A01=Robert Meister
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Robert Meister
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HP
Category=JPA
Category=JPVH
Category=QDTS
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Language_English
PA=Available
Price_€100 and above
PS=Active
softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9780231150361
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 22 Dec 2010
- Publisher: Columbia University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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.
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.
