together with arousal of the

organism (Frijda 1986, Ch.3). Positive emotions, too, can have effects on the body,

Romantic love can have some of the same effects as hypomania or amphetamines,

reducing the need for food and sleep and inducing supernormal energy. Some

scholars who hope they might be awarded a Nobel prize reportedly sleep badly the

night before the committee in Stockholm announces its decision.

It is important to note the difference between visceral and prudential fear

(Gordon 1987, p. 77). The latter, illustrated by taking an umbrella when one “fears”

that it will rain, does not involve any emotion at all and does not have the effects on

beliefs and preferences that I have discussed. Although in a given case it may be hard

to identify which of the two varieties of fear we are dealing with, these effects will, if

we can identify them, provide a tell-tale sign. A similar observation applies to the

distinction between retaliating in anger and rational deterrence or incapacitation.

Short half-life. If a state of arousal is caused by a threat to the individual, it

naturally tends to dissipate when the threat goes way. Even when no physical threat

is involved, emotions tend to have what is often called a short half-life. I may get

angry and want to take action if I hear that someone has been talking badly about me,

but after a while the anger subsides, I shrug my shoulders, and get on with my life.

The advice “count to ten” is based on this fact. As is the case for virtually any

generalization about the emotions, there are exceptions. Anger and love can persist

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for years or decades if their action tendencies are thwarted. Also, as noted, the agent

may believe that the emotion will persist.

Action tendencies. I conclude this Section by discussing the important fact

that emotions have action tendencies. These are impulses to act rather than simple

dispositions to act. The impulse need not lead all the way to action: it may be quelled

almost immediately, be counteracted by another emotion, or checked by self-interest.

Most emotions have specific action tendencies, just as they have specific cognitive

antecedents. The angry person wants to retaliate, the guilty person to make repairs,

the person who is afraid to run away, the envious person to destroy the envied object

and perhaps its possessor, and so on. There is some slack or indeterminacy, however

(Elster 2011). A’s belief that B has unjustly favored her rival C may cause her to feel

anger towards B or envy towards C. Fear may cause flight or fight. Anger, too, may

cause fight. Also, emotions such as pride or hope do not seem to have an action

tendency.

This concludes my selective thumbnail sketch of the emotions. I have ignored

the facts that they have valence (they are pleasant or painful) and that, unlike for

instance pain, they have an intentional object. The only purpose of the survey was to

prepare the ground for the discussion of “the puzzle” in the Conclusion.

III. Enthusiasm in history

Kant said that nothing great is ever achieved without enthusiasm. One

illustration could be the events in Leipzig in September-October 1989, when Monday

after Monday increasing number of demonstrators defied the East German

authorities, regardless of the risk that the Politburo might opt for the “Chinese

solution” of June 4 in the same year. However, because of the disregard it induces

for the rational choice of means and assessment of facts, enthusiasm may lead to

disaster. The enthusiasm that propelled the protesters in Tharir Square ultimately led

to a regime harsher than the one they opposed. I know too little about Egypt to assess

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whether the outcome was due to any kind of irrationality. The protesters may simply

have become less risk averse rather than irrationally optimistic.

I discovered the importance of enthusiasm in my work on the French

constituent assembly in 1789-1791. Later, I realized that the American War of

Independence would not have succeeded without that emotion. (By contrast, the

Federal Convention that drafted the 1787 American constitution was unencumbered

by enthusiasm.) Finally, I discovered the essential role of enthusiasm in the making

of the 1814 Norwegian constitution. Whereas I have no direct participant or observer

testimonies for the role of enthusiasm in the two events I mentioned in the previous

paragraph, there is textual evidence for these three processes. I shall discuss them in

chronological order.

The American War of Independence. For this discussion, I shall draw on

two sources, a remarkable book by David Ramsay on the American Revolution that

he published in 1789 and the Federalist Papers that Alexander Hamilton, John Jay

and James Madison published (under the name of Publius) as 77 newspaper articles

between October 17 1787 and April 2 1788, to which eight more were added later. I

cite them below by their number, corresponding to the order in which they were

published.

In Ramsay’s opinion, the actions of the American revolutionaries were largely

based on enthusiasm-generated wishful thinking. Their “ignorance of the military art,

prevented their weighing the chances of war with that exactness of calculation,

which, if indulged in, might have damped their hopes”. They were “buoyed above the

fear of consequences by an ardent military enthusiasm, unabated by calculations”.

