After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights

by Robert Meister

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Politics

544 pages, Hardcover

First published December 3, 2010

Reviews

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bob was my advisor so I was lucky enough to hear him talk on many of these issues in far more detail - and had the chance to ask questions, too. I think it might be a lot harder to get what's going on here without that benefit. But it's a rich, complicated, and incredibly important book. And if parts are difficult, the broader themes are quite simple and powerful.

[Colm Gillis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book which deconstructs the modern version of human rights. It very much reads also as a theory of history. The author's primary concern is with evil and how to reconcile justice in the present with the 'evil' that occurred in the past. In doing so, he touches on the South African experience and the Jewish experience in the Holocaust and how the latter is relevant to the Palestinian question. He concludes with some interesting thoughts on Islam. Overall the book is difficult to follow and at times it feels like reading someone's notebook. That is a major defect of the book. It obscures many of the interesting and valid points raised which are food for thought.

[Meru · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review to come