Includes bibliographical references and index.

Acknowledgments; Introduction: A New Rhetoric of Passions; 1 Early Modern Emotion and the Economy of Scarcity; 2 Apathy in the Shadow Economy of Emotion; 3 Virtues of Passivity in the English Civil War; 4 The Politics of Pride in David Hume and David Simple; 5 Thinking and Feeling without a Brain: William Perfect and Adam Smith's Compassion; Index.

Princess Diana's death was a tragedy that provoked mourning across the globe; the death of a homeless person, more often than not, is met with apathy. How can we account for this uneven distribution of emotion? Can it simply be explained by the prevailing scientific understanding? Uncovering a rich tradition beginning with Aristotle, The Secret History of Emotion offers a counterpoint to the way we generally understand emotions today. Through a radical rereading of Aristotle, Seneca, Thomas Hobbes, Sarah Fielding, and Judith Butler, among others, Daniel M. Gross reveals a persistent intellectu.