Political Evil Research Articles

Politics without vision: thinking without a banister in the twentieth century

From Plato through the nineteenth century, the West could draw on comprehensive political visions to guide government and society. Now, for the first time in more than two thousand years, Tracy B. Strong contends, we have lost our foundational supports. In the words of Hannah Arendt, the state of political thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has left us effectively “thinking without a banister.” Politics without Vision takes up the thought of seven influential thinkers, each of whom attempted to construct a political solution to this problem: Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Lenin, Schmitt, Heidegger, and Arendt. None of these theorists were liberals nor, excepting possibly Arendt, were they democrats—and some might even be said to have served as handmaidens to totalitarianism. And all to a greater or lesser extent shared the common conviction that the institutions and practices of liberalism are inadequate to the demands and stresses of the present times. In examining their thought, Strong acknowledges the political evil that some of their ideas served to foster but argues that these were not necessarily the only paths their explorations could have taken. By uncovering the turning points in their thought—and the paths not taken—Strong strives to develop a political theory that can avoid, and perhaps help explain, the mistakes of the past while furthering the democratic impulse. Confronting the widespread belief that political thought is on the decline, Strong puts forth a brilliant and provocative counterargument that in fact it has endured—without the benefit of outside support. A compelling rendering of contemporary political theory, Politics without Vision is sure to provoke discussion among scholars in many fields.

Lamentations and the Poetic Politics of Prayer

The first half of this paper seeks to make explicit the political dimensions of the text of Lamentations. The poetry vividly depicts the political use of violence in the destruction of a society. Judah is ruined politically, economically, socially, and religiously by the Babylonians for political ends. In the second half of the paper I argue that Lamentations contributes to our theo-political reflections not so much in its provision of new conceptual categories, nor even in its sharpening of categories already in place but rather in its power for shaping the emotional, ethical-political response of its audiences (human and divine). The readers are invited to bring political calamity into God’s presence and to seek salvation; they are encouraged to look with merciful eyes at victims of political violence even if those victims are not ‘innocent’; they are encouraged to see political evil for what it is and to speak its name; they are guided towards becoming honest-to-God lamenters and God-dependent pray-ers who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

The Relevance of Hannah Arendt’s Reflections on Evil: Globalization and Rightlessness

The centenary of Hannah Arendt’s birth in 2006 has provided the catalyst for a body of literature grappling with the legacy of her thought, especially the question of its enduring political relevance. Yet this literature largely excludes from consideration a significant aspect of Arendt’s legacy, namely, her account of evil and its devastating political reality. This article contends that the neglect of Arendt’s understanding of the dynamic reality of evil unnecessarily delimits the opportunities her legacy affords to diagnose forms of evil today. In particular, I propose that Arendt’s notion of evil and her unique insight into its dynamic reality remain very much pertinent in light of a globalizing world where the conditions of extreme deprivation and exclusion have become thoroughly bound up with the structurally unequal conditions of the global political economy. The persistent global poverty knowingly reproduced in and through policies and practices of economic globalization effectively renders vast numbers of people superfluous and “rightless,” resulting in a distinctive form of political evil. I conclude that more attention should be paid to the deeper pertinence of Arendt’s concepts of evil, human superfluousness, and rightlessness for contemporary political life.

Melancholy, Trauma, and National Character: Mme de Staël’s Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Revolution française

