Hannah Arendt is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most powerful political theorists. The purpose of this book is to make an innovative contribution to the newly emerging literature connecting Arendt to international political theory and debates surrounding globalization. In recent years the work of Arendt has gathered increasing interest from scholars in the field of international political theory because of its potential relevance for understanding international affairs. Focusing on the central theme of evil in Arendt’s work, this book weaves together elements of Arendt’s theory in order to engage with four major problems connected with contemporary globalization: genocide and crimes against humanity; global poverty and radical economic inequality; global refugees, displaced persons, and the ‘stateless’; and the destructive domination of the public realm by predatory neoliberal economic globalization. Hayden shows that a key constellation of her concepts—the right to have rights, superfluousness, thoughtlessness, plurality, freedom, and power—can help us to understand and address some of the central problems involving political evil in our global age. In doing so, this book takes Arendtian scholarship and international political theory into provocative new directions. Political Evil in a Global Age will be of interest to students, researchers and scholars of politics, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies.

This volume uses elements of Arendt’s theory to engage with four distinctive political problems connected with contemporary globalization: genocide, global poverty, refugees and the domination of the public realm by neoliberal economic globalization.

A leading political scientist identifies "political evil" as wrongdoing perpetrated by individuals with specific political goals, cites specific examples throughout the world and explains that important changes can be initiated through adjustments in how political evil is treated.

Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider examine the forms that collective memory take in the age of globalisation. They explore how the Holocaust has been remembered in Germany, Israel and the US over the past 50 years and demonstrate how this event has become detached from its precise context.

Talking about the Holocaust has provided an international language for ethics, victimization, political claims, and constructions of collective identity. As part of a worldwide vocabulary, that language helps set the tenor of the era of globalization. This volume addresses manifestations of Holocaust-engendered global discourse by critically examining their function and inherent dilemmas, and the ways in which Holocaust-related matters still instigate public debate and academic deliberation. It contends that the contradiction between the totalizing logic of globalization and the assumed uniqueness of the Holocaust generates continued intellectual and practical discontent.

Zygmunt Bauman is one of the most original and influential social thinkers of our time. This new book focuses on social inequality.