Alan Wolfe
discusses
Political Evil:
What It Is and How to Combat It
DateSep
5
Wednesday
September 5, 2012 7:00 PM |
LocationHarvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138 |
Tickets
This event is free; no tickets are required.
|
Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome ALAN WOLFE, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, for a discussion of his book Political Evil: What It Is and How to Combat It.
Now out in paperback, The New York Times Book Review called Political Evil “Intelligent and often brave . . . Audacious . . . Important . . . timely, valuable and refreshingly adult.”
In an age of genocide, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and torture, evil threatens us in ways radically different from tsunamis and financial panics. Nature unleashes its wrath and people rush to help the victims. Evil shows its face and we are paralyzed over how to respond.
It was not always this way. During the twentieth century, thinkers as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Reinhold Niebuhr, Arthur Koestler, and George Orwell made evil central to everything they wrote. Alan Wolfe argues that in an age of partisan blame-assigning, therapeutic excuse-making, and theological question-dodging, we need to get serious about the problem of evil once again. While there will always be something incomprehensible about evil, we are very much capable of understanding and combating the use of evil means to obtain political ends.
Looking at examples of political evil around the globe—in the Middle East, Darfur, the Balkans, and at home in the West—Wolfe shows us how seemingly small distinctions can make an immense difference in international response. And he makes clear that much-needed change can be initiated with a shift in how we talk and think about political evil. Political Evil sheds essential light on the creation of policy and on a concrete path to a more practicable and just future.
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