Melancholy, Trauma, and National Character: Mme de Staël’s Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Revolution française Eric Gidal (bio) Eric Gidal University of Iowa Eric Gidal eric Gidal is Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Poetic Exhibitions: Romantic Aesthetics and the Pleasures of the British Museum (2001) and related articles on eighteenth- century and romantic period poetry, aesthetics, and visual culture. His current scholarship explores melancholy and social theory in the literature and philosophy of the European Enlightenment. Footnotes 1. The Poems of William Cowper, vol. 2., ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) 5.460–64, 473. All subsequent quotations from this work are given parenthetically in the text by book and line numbers. 2. See Eric Gidal, “Civic Melancholy: English Gloom and French Enlightenment,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37.1 (2003): 23–45. 3. The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981) 2: 215. W. B. Hutchings offers a more comprehensive and detailed consideration of Cowper’s politics and poetry during this period in “William Cowper and 1789,” The Yearbook of English Studies 19 (1989): 71–93. See also Tim Fulford, “Wordsworth, Cowper, and the Language of Eighteenth-Century Politics” in Thomas Woodman, ed., Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998) 117–33. 4. The Speeches of the Right Honourable Charles James Fox in the House of Commons (London, 1815) 4: 427. 5. The Origin and Progress of Kings; a Poem; by the celebrated Mr. Cowper. And The Progress of a Divine (London, 1798?). 6. Vincent Newey, in his subtle and far-reaching reading of The Task, spends only a page and a half on these “promulgatory” lines (Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment [Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1982] 141–42), and Richard Feingold characterizes this “digression” as an intrusion which “adds little to the conclusions implicit in the mythical narrative” that “points only to the realm of grace, in which natural and political evils are transcended rather than resolved” (Nature and Society: Later Eighteenth-Century Uses of the Pastoral and Georgic [New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1978] 181–83). 7. Mme de Staël, Considérations sur la Révolution française, ed. Jacques Godechot (Pans: Tallandier, 1983) 542. All quotations and citations from Staël’s work in the main body of the text refer to this edition. All translations of the Considérations are taken from the newly revised edition of the 1818 English translation, Considerations on the Principal Events of the french Revolution, ed. Aurelian Craiutu (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2009) cited by page number, in this instance, 673. 8. For the relation between the idealized vision of English culture presented in the Considérations and Staël’s actual knowledge and encounters from her visit in 1813–14, see Beatrice W. Jasinski, “Madame de Staël, l’Angleterre de 1813–1814 et les ‘Considérations sur la Révolution Française,’” Revue d’Histoire littérairc de la France 66.1 (1966): 12–24. For a thorough documentation of her Anglophilia throughout her career, see Robert Escarpit, L’Angleterre dans l’œuvre de Madame de Staël (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1954). 9. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 3.17 (Sept. 1818): 633. For the authorship of this and other related articles in Blackwood’s, my source has been Alan Lang Strout, A Bibliography of Articles in Blackwood’s Magazine 1817–1825 (Texas Technological College, Lubbock Library Bulletin 5 [1959]). 10. Roberto Romani provides an extensive analysis of these shifting ideological motivations, as well as a detailed chapter on Mme de Staël, in National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002). 11. Ian Duncan, “Blackwood’s and Romantic Nationalism” in David Finkelstein, ed., Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition 1805–1930 (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006) 83. 12. Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005) 23. In erudite readings of Keats’s early Poems of 1817 and Heine’s Buch der Lieder of 1827...

Aesthetics of Memorialization: The Sabra and Shatila Genocide in the Work of Sami Mohammad, Jean Genet, and June Jordan

Of all the primary images of political evil, the one that has been consis tently foregrounded by artists and writers is that of the massacred political outcast because such an image is the most visible and heinous spectacle of oppressive power. This study examines visual and verbal texts that offer extended reflections on the 1982 genocide of the civilians, mostly Palestin ian, in the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut, Lebanon: Sami Moham mad's Sabra and Shatila (1982), a commemorative bronze statue in the round;1 Jean Genet's Four Hours in Shatila (1983), his testimonial narrative about his visit to the two devastated camps immediately after the massa cres; and June Jordan's Living Room (1985), which contains poems that register her reaction to the genocide and the Lebanese civil war. By examining the representation by the Kuwaiti sculptor, the French writer, and the American poet of the genocide in Sabra and Shatila, I at tempt to bring attention to the ways in which commemorative art and literature conceive of their role in an age of media hegemony. Moreover, through the comparative perspective of the study, I attempt to reveal a spectrum of aesthetic strategies appropriated by politically motivated texts that are wrought by their memorializing impulses and are aware of their inevitable position at the margin of the corporate media empires. It is needless to point out that, in delineating this spectrum, I am pursuing a general overview rather than reaching a conclusive list of strategies. This study uses the word media in the narrow sense of daily journalistic news reports and television news programs, typically filled with advertisements, consumed by a vast number of heterogeneous readers/viewers, and man aged by conservative mainstream press companies and television broad casting corporations in the West at a time when cyberspace networks and

