Since we’re talking about feelings, I’ll confess to experiencing pinpricks of irritation when I came across that self-satisfied line, which appears on the second page of Nussbaum’s preface, before she has even started to make her argument. But one of the virtues of this slender volume is how gradually and scrupulously it moves, as Nussbaum pushes you to slow down, think harder and revisit your knee-jerk assumptions.

She’s transparent about her beliefs and her background, describing her cosseted upbringing in Philadelphia as “fairly affluent” (and her father, whom she loved and eventually rebelled against, as racist, sexist and anti-Semitic). She admits that her “highly privileged life” as a celebrated academic affords her the luxury of contemplating at leisure what plenty of people are experiencing as a national emergency. Nussbaum might live differently than most Americans do, but she wants to put that remove to good use. Where other members of the elite might flee or close ranks, she insists on engagement, accepting the “responsibility of dissecting our own moment and our own pathologies.”

Image Martha C. Nussbaum Credit... via The University of Chicago

Which isn’t to say “The Monarchy of Fear” is an entirely successful deployment of her privileged perspective. The book starts out strong, as she breaks fear down into first principles in order to show how feelings of insecurity and powerlessness can render an otherwise useful emotion like anger, or a desire for fairness, into something more vengeful and poisonous. She’s a skillful rhetorician, gracefully navigating her way around partisan land mines by talking about babies and ancient Greece. She wants to show how the feeling of fear is primal and therefore universal, reminding us that we were all helpless infants once, dependent on the kindness and mercy of others.

This shared experience of “animal vulnerability,” she says, holds the biggest promise and peril for a democracy. It’s something everyone has in common, an incentive to cooperate and trust in one another rather than go it alone. In “Hiding From Humanity” (2004), she explicitly called for “a society of citizens who admit that they are needy and vulnerable.” But this neediness is so elemental and terrifying that we can also insist on repudiating it, especially when we feel ignored or, worse, let down. Fear of our own vulnerability can make us mistrustful of the world, turning us into self-absorbed narcissists.