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Book Review
The Political Mind
Why you can’t understand 21st‐Century American Politics with an 18th‐
Century Brain
Penguin Group (USA), 2008
The study of the mind presents several implications; one of
these is certainly political. Politics is not only an abstract
concept concerning administration and power; it is also an
embodied idea involving different cognitive functions
instantiated by our brain. Any cognitive ability, like the
communicative skills we use every day, as well as our aptitude
to recur to moral evaluations, is strictly related to various
bodily features characterizing each of us. Understanding the
ways our natural constitution shapes our mind represents
today a new challenge that could change the manner we
approach the study of social phenomena in the future.
Lakoff’s Book is a description of some of the main scientific
theories that make possible a naturalistic analysis of different
aspects of our social world, revealing the importance of the unconscious mechanisms
regulating political life. This book is an instrument for all readers interested in knowing how
science can be successfully involved in the development of the social studies and, at the same
time, it represents an acute analysis of the major cognitive strategies adopted by the principal
political alignments of the United States. The Political Mind is principally a work about politics;
but it’s also an attempt to link together salient outcomes of cognitive science, neurobiology
and linguistics, with the explicit philosophical aim of defining a more complete understanding
of “what it means to be a human being”.
For Lakoff we are facing the necessity to abandon the traditional way we conceive our rational
thought, as well as to change the established role we attribute to rationality in the foundation
of our democratic systems. The old enlightenment’s ideal of (pure) reason, involving notions
such as universality, evidence and abstractness, employed for many centuries to justify the
main ideas of the progressive tradition, clashes today with evidences coming from empirical
research. Recently, cognitive inquires, as well as functional and anatomical brain studies, have
revealed a different imagine of rationality, characterized by natural contingences, unconscious
mechanisms and embodied aspects. These represent a deep change of paradigm in the way we
conceive rationality, involving necessarily modifications also in the way we understand aspects
of our life, such as communication, morality and politics.
To understand what exactly drives Lakoff to propose an innovative twenty‐first‐century
conception of the human mind, it’s necessary to begin with one of the basic assumptions of his
book. For Lakoff, an adequate analysis of the political context begins necessarily from the fact
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that we think with our brain, that is, from the fact that we have no choice but to assume that
all human cognitive life is subject to the rules governing the behavior of our neurons. In its
practical dimension politics involves many cognitive abilities, such as communication,
evaluation and conceptualization, all of these inseparably related with different natural
features of our brain. For this reason, for Lakoff, the study of politics can be considered an
analysis of a particular human activity about changing the brain through the individuation and
the use of the adequate cognitive strategy.
One of the main purposes of Lakoff’s work is to show how a deeper awareness of the way
different brain mechanisms are involved in our cognitive life can be considered a useful
instrument for the understanding and the development of a political behavior. Far to propose
a kind of deterministic neuro‐politics, or a sort of rhetorical neuro‐liberalism, Lakoff intends to
suggest an original way to analyze the political context introducing measures of evaluation
updated to the actual level of scientific knowledge. To be aware of the natural constraints
regulating fundamental aspects of our social life, such as emphatic attunements and moral
judgments, is for Lakoff indispensable to promoting a mindful approach to the complex world
of political thought.
Lakoff’s argumentation follows two principal lines. On the one hand he develops an exam of
some neurobiological features generally involved by political thought, on the other he
produces an analysis of the main cognitive frames present within the actual American debate.
At the end of his work Lakoff shows the possibility of creating a strict correlation between
these two different approaches to the political discussion, underlining the role that a
naturalistic point of view can assume in the examination of our social life.
At the basis of Lakoff’s analysis is the relatively recent discover about the behavior of
particular neural circuits present in the human brain (and in the brain of other primates) called
Mirror Systems. Well confirmed experiments show the role of these kind of neurons for the
development of imitative process involved by social abilities such as intentional understanding
and emphatic attunement. In light of these results, Lakoff proposes an original unification
between some aspects of his célèbre studies of cognitive linguistics and recent acquisitions of
neuroscience, showing how an original description of the cognitive processes involved by the
political thought (and praxis too) is starting to be available also from a biological level of
description.
In Lakoff’s Book politics assumes the aspect of a cognitive strategy involving both a qualified
use of language and deep understanding of what determines moral evaluations. The first task
passes through the introduction of the notion of frame, that is through the awareness that the
understanding of any meaning is always strictly dependent from the understanding of the
conceptual and evaluative parameters related to it. In this way, the success of a
communicative process is made possible by the ability to evoke the right frame in whom the
message is directed.
