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Martha Nussbaum’s Third Way: Compassion in Late Capitalism

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines Martha Nussbaum’s formulation of the public value of the humanities. According to Nussbaum, today’s democracies need compassionate citizens, and the type of compassion that serves politics best can be developed through the study of the Liberal Arts. I try to reconstruct Nussbaum’s argumentation and show its sociological implications. Considering the ongoing debate on the crisis of public engagement, Nussbaum’s thesis offers an original way of restoring meaning to public matters. Its weakness, however, is little insight into the questions of social structure and the rationalization of political life. Nussbaum’s vision of the political role of compassion can be described as an element of a liberal utopia since compassion serves to constantly correct the unintended consequences of the functioning of liberal democratic institutions rather than to transform them.

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