Concerning the use of paper money to fund the war, he wrote that although it

inevitably led to “a general wreck of property”, a “happy ignorance of future events,

combined with the ardor of the times, prevented many reflections on this subject, and

gave credit and circulation to these bills of credit” (Ramsay 1789, vol. 1, p. 146; my

italics). Moreover, their passion was not an idling sentimentality, but generated

action: “such was the enthusiasm of the day, that the colonists gave up both their

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personal services and their property to the public, on the vague promise that they

should at a future time be reimbursed” (ibid., p. 255-56; my italics).

Publius echoes the last comment when he refers to “those oppressive

expedients for raising men [during the revolutionary war] which were upon several

occasions practiced, and which nothing but the enthusiasm of liberty would have

induced the people to endure” (No. 22; my italics). In No. 83 he refers to the

distorting effect of enthusiasm on rational belief formation, when he asserts that those

who propose jury trials in all cases, and not merely in criminal trials, are “blinded by

enthusiasm” and by “men of enthusiastic tempers”. In No. 1 he suggests that “the

noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal

distrust”, leading to what has been called “libertarian panics” (Vermeule 2005). The

most striking reference, however, occurs when he argues against Jefferson’s proposal

of revising the constitution by a constitutional convention whenever two thirds of the

members of two of the three branches of Government call for it:

The danger of disturbing the public tranquility by interesting too strongly the public passions, is a still more serious objection against a frequent reference of constitutional questions to the decision of the whole society. […] We are to recollect that all the existing [state] constitutions were formed in the midst of a danger which repressed the passions most unfriendly to order and concord; of an enthusiastic confidence of the people in their patriotic leaders, which stifled the ordinary diversity of opinions on great national questions; of a universal ardor for new and opposite forms, produced by a universal resentment and indignation against the ancient government; and whilst no spirit of party connected with the changes to be made, or the abuses to be reformed, could mingle its leaven in the operation. The future situations in which we must expect to be usually placed, do not present any equivalent security against the danger which is apprehended (No. 49; my italics).

An important statement in this passage is that enthusiasm for “new and

opposite forms” were produced by indignation against “the ancient government”. We

may ask, therefore: does enthusiasm require anger? I shall return to the question,

without answering it.

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The Constituante (1789-1791). The two main episodes in which the French

constitution-makers embodied (or appeared to embody) enthusiasm occurred on the

night of August 4 1789 and on May 16 1791.

In the Spring and Summer of 1789, people in many parts of France

experienced what became known as la Grande Peur, the Great Fear. It was based on

the entirely erroneous belief that bandits and brigands were deliberately cutting the

grain before it was ripe, as part of a vast conspiracy to starve the people. In July, the

fear of the brigands was somehow transmuted into anger towards the nobles, through

mechanisms that remain unclear. The anger caused the peasants to attack the castles

of the seigneurs, burn property records, and in some cases kill nobles. Taking

account of the slow communications between Paris and the provinces and the time

pattern of anti-seigneurial actions, Markoff (1996: 437) calculates that the reception

in the constituent assembly of bad news from the provinces had two sharp spikes

around 28 July and 2 August. Many of the deputies to the constituent assembly were

personally affected or threatened. In addition to the nobles, many members of the

third estate held important landed properties (Kessel 1969, p. 19–21; Tackett 1996, p.

38–39). It took the deputies a few days to absorb the shock and start debating and

enacting countermeasures. Their first reaction was to initiate repression, but on the

night of August 4 a chain reaction of proposals was set in motion that more or less

abolished the old regime of property and privilege overnight.

Writing to a friend on August 7 1789, the Marquis de Ferrières, deputy for the

nobility, asserted that « the session on August 4 is the most memorable one that has

ever been held by any nation. It shows the noble enthusiasm of the French” (Ferrières

1932, p. 113). He also refers to the “patriotic drunkenness” of the deputies (ibid., p.

114). (Kessel 1969, pp. 192-94 also cites allegations of drunkenness in the literal

sense.) For Tocqueville (2001, p. 148), “the night of August 4 was the combined

product, in proportions impossible to measure, of fear and enthusiasm”. There is no

doubt that many deputies acted to appease the peasantry, out of fear and self-interest.

