On Scandal: Moral Disturbances in Society, Politics, and Art

摘要

To most readers, it will come as no surprise that scandal as a social phenomenon is ubiquitous and has deep transformative power. Hardly a day goes by without a major national or international scandal playing itself out in the media. Most of these scandals fade away as new scandals take their place, but some can generate structural changes of unanticipated magnitude and consequences. Most of them affect the lives of those directly involved, but some have an impact far beyond that. U.S. foreign policy, as well as the strategy of U.S. military forces, for example, will surely look much different after the Abu Ghraib scandal in ways that would have been impossible for any of the participants to anticipate.