After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (Columbia Studies in Political Thought / Political History)

Meister, Robert Robert Meister,

ISBN 10: 0231150377 / ISBN 13: 9780231150378

Published by Columbia University Press -, 2012

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (Columbia Studies in Political Thought / Political History)
• Publisher: Columbia University Press -
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0231150377
• ISBN 13: 9780231150378
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

The way in which mainstream human rights discourse speaks of such evils as the Holocaust, slavery, or apartheid puts them solidly in the past. Its elaborate techniques of "transitional" justice encourage future generations to move forward by creating a false assumption of closure, enabling those who are guilty to elude responsibility. This approach to history, common to late-twentieth-century humanitarianism, doesn't presuppose that evil ends when justice begins. Rather, it assumes that a time before justice is the moment to put evil in the past.

Merging examples from literature and history, Robert Meister confronts the problem of closure and the resolution of historical injustice. He boldly challenges the empty moral logic of "never again" or the theoretical reduction of evil to a cycle of violence and counterviolence, broken only once evil is remembered for what it was. Meister criticizes such methods for their deferral of justice and susceptibility to exploitation and elaborates the flawed moral logic of "never again" in relation to Auschwitz and its evolution into a twenty-first-century doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect.

About the Author

Robert Meister is professor of social and political thought at the University of California, Santa Cruz. An active participant in California higher education politics, he is director of the Bruce Initiative on Rethinking Capitalism at UCSC and the author of Political Identity: Thinking Through Marx.