However, many of the measures enacted by the assembly went beyond concessions

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to the peasants. Parish priests who held several bénéfices (ecclesiastical incomes)

might sacrifice all but one (Duquesnoy 1894, p. 267). A magistrate, who lived from

the fees he took from litigants, might propose justice to be rendered free of charge

(ibid.). The deputies from towns and provinces who proposed to give up their

privileges certainly had something to lose. Some scholars believe, in fact, that

altruism was the dominant feeling in the assembly (Fitzsimmons 1994, p. 53;

Tackett 1996, p. 172). The assessment by Mirabeau (1789, No. XXIII, No. XXIV) is

more nuanced, when he attributes the self-sacrificial proposals to “reciprocal

challenge and generosity […], to the seduction of applause, the emulation of

outdoing one’s colleagues, the honor of personal disinterestedness, and to the kind of

noble intoxication which accompanies the effervescence of generosity”(my italics).

I agree with Tocqueville that it is impossible to determine the relative

importance of enthusiasm and fear, and of other emotions such as spite or

vindictiveness (Elster 2007). Whatever the precise emotional mix, the behavior of the

deputies revealed the influence of passion:

Because of the short half-life of the emotions, we might expect to see a prefer-ence reversal after a cooling-down period. In a chapter on “The time for repentance”, Kessel (1969) cites numerous instances of Monday-morning blues, but with no specific references to preference reversal.

Because of the hot–cold empathy gap we might expect that when adopting the decrees the deputies did not imagine that they would ever change their minds. They ignored the rules of the Assembly (which they had adopted on July 28), requiring constitutional matters to be discussed on three different days. Those who wanted immediate action said that “an élan of patriotism does not need three days” and “since one cannot vary in such sentiments, the three days would be a pointless waste of time” (cited in Mirabeau 1789, No. XXIV; my italics).

Because of the urgency induced by emotion, we might expect the deputies to vote immediately rather than taking the time to verify the news from the provinces. Although several deputies insisted on the need to confirm the truth of the reports (AP 8, p. 336), the Assembly overrode their objections.

Because of the tendency of emotions to induce wishful thinking, we might expect the deputies to believe that the peasantry would be appeased by

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concessions. This was indeed their assumption, whereas a rational assessment suggests that concessions generate the demand for more concessions (Dumont 1832, p. 104).

Earlier, I noted Publius’s claim that anger generated enthusiasm in the

American Revolution. I am not claiming that fear had a similar causal role on the

night of August 4 1789, nor do I exclude it.

The second episode, on May 16 1791, has been characterized by the

biographer of the constituant Thouret as one in which the deputies were “drunk with

disinterestedness” (Lebèque 1910, p. 261). On that day, they declared themselves

ineligible to the first ordinary legislature, having already on April 7 1791 excluded

themselves from ministerial positions during the four years following the end of the

legislature. Both of these “self-denying ordinances” were proposed by Robespierre,

invoking the authority of Rousseau and the precedents of Solon and Lycurgus (AP

24, p.621; AP 26, p. 123-24). In principle, both decrees could be seen as responses to

a real problem, the risk that deputies might write a constitution that would favor

themselves in the future, as members of the legislature or of the executive branch

(Elster 2006). However, as solutions they were a form of overkill.

Although the public applauded the decree as an example of altruism and

disinterestedness (Shapiro 2002, p. 631-32), the reality was quite different. As on

August 4 1789, a number of different motivations were in play. The left voted for the

proposal because it expected that a legislature composed of inexperienced men

would be easily dominated by the political clubs. The right voted for it because it

expected that a legislature composed of inexperienced men would be easily

dominated by the King and his entourage. (The left was proven right, because the

King lost all moral authority after his disastrous attempt to flee the country in June

1791.) In the center, some voted for it because they were happy to be prevented

from running in an election they might lose, and others were probably swayed by

Custine’s intervention ad terrorem : “ I demand a roll-call vote. In that way, we shall

know who wants to be reelected” (AM 8, p. 120). In the spirit of the time, only

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counter-interested behavior counted as disinterested. The deputies had good reasons

to fear that lists with names of those who voted against non-reelection would

circulate in Paris, and that they might suffer violence as a result. Some, finally, were

probably drunk with disinterestedness. Even among these, the competitive urge to be

- and, above all, to be seen as - more-disinterested-than-thou may for many have

been a stronger motivation than a concern for the common good.

Compared to the earlier vote, the proportion of pseudo-enthusiasm – induced

by interest, fear, or vanity - was almost certainly higher on May 16 1791. It seems

closer to the organized “enthusiasm” for the fulfillment of the plan in Communist

societies than to the spontaneous enthusiasm that brought people into the streets of

Leipzig, to Tharir Square, and to the American battlefield. In particular, I cannot

detect any indicators of emotional decision-making similar to those I enumerated for

the vote on August 4 1789, except possibly an element of wishful thinking in the

enthusiasts who ignored or even questioned the need for political experience.

