Susan Neiman - Call It Evil

To be held at Solid State Books on H St. NE

"[B]racing…[Neiman] argues that our misunderstanding of evil has lulled us into complacency, so that we now take cruelty and corruption for granted." —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
The eminent moral philosopher Susan Neiman shows how naming and confronting evil is essential for preserving democracy in an age of demagogues.

Call It Evil is a bold reckoning with one of the most fraught words in our vocabulary. Far from being a religious or outdated concept, evil is a vital lens, Susan Neiman argues, through which to understand the threats we face today.

Neiman is one of our most important philosophers, and one of the world’s leading thinkers on the nature and question of evil. She opens this sharp, revelatory work with the idea that the reelection of Donald Trump is the outcome not simply of political and economic forces but the erosion of values that have been subject to derision for more than a century. She goes on to show how we have been quietly bombarded from all sides with messages that undermine basic moral principles. Misreadings of Adam Smith and Charles Darwin have led to a view of human nature we now accept as common sense: ideals are for losers, or for politicians who wish to deceive them. Neiman then explores how that ancient view, first formulated by pre-Socratic philosophers, has been steadily promoted by corporate interests and (pseudo) scientists in the modern era. Drawing on history—from European fascism to the moral failures of recent U.S. leaders—she demonstrates how the normalization of evil corrodes trust, destroys justice, and endangers our future.

This is a book for readers who refuse to accept moral confusion as the price of political life, and who believe that confronting evil is the first step toward renewing it.

Susan Neiman is director emerita of the Einstein Forum, after working as associate professor of philosophy at Yale University and Tel Aviv University. She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Neiman is the author of nine previous books, translated into 15 languages, including The Unity of Reason, Evil in Modern Thought, Moral Clarity, Why Grow Up?, Learning from the Germans, and Left is Not Woke. Her essays appear in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, and other publications. Visit www.susan-neiman.com for more information.

Diane McWhorter is an American journalist, commentator and author who has written extensively about race and the history of the civil rights movement. She is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Carry Me Home, about the civil rights revolution in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. She is working on a book about the Nazi rocket scientists who built the Saturn V moon rocket, in Alabama, at the time of that revolution.

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Solid State Books, 600F H Street Northeast, Washington, United States

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