Meister After Evil

A Politics of Human Rights
Erscheinungsjahr 2010
ISBN: 978-0-231-52095-9
Verlag: Columbia University Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 544 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Meister, Robert

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein Geschichtspolitik, Erinnerungskultur
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Kultur Menschenrechte, Bürgerrechte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

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.