On the Aporetic Borderlines of Forgiveness: Bereavement as a Political Form

This article focuses on representations of forgiveness as adopted or assumed by processes of collective amelioration experienced in the aftermath of mass atrocity. It seeks to demonstrate how each representative approach to forgiveness captures some of the torment, pain, and suffering of survivor and successor generations, but also that each fails to accommodate the depths and complexities of personal grief and collective mourning. Too often transnational justice in the aftermath of political evil becomes grounded in assumptions of justice, truth, and apology that are severely delimited. Such strategic and theoretical perspectives are insufficiently attuned to the needs of bereavement as a political form because they fail to promote social solace by means of collective atonement on the part of survivor and successor generations who inherit the legacies of sorrow. If political bereavement conducive to collective amelioration is to occur in any one polity, it should be legitimated by a transnational system of “transnational legacy sites” exclusively devoted to the designation, protection, and intercultural connection of all the many places where political evil may be said to have occurred.

Existential Values in Arendt’s Treatment of Evil and Morality

George Kateb Existential Values in Arendt’s Treatment of Evil and Morality EXISTENTIAL VALUES DOMINATE HANNAH ARENDT’S POLITICAL THEORY.* The result is that morality often ends up either subordinate in impor­ tance to existential values or sidelined by them. Morality must struggle to be heard. Most famously, her espousal of political action grows not out of moral concern, but out of her existential values, which politi­ cal action is intended to serve. But the story does not end there. The existential values present in Arendt’s writings that I consider are the two that I believe (with some encouragement from Arendt) constitute human dignity: human status and human stature. Human dignity for Arendt rests on human uniqueness, the human difference from the rest of nature. The salient element of Arendt’s concept of human status is not being animal-like, the salient element of Arendt’s concept of stature is the creative and audacious use of freedom in thought, art, and action. I do not quite mean to say that Arendt is a philosopher of exis­ tentialism, properly speaking, though she has noteworthy affinities to it, especially to some of its French variants. Although my explicit discussion of The Human Condition, which is her most extended treatment of existential values, is concentrated in the last pages of this paper, that book is always in the background of my discussion. HANNAH ARENDT’S UNDERSTANDING OF POLITICAL EVIL IS HARD TO match. The depth of her understanding, however, does not stop her social research Vol 74 : No 3 : Fall 2007 811 from condemning such evil with a force that is also hard to match. The more she perceives, the more unforgiving she grows. She has no doubt as to what evil is and why certain political phenomena should be called by that name, the worst of all names. Is there anyone more trustwor­ thy in illuminating this darkness and guiding people’s response to it? I doubt it. Yet I think that it is fair to say that thinking about morality is not congenial to her talent. One might expect that one who writes so powerfully about evil would publish a general view of all kinds and degrees of wrongdoing, and at least by implication, right conduct. Even if political evil is in some respects discontinuous with, say, either oppression or injustice, even if evil is qualitatively different and not only worse in intensity ofinflicted suffering, isn’t it a bit odd that a great theorist of evil showed such a reluctance to publish more extensively on the general subject of morality and immorality? She seems suspi­ cious of morality, as if she had an allergy to it. Perhaps evil blots out all other phenomena of wrongdoing? Are they only to be taken as inevi­ table and as posing no great philosophical mystery or even perplexity? Another possibility, which I take more seriously, is that Arendt believes that too much attention to morality would dilute adherence to existen­ tial values, which I believe to be her deepest commitment. Thanks to the splendid editorial labors ofJerome Kohn, to whom any student of Arendt’s work owes a tremendous debt, Arendt’s rela­ tionship to morality, and the connection of morality to evil, become much fuller. The volume he put together, Responsibility and Judgment (2003), with a fine introduction, helps us see Arendt’s hardest thinking about morality and immorality in themselves, and in relation to evil. The main text is “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy” (1965), but the full version of “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship” (1964) and several other items, including the hitherto unpublished presentation at the American Philosophical Association, “Collective Responsibility” (1968), also enhance our knowledge of what Arendt thought about the general subject of morality and its relation to evil. I do not say that in these texts Arendt gives us a fully worked-out view of morality; much less that the view that appears is free of difficulties. But we can now 812 social research make a better sense of Arendt’s moral thinking; and just by that, we can, I believe, make something more of Arendt’s thought as a whole. In this paper, I first sketch Arendt...