The making of the 1814 Norwegian constitution. The adoption of the

Norwegian constitution on May 17 1814 was a small miracle, or a stroke of luck.

What made it possible was enthusiasm, urgency, and wishful thinking on the part of

a politically inexperienced majority in the constituent assembly, together with a

window of opportunity created by the international situation.

In the treaty of Kiel, concluded on January 14 1814 between Sweden and

Denmark with England as a guarantor, Denmark conceded Norway to Sweden in

exchange for concessions elsewhere. The Norwegians would retain the “laws, rights,

liberties and privileges” they had at the time. As Denmark-Norway was an absolute

monarchy, these did not amount to much, and certainly not to a constitution.

The previous year, prince Christian Frederik, first in line for the Danish throne,

had been appointed viceroy or governor (stadtholder) of Norway. When he received

news about the Kiel treaty on January 24 1814, with instructions from the Danish

king to surrender the Norwegian fortresses and return to Denmark, he decided to

disobey and carve out a space for himself in Norway. Before he got fully underway,

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however, the Swedish king signed a proclamation on February 8, asking the

Norwegians to welcome the Swedish troops as “brothers” and assuring them that

“Our Governor General will […] listen to Your most eminent men and then submit

to Us for Our approval a draft of a constitution that will correspond to Your needs

and protect Your happiness. We promise in advance that this constitution will be

based on the two beautiful rights that belong to a courageous and noble people, that

of expressing itself (yttra sig) through its representatives and that of taxing itself”.

Although minimal, these guarantees at least went beyond the Danish regal law. The

instructions were not implemented immediately, since the Swedish troops were

occupied elsewhere. The Swedish crown prince and de facto ruler, Bernadotte was

involved, with his army, in the final stages of the struggle against Napoleon, which

ended with the latter’s abdication in early April. Christian Frederik stepped into the

vacuum and called for elections to a constituent assembly, which met on April 11.

He also proclaimed himself regent, in the firm expectation that he would later be

chosen as king.

None of the 112 delegates had been elected on a party platform. Yet they soon

crystallized into what came to be called the “independence party”, because its

members demanded full national independence, and the “union party”, because its

members demanded union with Sweden. They were “parties”, however, only in the

sense of informal groupings around a few leaders. Actually, the terms “independence

party” and “union party” are also misleading. According to Steen (1951, p. 142),

many – perhaps most - members of the independence party anticipated a subsequent

reunion with Denmark. Among them, he writes, “some wished for reunion, others

merely saw it as a political necessity”. The same distinction between wish and

necessity applies to members of the union party. Some, like its main spokesman

Count Wedel, had worked for union with Sweden for many years. He might also

have viewed it as inevitable. Others, such as Jacob Aall, had strong affiliations with

Denmark and viewed the union merely as a necessity imposed by the great powers.

Hence we can redefine the opposition as turning on the factual question whether

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independence was politically possible. If union was inevitable, independence was

impossible. If independence was thought to be desirable, it had to be possible, since

“ought implies can”.

The sober and experienced observers in the union party argued that

independence was obviously impossible, a “wishful and fantastic idea” (Bergsgård

1945, p. 21-22). They were right. There was no way in which major European

powers would let their treaty decision be deflected by a small and powerless

province. From his private diary (CF p. 367), it seems that Christian Frederik

realized that fact, at least intermittently, and that he only aimed at a constitution that

would be more favorable to Norway than an imposed Swedish constitution would be.

Be this as it may, he certainly encouraged the more optimistic view of the

independence party.

The optimism was rooted in enthusiasm. According to Steen (1951, p. 143-

44), the framers of 1814 were characterized by “an incredibly vitality and restless

activity” – “enthusiasm (begeistring) was their normal state of mind.” In his

Recollections, based on notes he took at the time, Jacob Aall often refers to this

emotion as motivating his opponents, sometimes calling it by the pejorative term

svermeri (Aall 1859, pp. 359, 361, 422), sometimes by the more neutral enthusiasme

(ibid., pp. 372-74) or begeistring (ibid., pp. 363, 400). The most important reference

occurs when he discusses the “excesses” that must inevitably arise in “a sudden

transition from a complete exclusion from the government to […] the participation of

the people in legislation through its representatives” (ibid., p. 431). He asserts that

“proofs of these excesses are evident in the constitutional drafts that were presented

to the constituent assembly, both by those who could not be assumed to have the

requisite knowledge and political understanding and by insightful men who were in a

kind of exalted mood that does not allow for calm deliberations” (ibid.; my italics).

