"Examines the relationship of evil, action, and judgment in the work of Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard"--.

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Totalitarianism and the Problem of Evil in Politics
  • The Problem: A “New” Form of Evil
  • Uncertainty
  • The Nature of Totalitarian Crimes
  • Subjective Evil and Bureaucratization
  • Moral Foundations
  • A Critical Political Theory of Evil
  • Structure and Method
• Part 1: Action
  • Chapter 1 Arendt’s Reassessment of Responsibility
    • Radical Evil and the Destruction of Responsibility
    • Beginning, Disclosure, Distinctness
    • Forgiveness and the Burden of Unpredictability
    • Evil and Responsibility after Eichmann
    • Responsibility between Thinking and Action
    • Conclusion
  • Chapter 2 Kant on the Deceptiveness of Evil
    • Arendt, Eichmann, Kant
    • Freedom and the Ground of Imputability
    • The Choice of Evil
    • Deception
    • From Radical Evil to the Banality of Evil
    • Conclusion
• Part 2: Judgment
  • Chapter 3 Kant on the Sublime and the Judgment of Action
    • Arendt’s Turn to Kant’s Third Critique
    • Judgment between the Empirical and the Intelligible
    • A Sublime Judgment
    • A Supersensible Power
    • Between Enthusiasm and Sublimity
    • Conclusion
  • Chapter 4 Lyotard on Good and Evil in Postmodernity
    • The Problem of Legitimacy and the Turn to Kant
    • Critical, Political, and Reflective Judgment
    • The Sublime and the Differend
    • Universality as a Sublime Sign
    • Conclusion
  • Conclusion: Extreme Evil as a Response to Political Uncertainty
    • The Eichmann Problem and Responsibility
    • Ideological Extremism
    • Uncertainty and Totalitarianism
    • Political and Moral Judgments
    • The Politics of the Lesser Evil
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index