Out of Eden: Adam and Eve and the problem of evil

Acknowledgments vii Introduction: The Study of Evil 1 Chapter 1: A Preliminary Meditation on Oedipus and Adam 16 Chapter 2: Evil and the Image of the Sacred 53 Chapter 3: Love and Evil 106 Chapter 4: Political Evil: Slavery and the Shame of Nature 143 Chapter 5: Political Evil: Killing, Sacrifice, and the Image of God 174 Conclusion: Tragedy, Comedy, and the Banality of Evil 211 Index 223

Superfluous Humanity: An Arendtian Perspective on the Political Evil of Global Poverty

This article seeks to move the debate about political evil within normative international theory into the realm of global poverty, through the work of Hannah Arendt. To that end, the article employs Arendt's conceptions of `superfluousness' and `banality of evil' to highlight how the international agenda reflects a narrow concern with one particular type of political evil, namely with gross violations of civil and political human rights, rather than gross violations of socio-economic rights. This bias is challenged on the basis that the severe and widespread wrongs arising from extreme global poverty are a form of political evil as well, insofar as these make vast segments of humanity superfluous. Further, it is argued that we have become desensitised to the banal, thoughtless, `ordinary' origins of pervasive economic rights violations, as these have become normalised in the global politico-economic order. In the end, the contemporary confrontation with political evil is unjustifiably and tragically selective.

French writers and the politics of complicity: crises of democracy in the 1940s and 1990s

Focusing on the political commitments of three French writers who collaborated with the Vichy Regime and Nazi Germany during World War II, and on those of three leading French intellectuals of the 1990s whose misplaced political idealism led them to support xenophobic, authoritarian regimes and dangerous historical revisionisms, Richard J. Golsan reexamines the notion of political commitment or engagement in two difficult periods in modern French history. Discussing the fiction, essays, and journalism of Henry de Montherlant, Jean Giono, and Alphonse de Chateaubriant, Golsan explores the complexity of artistic and intellectual collaboration during the German Occupation. He demonstrates that, in this context, complicity with political evil often derived from nonpolitical motives including sexual orientation, antimodern aesthetics, and dangerously skewed religious beliefs. Turning to the post-cold war era of the 1990s, Golsan examines the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut's support for Croatian independence, the mediologist Regis Debray's pro-Serb stance during the bombing of Kosovo, and the historian Stephane Courtois's revisionist comparison of Nazi and Communist crimes during the 1997 debate surrounding the publication of The Black Book of Communism. In these three cases, laudable motives-and misguided historical comparisons with Vichy, Nazism, and the Occupation period that marked the political and intellectual discourses of France in the 1990s-resulted, paradoxically, in antidemocratic engagements profoundly at odds with the original motivations behind these intellectuals' commitments. In each of these case studies, political complicity derives from a combination of passions and ideals-whether positive or negative, emotional or intellectual-as well as a desire to make the present conform to a particular and generally skewed vision of the past. The full implications of these involvements are neither fully grasped nor understood by their authors, either through lack of objectivity, rationality, or imagination or through willful ignorance. The results are always unfortunate and often disastrous. Considered together, these six intellectuals serve as sobering reminders that political commitments are never as simple or straightforward as they seem and that admirable motives for political involvement can have dangerous and destructive consequences in historical practice.

The lie of race: the politics of evil

This is a paper about a world without racism; it addresses the tenacity of racism as equivalence to privilege. The biology of love as a conversation is explored. Organization theory is juxtaposed as a system of Others. Some language of quantum theory is used to present a hypothesis about why systems of privilege are created and conserved through self-reference. The God metaphor is posed as the penultimate organization enabling privilege. This is offset by seeing that love is not a choice, thus freeing both gods and humans to the universe of possibilities. Threads for further research in organization theory are suggested.

