Publisher Description

Guilt about the Past explores the phenomenon of guilt and how it attaches to a whole society, not only to individual perpetrators. It considers how to use the lesson of history to motivate individual moral behavior, how to reconcile a guilt-laden past, and the role of law in this process. Based on the Weidenfeld Lectures author Bernhard Schlink delivered at Oxford University, Guilt about the Past is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand how events of the past can affect a nation's future. Written in Schlink's eloquent but accessible style, these essays tap in to the worldwide interest in the aftermath of war and how to forgive and reconcile the various legacies of the past.

Bloggers confessing that they waste food, non-governmental organizations naming corporations selling unsustainably harvested seafood, and veterans apologizing to Native Americans at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation for environmental and social devastation caused by the United States government all signal the existence of action-oriented guilt and identity-oriented shame about participation in environmental degradation. Environmental Guilt and Shame demonstrates that these moral emotions are common among environmentally friendly segments of the United States but have received little attention from environmental ethicists though they can catalyze or hinder environmental action. Concern about environmental guilt and shame among “everyday environmentalists” reveals the practical, emotional, ethical, and existential issues raised by environmental guilt and shame and ethical insights about guilt, shame, responsibility, agency, and identity. A typology of guilt and shame enables the development and evaluation of these ethical insights. Environmental Guilt and Shame makes three major claims: first, individuals and collectives, including the diffuse collectives that cause climate change, can have identity, agency, and responsibility and thus guilt and shame. Second, some agents, including collectives, should feel guilt and/or shame for environmental degradation if they hold environmental values and think that their actions shape and reveal their identity. Third, a number of conditions are required to conceptually, existentially, and practically deal with guilt and shame's effects on agents. These conditions can be developed and maintained through rituals. Existing rituals need more development to fully deal with individual and collective guilt and shame as well as the anthropogenic environmental degradation that may spark them.

The title of our collection is owed to Hannah Arendt herself. Writing to Karl Jaspers on August 6, 1955, she spoke of how she had only just begun to really love the world and expressed her desire to testify to that love in the title of what came to be published as The Human Condition: "Out of gratitude, I want to call my book about political theories Arnor Mundi. "t In retrospect, it was fitting that amor mundi, love of the world, never became the title of only one of Arendt's studies, for it is the theme which permeates all of her thought. The purpose of this volume's a- ticles is to pay a critical tribute to this theme by exploring its meaning, the cultural and intellectual sources from which it derives, as well as its resources for conte- porary thought and action. We are privileged to include as part of the collection two previously unpu- lished lectures by Arendt as well as a rarely noticed essay which she wrote in 1964. Taken together, they engrave the central features of her vision of amor mundi. Arendt presented "Labor, Work, Action" on November 10, 1964, at a conference "Christianity and Economic Man:Moral Decisions in an Affluent Society," which 2 was held at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago.

Who’s to Blame? Collective Guilt on Trial presents a psychoanalytic exploration of blame and collective guilt in the aftermath of large-scale atrocities that cause widespread trauma and victimization. Coline Covington explores various aspects of social and collective guilt and considers how both perpetrators and victims make sense of their experiences, with particular reference to group behavior and political morality. Covington challenges the concept of collective guilt associated with the aftermath of large-scale atrocities such as the Holocaust and examines the moral pressure placed on perpetrators to exhibit guilt as part of a realignment of political power and a process of restoring social morality. Who’s to Blame? Collective Guilt on Trial concludes with a chapter-length case study examining Russia’s war in Ukraine. Combining psychoanalytic ideas with political, philosophical and social theory, Who’s to Blame? Collective Guilt on Trial will be of great value to readers interested in questions of collective guilt, blame and the possibilities of atonement. It will also appeal to psychoanalysts in practice and in training, and to academics of psychoanalytic studies, political philosophy, sociology and conflict resolution.

In this series of interlocking essays, which had their start as lectures inspired by the presidency of Barack Obama, Robert Burns Stepto sets canonical works of African American literature in conversation with Obama's Dreams from My Father. The elegant readings that result shed surprising light on unexamined angles of works ranging from Frederick Douglass's Narrative to W.E.B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk to Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of contemporary theories and research on collective emotions. It spans several disciplines and brings together, for the first time, various strands of inquiry and up-to-date research in the study of collective emotions and related phenomena. In focusing on conceptual, theoretical, and methodological issues in collective emotion research, the volume narrows the gap between the wealth of studies on individual emotions and inquiries into collective emotions. The book catches up with a renewed interest into the collective dimensions of emotions and their close relatives, for example emotional climates, atmospheres, communities, and intergroup emotions.