Manu Samnotra opens Worldly Shame: Ethos in Action by quoting remarks given by former United States President Barack Obama on what would have been Nelson Mandela’s hundredth birthday. In his comments, Obama lamented the ‘utter loss of shame among political leaders where they’re caught in a lie and they just double down and lie some more’ (p. viii). Samnotra’s book argues that Obama’s complaint helps capture the importance of shame in political life.

Samnotra argues for the value of what he calls worldly shame. Central to this construct is ‘worldliness,’ an orientation toward the world in which we are ‘receptive to the fact that we share the world with others’ (p. 2). Samnotra contrasts worldliness with ‘worldlessness’ in which we see ourselves as moved ‘by seemingly impersonal forces erode our ability to comprehend our reliance on others and act upon these linkages’ (p. 3). An orientation of worldlessness emphasizes our discreetness and individuality while also de-emphasizing the degree to which the success of our projects relies on others. Worldliness, however, is not merely a claim about the importance of others to the efficacy of actions; rather, it is ‘a form of meaning making practice’ (p. 4, emphasis original). We not only share the world with others, but we also make a shared world with others. Worldliness is simultaneously a recognition of and a commitment to this meaning making practice.

Samnotra argues that shame both aids us in the development of worldliness and signifies our adoption of it. Shame is ‘activated only because there is an encounter with powerlessness in the context of social relations’ (p. 32). Rather than resist this experience, we should instead think of shame as ‘teaching’ us that we are deeply dependent on others in social life (p. 33). In order to illustrate this feature of shame, Samnotra draws on Hannah Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman, the biographical work about Varnhagen’s life. As Arendt tells the story, Varnhagen’s life is marked by shame: she seeks acceptance and faces rejection in an anti-Semitic world. As Samnotra puts it, Varnhagen eventually ‘awakens to a hazardous and ambivalent path’ where she discovers her power to ‘resist narratives of belonging that shaped much of her life’ (pp. 35–36). According to Varnhagen’s husband, on her deathbed, she uttered the following: ‘The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame…I should on no account now wish to have missed’ (quoted p. 36). Samnotra, agreeing with Arendt, reads this statement as a realization. Varnhagen sees the social vulnerability she experienced as a form of connection to her fellow humans. As Samnotra puts it, ‘without shame, there would have been space for neither receiving generosity nor recognizing mankind’s supposed unity’ (p. 36).

Samnotra, of course, is sensitive to those who are skeptical of shame’s value. In the third chapter, he takes on the critique of the political value of shame. Samnotra divides the critique into two main objections: shame ‘disables action,’ and the values that shame inculcates cannot be ‘receptive to the plurality of the world’ (p. 72). Regarding the first objection, feelings of shame are well known to be paralyzing. Drawing on Levinas, Samnotra points out that the Other’s gaze ‘affixes us to our bodies’ (p. 61). In the case of Varnhagen, for example, the anti-Semites in her life refused to recognize her as anything other than ‘the Jew.’ Not only does this affixing prevent Varnhagen from fully inhabiting the world with her fellows, but it also prevents her from mobilizing with others to change her social situation. With regard to the second critique, shame ‘disciplines us into acting in certain kinds of prescribed ways’ (p. 62). Because shame ultimately enforces dominant norms, it does not encourage a general receptivity to plurality. As Samnotra puts it, ‘to act in a world that always disciplines my actions in advance…is to act into contexts where politics has disappeared’ (p. 62).

Samnotra responds to both of these critiques. Although shame can be paralyzing, it has also been used in the precisely opposite way: as a call to action (p. 61). Arendt employed this strategy in her columns in Aufbau, the German-Jewish periodical published prior to and during WWII (p. 63). Samnotra argues that Arendt addresses her readers directly in her column—she ‘beseeched, she warned, and she scolded her audience into, what she hoped, would be concerted and unflagging action against the Nazis’ (p. 64). By invoking shame, Arendt alerts her readers to the discrepancy between their words and their actions. Such an invocation asks the audience to evaluate who they are or have become. In this way, shame opens space for the readers to ‘creates for themselves a new subjectivity capable of taking on the task’ (p. 65).

Shame can also create solidarity. It is true that shame can be used to discipline us into dominant ideals. But this same feature of shame—that it can help create a ‘We’—can be deployed to aid in healthy self-criticism. It is to this ‘we’ that Arendt appeals when she calls to the collective identity of her Aufbau readers (p. 79). Shame poses critical questions to our ‘we’ identity. Look at the horrors of Nazism or racial violence in the U.S.: Is this who ‘we’ are or who ‘we’ want to be? Questions about who we are can create the very solidarity necessary for reshaping our political worlds. Samnotra argues that this sort of worldly shame can be deployed in global contexts as well. ‘Shame,’ he writes in the final chapter, ‘enables a certain stock-taking’ (p. 117).

Anyone interested in political emotions and the political value of shame will find much to ponder in Samnotra’s work. Those familiar with Arendt will feel particularly at home in the discussion. I would like to close with some reflections on the promise of worldly shame. Samnotra successfully spells out some of what shame can do. That it can accomplish many things does not mean that it will. As Samnotra is well aware, shame can inspire solidarity as much as it can fracture communities. It can be a call to action as much as it can freeze us on the spot. The question that faces those who are optimistic about the political value of shame is: how do we collectively create the conditions that allow worldly shame to flourish while discouraging the harmful version of shame?

To return to Obama’s comments at the beginning, Samnotra may be correct that the shamelessness of the lies is due to the loss or denial of the sense of the shared world. That we can identify the value of worldly shame need not give us the tools we need to reinstate it once it is lost. Even the calls to shame that Arendt engaged in during the war are unlikely to be heard by those who have defiantly inoculated themselves against the voices of others. Shame alone—even worldly shame—seems unable to bring about the changes we may need to make those in power accountable. My guess is that Samnotra is sensitive to these concerns. He may agree, for example, that it might take altering some of the material conditions of our social life in order to foster worldly shame. Altering these conditions requires collective action, but it is not clear that this kind of collective action can be accomplished by appeals to shame. In order for shame to get purchase in this way, there needs to be a meaningful ‘we’ to appeal to.

Skeptics will likely point to these sorts of issues as a reason to doubt the value or importance of shame: although it can make us receptive to our interdependence on others, it is not sufficient to create the collective political life we seek. Of course, Samnotra need not convince the most ardent critics in order to contribute fruitfully to the ongoing debate about the value of shame. He provides strong reasons to think that shame is central to political life and that we would not be better off without it.