Horror Films Face Political Evils in Everyday Life

Studies of cognition show that Americans get much of their political information from audiovisual media. Therefore, attention to popular films can help us learn how genre conventions communicate politics. The popular genre of horror uses subtexts to help people face political evils in their everyday lives. Many of the evils lately concern the politics of communication, and this is evident in a wide range of horror films, recently including Phone Booth (2003), The Ring (2002), and The Mothman Prophecies (2001).

Clifton Crais, The Politics of Evil: magic, state power and political imagination in South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (hb £50.00, US $65.00 – 0 521 81721 8; African edition available in limited markets only: pb £10.00 – 0 521 53393 7). 2002, 297 pp.

Clifton Crais, The Politics of Evil: magic, state power and political imagination in South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (hb £50.00, US $65.00 – 0 521 81721 8; African edition available in limited markets only: pb £10.00 – 0 521 53393 7). 2002, 297 pp.

The Politics of Evil: Magic, State Power, and the Political Imagination in South Africa. By Clifton Crais (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xvi plus 297pp. $60.00)

The Politics of Evil: Magic, State Power, and the Political Imagination in South Africa. By Clifton Crais (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xvi plus 297pp. $60.00)

Memory, Politics and Law – The Eichmann Trial: Hannah Arendt's View on the Jerusalem Court's Competence

When the true scale of what would later be called ‘crimes against humanity', ‘genocide’ and, specifically, ‘the Holocaust’ became clear in the aftermath of the Second World War, a number of questions were raised. First, is this a new type of crime, in which evil manifests itself in a radically different way than it had earlier? Some disputed this. Evil exists at all times and it has always confronted people with an abyss of atrocities. With Rawls, one might then say that every ‘great evil’ is sufficient in itself and that making comparisons is not necessary, even if the Holocaust cannot be detached from earlier ravages of evil such as the Inquisition and antisemitism. Others thought this question ought to be answered positively. Adorno and Levinas formulated their philosophies in part as a response to the unique character of the Holocaust. Even now, more than a half a century later, the events associated with the Holocaust form a rich source for public debate, scientific inquiry and literary expression. Secondly, the question has been raised as to how one is to cope with this modern form of political evil and with a new type of criminal offender. Some argued in favour of the familiar recourse to politics and international law. Specifically, political crimes ought either to be dealt with politically or to be considered in the light of the principle of international law: par in parem non habet jurisdictionem. So, ordinary criminal law is not applicable where the mutual conduct of states is concerned. Others, however, including the Allied governments in the period immediately following the termination of hostilities, argued that these crimes were such that punishment would be inevitable. This might give rise to legal problems, but these crimes ought to be dealt with to the extent possible by means of ordinary criminal procedure.