(He may not have read Kant, but he sounds like him.) The excesses he had in mind

took the form of aversion to compromise (ibid., p. 432-33).

The enthusiasm was reinforced by anger. For many Norwegians, being a pawn

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in the game of the great powers, without being consulted, was insufferable.

Commenting on the emergence of the independence party after the regent’s

declaration of February 19, Aall (1859, p. 354) writes that its views “spread

increasingly in greater and greater circles from the seat of the regent to the nation as

a whole, and nurtured the patriotic mind with high-flying rhetoric taken from

Norway’s distant past and from the violence with which a foreign will wanted to

impose a hated yoke” (my italics). Similarly, Steen (1951, p. 111) writes that “what

perhaps created the most fertile soil for the policy of independence was the

indignation of the Norwegians over the way in which the old union had been

dissolved and the new one created. […] Without consulting the Norwegian people,

[the Danish king] had broken a bond that was four centuries old and handed Norway

over to Sweden, which in Norway was hated rather than loved” (my italics).

As I did for the night of August 4 1789, I shall enumerate some ways in which

enthusiasm, jointly with anger, affected the action of the Norwegian framers.

On April 16 the assembly debated a proposal on the very day it was made, although the rules it had adopted on April 11 stated that any motion had to be announced on the previous day (Aall 1859, p. 410). Like the French framers on August 4 1789, they suffered from a hot-cold empathy gap.

On April 19, the assembly took its most momentous decision, which reflected both the urgency of the majority of the framers and their tendency to wishful thinking. By the barest of majorities (the president’s vote broke a tie), the assembly adopted a proposal that was intended and understood to block any information-gathering or contact with foreign powers. Any such efforts would have been time-consuming, but the framers did not want to wait. Also, they may have been so firmly in the grip of wishful thinking that they saw no need to gather information which, they assumed, would simply favor their plans.

The aversion to compromise to which I referred earlier can also be stated as the tendency for the best to become the enemy of the good. Practical difficulties and stubborn facts are ignored.

The lack of political experience and sophistication of most framers made them

susceptible to enthusiasm, which led them to wish for a quick resolution. In some of

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the many gently ironic observations with which his Recollections are spiced, Aall

cites two other mechanisms by which rusticity led to brevity. First, the internal rules

of the assembly were prepared very quickly, leading to brief and simple regulations.

“The untrained hand was quicker than the trained hand would later become. In the

subsequent ordinary sessions of parliament, the preparation of the rules and the

debates over them” would take up a considerable amount of time (Aall 1859, p. 393;

my italics). Second, “for the cause as a whole it must be esteemed useful that the

ability to speak in public was yet poorly developed among the representatives at

Eidsvold. One can just imagine how these important objects of deliberation would

have been treated in later parliaments. The ability to express one’s ideas and the

courage to let oneself be heard in public assemblies has in later parliaments often led

to excessive delays” (Aall 1859, p. 429-30; my italics). These effects were, however,

only correlated with enthusiasm, not caused by it.

Because the framers were in a hurry and proceeded quickly, they managed to

finish the constitution just as Carl Johan was coming back from the continent with

his troops. Had they taken the time to gather more information, he would have been

able to block their efforts and impose the minimal constitution proposed by the

Swedish king on February 8. As the framers presented him with a full constitution as

a fait accompli, however, he obtained only the minimal adjustments needed by a

union with Sweden. Aall (1859, p. 407) wrote that “Under the auspices of

independence and shaped by the nation’s own representatives, the work took a much

more liberal form than if it had been carried out under the impressive influence of

Sweden, itself supported by the most powerful states of Europe” (my italics). Steen

(1951, p. 163) makes the same point. The paradox is that blind enthusiasm, in Kant’s

words, led to an outcome that prudent and realistic considerations, aimed at the same

end, could never have produced. Ramsay suggested, as we saw, that the Americans

also benefited from their wishful thinking.

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IV. Conclusion

I shall now try to address the question in the title by confronting the examples

in Section III with the account of emotions that I sketched in Section II.

