Taking Lives: An Intellectual Confronts the Problem of Genocide

摘要

In 1976, when Irving Louis Horowitz published the monograph Genocide: State Power and Mass Murder, he embarked on a project in sociology and moral philosophy that was-at the start-an intellectually lonely one. Since at least the end of World War Ⅱ, the world knew about the Holocaust and the extraordinary murders that Nazi Germany had inflicted on its own citizens. Although familiar with the atrocities, many felt compelled to look away: how many films of the liberation of the death camps could one see without succumbing to physical revulsion? Perhaps similarly revolted, intellectuals seemed unwilling to or incapable of applying rational frameworks to the horrors. In the decades immediately following the Nuremberg trials, relatively few books or treatises were published that confronted the political causes of such state-organized violence against the innocents-as if the world would be better off forgetting Kristallnacht and Dachau. It is no wonder, then, that Susan Neiman chided modern philosophers by asking why they had resisted analysis of this political evil that, in its intensity and scale, so deeply marked the twentieth century. It was understandable that survivors might be silent, but not those thinkers responsible for explaining the moral universe and human nature.