For Lakoff, language is a matter of neural connections. To be aware of the mechanisms with
which our brain makes possible semantic understanding, that is by the activation and the
neural recruitment of just present synaptic relations, as well as by the construction of new
neural circuits, gives us a new appreciation for language, how it is exploited in different
Book Review – The Political Mind
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circumstances and what the limits are for its use in communicative contexts such as politics for
example. Political praxis involves the use of the right words within the opportune
circumstances, pointing to “activate” the right cognitive associations between the semantic
features characterizing any linguistic frame. Working within the framework of an adversary,
evoking his cognitive associations rather than the proper, represents a typical error committed
by politicians who ignore the basic cognitive and biological rules at the basis of any
communicative process.
Questions concerning the explanation of our common social behaviors are central for Lakoff’s
argumentation. The understanding of the natural processes that makes empathy a feature of
our common social life represents, for the author, a crucial point in the definition of what he
calls a Cognitive Policy. A Cognitive Policy, as Lakoff defines it, is a strategy to getting an idea,
for example a moral idea, into the normal public discourse, using the adequate communicative
approach to produce a desired “change in the brain of millions of people”.
Far from being a proposal involving the use of scientific knowledge to instill opinions or
manipulate minds, Lakoff’s book intends to show with clear language what political
understanding really involves on the biological ground, directing the attention of the reader to
the presence of natural, but unconscious, mechanisms of our everyday thought. Lakoff’s aim is
to make mindful both the general public and the politicians of the hidden dimension of any
political process, making possible a more responsible way to understand and practice political
life.
In his book Lakoff doesn’t hide his personal purpose to suggest a new way to intend the
progressive conception of politics. Analyzing the contemporary political language he makes
explicit the conceptual and moral differences that distinguish the two main ways to intend
social life in United States, revealing the different cognitive metaphors used by the
conservative and the progressive alignments. The book represents a criticism to the
communicative strategy pursued by the American left during the last fifty years, underlining its
inability to compete with the more efficacious tactics of the conservative part. Lakoff’s work
also represents an analysis that, with the appropriate translation, could be adopted to describe
the actual political state of many European countries, illuminating the presence of some
shared critical aspects of the contemporary progressive strategy all around the world.
The supremacy of the conservative frames in the political discussion, beyond to be frequently
imputable to a question of mass media control, is also the consequence of an inadequate
communicative approach of the great part of the progressive movements. The choice to adopt
a communicative strategy characterized by the evocation of enlightenment values, such as
universal rationality, or logical evidence, is now revealing its cognitive limits, forcing the
progressives to face the dominance of the more effectively conservative frames in the actual
political language.
Beyond to be an excellent example of scientific popularization, Lakoff’s book represents a
pioneering work in the definition of an original multidisciplinary approach to the world of
politics, proponing a new interaction between natural and social sciences. In doing this, Lakoff
is motivated by an optimistic stance about the possibility to give novel life to an Enlightenment
revolution, based on the diffusion of a new conception about reason and cognition that,
differently respect the past a priori stance, might be developed in accordance with the actual
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scientific acquisitions. For Lakoff, furnishing a natural explanation of the hidden processes
regulating our cognition, makes possible to consciously create a new conceptual framework,
that is an imaginary and an emotional tone in which to develop a novel approach to the
political dimension, characterized by moral consequence too.
Lakoff’s book shows that we are in front of one of the most important challenges of the
scientific history. The by now plausible possibility to develop a naturalistic approach to
complex aspects of our everyday life represents an exciting promises concerning the future
development of the scientific research toward a new understanding of our social nature. From
some years cultural and economical interests together exert a great pressure in support of a
rapid development of applicative outcomes of (Social) Neuroscience and in this field the
expectations appear to be enormous. Now, to know what practical changes the diffusion of a
“21st century” updated awareness of the social dimension will produce in our individual life is
just a matter of time.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Brain Change and Social Change
How the Brain Shapes the Political Mind
Anna Nicole on the Brain
The Political Unconscious
The Brain's Role in Family Values
The Brain's Role in Political Ideologies
Political Challenges for the Twenty‐first‐Century Mind
A New Consciousness
Traumatic Ideas: The War on Terror
Framing Reality: Privateering
Fear of Framing
Confronting Stereotypes: Sons of the Welfare Queen
Aim Above the Bad Apples
Cognitive Policy
Contested Concepts Everywhere
The Technical Is the Political
Exploring the Political Brain
The Problem of Self‐interest
The Metaphors Defining Rational Action
Why Hawks Win
The Brain's Language
Language in the New Enlightenment
Afterword: What If It Works?
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