People are often skeptical about the possibility of impartial deliberation. Yet while the demands of impartial deliberation are high, they are demands that we can satisfy, at least so long as we acknowledge the affective dimensions of deliberation.To acknowledge these dimensions is not to bring more passions into politics. There are plenty of passions in politics already. Moral sentiment does involve the public communication of sentiments and a refined faculty of sympathy, and justice will require that some previously silenced sentiments find a new voice on the public stage. But the communication of sentiments is already happening all around us; deliberation is steeped in passions as it is. The challenge is to civilize the passions that we cannot avoid and that practical reason cannot fully transcend. Achieving impartiality requires effort and widespread practices of cultivation and self-cultivation, which foster an increasingly inclusive and more sensitive faculty of moral sentiment. But affective impartiality is achievable. Our mistake has been to regard impartiality as flowing from an ideal of reason that no one has ever known and that human beings are constitutionally incapable of realizing.The primary objective of Civil Passions is to correct this mistake, to advance our basic understanding of ourselves and of the deliberative faculties of democratic citizenship. Passion and practical reason are not separate but deeply entwined. Impartial deliberation conceived in the old way is therefore a chimera.The theory of moral sentiment gives us a new way to understand impartiality. This view is truer to who we really are even as it answers our aspiration for justice. The deep connection between norms and motives within moral sentiment links aspects of the self that rationalist approaches tend to divide. Moral sentiment makes the self-as-public-deliberator one with the self-as-political-agent, and in this way it better empowers us to bring the conclusions of our deliberation to fruition in practice. Impartial deliberation feels as well as reasons, the path to justice is lighted by the glow of civil passions.My hope for the book is that it will speak effectively to what I consider a serious problem in American public life today. On the common assumption of a dichotomy between reason and passion, one either deliberates from “impartial reason” or one’s deliberation is driven by personal passions. And when passions drive deliberation, we think, the results can only be described as debased.Yet the rationalist ideal of impartiality that pervades the public culture is not true to who we are as human beings. It should therefore come as no surprise that public decision making in the United States today most often proceeds by means of interest-based competition, which is another name for the politics of untutored passion. Yet even as we give in to the politics of passion in its lowest form, our elusive ideal of reason continues to engage our aspirations and to tell us that passion-driven deliberation is illegitimate and likely to generate injustice.One result of trying and failing to live up to this impossible ideal of deliberation is cynicism about politics. The widely discussed lack of political participation in the United States today is only partly a product of excessive individualism, the absence of civic virtue, and the lack of social capital – as so many theorists have argued in recent years. This disengagement also reflects the disillusionment that naturally follows from our attachment to the false dichotomy between reason and passion, and from the absence of an achievable ideal of impartiality.To make matters worse, widespread citizen disengagement undercuts the possibility of genuine impartiality in public deliberation. The reason is that our deliberative process can only be fully impartial if it reflects the legitimate concerns of all affected. But we can only know the concerns of others if they tell us about them, which requires precisely the kind of active engagement in public life that the rationalist ideal discourages.American politics therefore needs a new way of understanding public deliberation, one that answers to the noble aspiration of impartiality but that does not disparage the passions that inevitably influence decisions and animate action. We need to reject the false dichotomy between reason and passion in both political theory and American public life: this dichotomy undercuts our ability to advance the cause of justice.In its place we need a better understanding of the holistic nature of practical reasoning as a faculty that combines both cognitive and affective states of mind, both intellect and feeling. We need standards that inspire reflective and legitimate decision-making but that are also practically viable and motivationally compelling, hence affectively engaged.The purpose of Civil Passions is to illuminate the nature of practical judgment in this respect, to show why this more holistic vision of ourselves and our capacities promises a more vital – and more just – democratic politics.