Cover image for After Evil : A Politics of Human Rights.
After Evil : A Politics of Human Rights.
Title:
After Evil : A Politics of Human Rights.
Author:
Meister, Robert.
ISBN:
9780231520959
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (421 pages)
Series:
Columbia Studies in Political Thought / Political History
Contents:
Cover -- Half title -- Series Page -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface: My Task -- Introduction: Disavowing Evil -- 1: The Ideology and Ethics of Human Rights -- 2: Ways of Winning -- 3: Living On -- 4: The Dialectic of Race and Place -- 5: "Never Again" -- 6: Still the Jewish Question? -- 7: Bystanders and Victims -- 8: Adverse Possession -- 9: States of "Emergency" -- 10: Surviving Catastrophe -- Conclusion: Justice in Time -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- References -- Index.
Abstract:
Mainstream human rights discourse speaks of such evils as the Holocaust, slavery, or apartheid in ways that put them solidly in the past. Its elaborate techniques of "transitional" justice encourage future generations to move forward, but the false assumption of closure enables those who are guilty to elude responsibility. This approach to history, common to late-twentieth-century humanitarianism, doesn't presuppose that evil ends only 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 that is broken once evil is remembered for what it was. Meister calls out such methods for their deferral of justice and susceptibility to exploitation. Specifically, he spells out the moral logic "never again" in relation to Auschwitz and its evolution into a twenty-first-century doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
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