Confronting Evil in History (Elements in Historical Theory and Practice)

✍ Scribed by Daniel Little

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2022
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 76
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Evil is sometimes thought to be incomprehensible and abnormal, falling outside of familiar historical and human processes. And yet the twentieth century was replete with instances of cruelty on a massive scale, including systematic torture, murder, and enslavement of ordinary, innocent human beings. These overwhelming atrocities included genocide, totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and the Holodomor. This Element underlines the importance of careful, truthful historical investigation of the complicated realities of dark periods in human history; the importance of understanding these events in terms that give attention to the human experience of the people who were subject to them and those who perpetrated them; the question of whether the idea of 'evil' helps us to confront these periods honestly; and the possibility of improving our civilization's resilience in the face of the impulses towards cruelty to other human beings that have so often emerged.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Confronting Evil in History
Contents
1 Introduction
2 Philosophy and Twentieth-Century Evil
What is Evil?
Historical Examples of Evil
The Evil of Genocide
A Role for Philosophy
The Philosophy of History
3 Historicizing Human Culture
Historicism and Culture Change
The Two Moral Perspectives
Creating Institutions
4 Evil in the Twentieth Century: The Final Solution
New Elements of Holocaust History
Intentionality, Bureaucracies, and Collaborators
Ordinary Perpetrators
Corporations and the Nazi Regime
Assessment
5 Truth Telling and Mythmaking
Mythmaking and Memory
Silence about the Holocaust after 1945
France
Poland
Lithuania
Assessment
Lies in the Soviet Sphere
Trauma
6 Philosophy after the Evils of the Twentieth Century
Engaged Philosophy of History
References
Acknowledgments