 Early modern philosophy held a special place for the emotions in its political and social theory (see Kahn, Saccamano &amp; Coli, 2006). Indeed, there was a popular early modern genre of ‘how-to’ books about techniques for governing others by managing their emotions. Likewise, a great deal of political philosophy concerned the management of the emotions by social institutions and authorities, with Hobbes and Mandeville being just two of the most obvious examples. Hume picks up on the language of remedying our emotions to discuss how practices of justice and institutions of magistracy remediate our partial affections (see T 489). But there are also deeper issues about what role the emotions might play in making social order possible. Many philosophers held that the emotions facilitated social interaction: Descartes suggested something of the sort in his analyses of such passions as love and generosity. Malebranche was even more clearly committed to the view, holding that the communication of the emotions is crucial to social organization, ranking and cohesion. Hobbes and Spinoza, in contrast, found the grounds of much interpersonal conflict in the emotions, and even diagnosed specific emotions as inherently disruptive to social order, e.g., glory for Hobbes. But by the same token, there are many passions that Hobbes stated “incline us to peace,” and Spinoza allowed that insofar as people agree in affects, they agree in nature. Eighteenth-century philosophers tended to evaluate the social effects of the emotions in terms of whether they were self- or other-directed, with Shaftesbury and Hutcheson arguing against Mandeville that our most natural emotions were other-directed. In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1759), Edmund Burke distinguished between the passions directed at self-preservation and those belonging to society, but spends the lion’s share of his time on the latter. The issue is somewhat more complicated in Hume, but he does seem to take the development of our emotions and their susceptibility to a standard of appropriateness to be indispensable to many of the “artifices” that make social life possible. A different twist is provided by Rousseau’s contrast between two kinds of self-directed affection, amour de soi and amour propre, of which the former, but not the latter seems consistent with compassion for others.