Political Evil: What It Is and How To Combat It

Despite its fire-and-brimstone title, the latest from Wolfe (The Future of Liberalism) offers a restrained and balanced inquiry into the violent world confronting America today, covering a wide variety of leaders and philosophers, including St. Augustine, Hannah Arendt, Adolf Hitler, and Osama bin Laden. Wolfe spends little time mulling the subjectivity of "evil" as a concept. Rather, by "evil," he means the threats that loom for the liberal democratic societies of Europe and America during the coming decades. His primary concern is to construct a typology of political evil, encompassing genocide, ethnic cleansing, terrorism, and such "counterevil" as the American use of torture to combat its enemies. Too often, argues Wolfe, citizens allow their leaders to use acts of evil as an excuse for overly aggressive retaliations. Only by accurately classifying each threat can the West successfully respond to it. However, it's not clear how mere identification can solve real-world problems, such as poverty and powerlessness, which underlie many of the evil acts he discusses. Without addressing these root causes, any schema such as Wolfe's will be an exercise in scholasticism, akin to counting how many devils can dance on the head of a pin. (Sept.)