Democracy is inevitably messy, in part because the availability and affect heuristics that guide citizens’ beliefs and attitudes are inevitably biased, even if they generally point in the right direction. Psychology should inform the design of risk policies that combine the experts’ knowledge with the public’s emotions and intuitions.

Something odd occurs when Spinoza comes to explain this affective foundation of political order – an intersection between his psychological and political theory that Matheron’s close studies were some of the first to elucidate.