Arousal. Steen’s observation that the enthusiasm of the Norwegian framers

induced “an incredibly vitality and restless activity” strongly suggests an emotional

arousal of the organism. The statements that the framers were “drunk with

patriotism” and in a state of “noble intoxication” on August 4 1789 and “drunk with

disinterestedness” on May 16 1791 convey the same impression. As I have noted,

however, it is not easy to determine the exact motivational mix behind the two self-

denying ordinances. There were certainly strong emotions at work, but enthusiasm

in the OED sense may not always have been the most important one. The frequent

references to the “electrifying” effect of the events (e.g. AP 8, p. 307; Bailly 1804, p.

314-15) are also hard to interpret. Among the many references to enthusiasm in

Ramsay’s History, none allows us to infer an altered physiological state.

Impact on beliefs and preferences. The historical examples certainly support

Kant’s idea that enthusiasm is “blind”, that is, incapable of rational choice of means

and assessment of facts. I have tried to illustrate how it can generate wishful

thinking, urgency leading to suboptimal gathering of information, and a hot-cold

empathy gap. I have no evidence suggesting that it can shape risk preferences or time

preferences, except that some cases that look like wishful thinking (optimistic risk

assessments) might actually be due to a lowering of risk aversion. It is worth

mentioning that Jennifer Lerner (personal communication) agrees with my intuition

that enthusiasm is similar to anger in that both induce more optimistic risk

assessments and lower risk aversion.

Short half-life. If enthusiasm is an emotion, we should expect it to abate in

strength with time (but also expect that the agents will believe that it will endure).

Ramsay (1789, vol. 2, p. 83) affirms that in “the first years of the war the mercantile

character was lost in the military spirit of the times, but in the progress of it the

inhabitants, cooling in their enthusiasm, gradually returned to their former habits of

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lucrative business”. Mirabeau’s secretary Dumont (1832, p. 103) writes that after the

night of August 4, “one tried to amend and modify the most imprudent parts of these

precipitous decrees, but it was not easy to retract concessions that the people already

regarded as indisputable rights”. Øystein Sørensen suggests (personal

communication) that the Norwegian enthusiasm had run out of steam by the summer

of 1814, thus preventing a disastrous military confrontation that would have led to an

imposed Swedish constitution. If that hypothesis were to be confirmed, both the

eruption of the emotions and their abatement were crucial for the happy outcome.

Action tendencies. A recurrent feature of enthusiasm is the sacrifice of self-

interest, either by exposing oneself to physical danger or by renouncing income,

property, and privileges. Ramsay repeatedly cites both of these effects. The

renouncement of feudal dues on August 4 1789 was motivated by self-interest, as

property-owners believed that it would pacify the peasantry and prevent further

attacks or demands. By contrast, the sacrifice of privileges was often contrary to self-

interest and arguably due, to some extent at least, to enthusiasm in the OED sense. It

is more difficult to find an element of self-sacrifice in the behavior of the Norwegian

framers. The assembly counted a large number of officers and soldiers, 33 deputies

out of 112, who were willing to fight for independence. For the most part, the

military deputies belonged to the independence party (Bergsgård 1943, p. 173).

When Christian Frederik (CF pp. 337, 354) castigated members of the union party

for their pusillanimity, we can perhaps infer that being in favor of independence

carried some risks or cost. Some deputies were, perhaps, animated by hope rather

than by enthusiasm. While hope can have many of the other features I have

enumerated, notably the capacity to induce wishful thinking, it does not have a

specific action tendency.

Cognitive antecedents: the missing piece of the puzzle. I believe that the

features I have enumerated make up a strong case for viewing enthusiasm as an

emotion. Yet the case is incomplete in the absence of demonstrable cognitive

antecedents. Before I address that issue, let me comment on the intriguing fact that in

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all the three historical cases, the enthusiasm had an emotional antecedent: anger in

America and Norway, fear in France. Presumably, the East Germans and Egyptians,

too, were angry at the way their regimes treated them. As noted, anger and

enthusiasm seem to be similar in their impact on risk assessments and risk aversion.

Fear has the opposite effects: It makes us more pessimistic and more risk averse

(Lerner and Keltner 2001). An emotional alchemy that turns anger into enthusiasm is

perhaps imaginable, but hardly one that turns fear into enthusiasm. I leave this

question unresolved.

Unfortunately, I shall also leave the issue of the cognitive antecedents of

enthusiasm unresolved. According to the OED, it proceeds “from an intense

conviction of the worthiness of the object”. That necessary conviction is not,

however, sufficient. Perhaps one should add the belief that the object be attainable,

and not merely a pipe dream. However, in the Norwegian case that belief – that

independence was possible - was an effect of the emotion, not its cause. The goal

was a pipe dream.

But if enthusiasm is not an emotion, what is it?

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