BOOK REVIEW: Crais, Clifton. THE POLITICS OF EVIL: MAGIC, STATE POWER AND THE POLITICAL IMAGINATION IN SOUTH AFRICA. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Reviewed by: The Politics of Evil: Magic, State Power and the Political Imagination in South Africa Richard F. Weisfelder Crais, Clifton . 2002. The Politics of Evil: Magic, State Power and the Political Imagination in South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 297 pp. $60.00 (cloth); £10 paperback African edition (limited markets). From the title of this book, one might expect to read a systematic evaluation of the interactions of magic and traditional African spiritual beliefs with a wide variety of economic, political, and social experiences. Instead, the central themes are primarily the spatial, economic, political, and social consequences of colonial state-building in the Ciskei and Transkei areas of South Africa from the initial conquest through the end of the apartheid era. Crais notes how stable those patterns have become, and that they remain "enduring features" of the postapartheid "political order" (p. 31). He sees "precious little evidence" of substantive democratization of local government in the former reserves, but just minimal efforts by the current administration to shore up enough political consent to foster its policies and programs (p. 224). Crais tells the tale of people who were not privileged in the colonial order, but participated in social movements and organizational activities that challenged the colonial state (p. 11). He portrays their creative imagination in hating and resisting the profoundly evil colonial and apartheid systems and the subaltern African institutions those had fostered. He [End Page 134] emphasizes how the victims of social dislocation often attempted to harness occult forces to restore social harmony and health or create harm, especially to those deemed responsible for disrupting the social order. He persuasively demonstrates the blending of witchcraft beliefs with Christian notions of good and evil, and revenge and redemption, as well as the syncretism resulting from the addition of Zionist and Israelite movements, Garveyism, trade-unionism, and revolutionary movements to this blend. Analysis of the evolving political economy and geopolitics of state formation comprises a substantial portion of this book. For Crais, the conqueror gains control through simplification, standardization, and increasing technological capacity, with control of land and labor playing the central roles. Maps and censuses define the new order, rather reflecting the actuality of the old; but "the more the state looked[,] the less it saw" (p. 83), replacing complexity and nuance with self-serving stereotypes. Crais does not infer that the administrators in the Native Affairs Department knew what they were doing or had a consistent plan, but cumulative colonial overlays on hitherto undefined domains and indigenous state-building processes rapidly became explicit sources of conflict. Crais perceives apartheid as "modernity gone mad" (p. 9), where a dry scientific language of social engineering prevailed, causing "redundant people" to be "endorsed out" as "mere objects of state policy" (p. 100). He argues that when such policies were translated into "indigenous grammars of power" and engaged the "political imagination" of the subject peoples, they were perceived to be similar to the coolly calculated surveillance used by witches to appropriate power and wealth at the expense of their potential victims (p. 13). An initial system based on colonial magistrates was transformed into a pattern of retribalization, where chiefs and headmen were "restored" dubious powers they had never had. Using alleged "scientific management" to reverse the economic damage created by prior policies, the apartheid state endowed these so called traditional rulers with sovereignty and modern coercive capabilities. Crais argues that Africanization of the subaltern culture under apartheid resulted in a form of patrimonialism where illegitimate rulers utilized state resources and power in a truncated and subordinate form. The strongest chapters deal with African actions to restore the health of their society in the midst of evils created from within and without. The first of these, with the highly symbolic title "Death of Hope," tells of the death of an early magistrate at the hands of ritual specialists who sought to recapture his powers for their chief and community. Crais explains how Zionist and Israelite churches subsequently fostered the concept of a "black nation," a concept that challenged the state's intrusive surveillance and categorization. He shows how Garveyism, trade-unionism, and political movements were also incorporated into this consciousness. He reveals how these...

Agents, Structures and Evil in World Politics

The concept of evil adds complexity to our moral analysis and judgement of social and political phenomena, but the language of evil can be abused, either to exclude persons or groups from our universes of moral obligation, or to subvert fragile international and domestic moral orders and the conditions for human moral agency and responsibility. Despite these dangers the concept of evil is indispensable for identifying acts and states of affairs that violate our most basic moral ideals and expectations. Recognition of evil leads to three distinct but interrelated questions: who is to blame? How could such evil happen? And how can it be prevented from recurring? Answering these questions requires an account of agents, structures and their relationship. Acknowledging that agents and structures are mutually constituted need not absolve agents of moral responsibility; rather, it is vital to refining judgements of moral responsibility, and understanding how various social and political evils occur, as well as how to prevent their future recurrence.

The Politics of Evil: magic, state power, and the political imagination in South Africa by CLIFTON CRAIS Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. 297, £45.00.

<b>The Politics of Evil: magic, state power, and the political imagination in South Africa</b> by C<scp>LIFTON</scp> C<scp>RAIS</scp> Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. 297, £45.00.

Clifton Crais. &lt;italic&gt;The Politics of Evil: Magic, State Power, and the Political Imagination in South Africa&lt;/italic&gt;. (African Studies Series, number 103.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2002. Pp. xvi, 297. $60.00

Clifton Crais. The Politics of Evil: Magic, State Power, and the Political Imagination in South Africa. (African Studies Series, number 103.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2002. Pp. xvi, 297. $60.00 Crais Clifton. The Politics of Evil: Magic, State Power, and the Political Imagination in South Africa. (African Studies Series, number 103.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2002. Pp. xvi, 297. $60.00. Ivan Evans Ivan Evans University of California, San Diego Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 109, Issue 1, February 2004, Pages 297–298, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/109.1.297 Published: 01 February 2004

Reviews of Books:The Politics of Evil: Magic, State Power, and the Political Imagination in South Africa Clifton Crais

Reviews of Books:The Politics of Evil: Magic, State Power, and the Political Imagination in South Africa Clifton Crais