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...Arendt, and the works she had written in an effort to grapple with another situation beyond the common measure. "The problem of evil," Arendt forecast in 1945, "will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe -- as death became the fundamental problem after the last war."
'Evil' is word one heard with some frequency in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, though rarely deployed with Arendt's precision. Within some intellectual circles, a denunciation of these acts as evil has been accompanied by a far too simple justification of liberalism and the Enlightenment as decency incarnate. Evil, in this view, implies more than doing harm or inflicting pain on innocents. Behavior is evil when it attacks valued goods proffered by Western modernity.
Disputing the integrity and worth of these goods, critics in other intellectual circles have focused instead on the evils of post colonialism and the exploitative relationships characteristic of global capitalism. It is these iniquities that should command our attention, not the acts of terror they consider in a cooler, sometimes icy, register.
I find the impulses at play in both responses unsettling. Each group is better at assuming a posture than developing ways of...
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More articles from Daedalus
A perfect crime: Inequality in the age of globalization., January 01, 2002
Beyond compassion: Selfish reasons for being unselfish.(Column), January 01, 2002
Against redress.(Column), January 01, 2002
Does inequality matter?(Column), January 01, 2002
America's lost egalitarian tradition.(Column), January 01, 2002
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