{"id":1288,"date":"2016-10-27T15:19:49","date_gmt":"2016-10-27T15:19:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arendt.sdsu.edu\/?p=1288"},"modified":"2016-10-27T15:21:47","modified_gmt":"2016-10-27T15:21:47","slug":"more-books-for-your-bibliography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arendt.sdsu.edu\/index.php\/2016\/10\/27\/more-books-for-your-bibliography\/","title":{"rendered":"More Books for Your Bibliography"},"content":{"rendered":"

A recent \"images\"NYTimes Book Review<\/a><\/em> carried reviews of three new books with relevance for the themes of the Arendt seminar. Phillippe Sands\u2019 East West Street: On the Origins of \u2018Genocide\u2019 and \u201cCrimes Against Humanity<\/em><\/a>,\u2019\u201d explores the development of international law and justice around two key concepts that changed the way we view what Arendt called \u201cthe only entirely new crime\u201d of the twentieth century (EiJ,<\/em>p. 257 ),\u201cthe new and unprecedented\u201d (p. 255) \u201c\u2018crime against humanity\u2019…or, as the French prosecutor Francois de Menthon called it, with greater accuracy, a \u201ccrime against the human status\u201d(EiJ,<\/em>p. 257 ). As the philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy notes in his review of East West Street<\/em>, Sands narrates the story of these concepts through the lens of the stories of the \u201ctwo men who brought them to life: Hersch Lauterpacht<\/a> for the concept of the crime against humanity and Raphael Lemkin<\/a> for that of genocide.\u201d (NYT, Book Review, Sunday<\/em>, May 29, 2016, pp. 1, 18).<\/p>\n

The psychiatrist Joel Dimsdale<\/a> writes about Nazi War Criminals through the perspective of psychology in his Anatomy of Malice: The Enigma of the Nazi War Criminals<\/a><\/em>, attempting to answer the question of whether those who commit atrocities are \u201cmonstrous psychopaths\u201d or demonstrations of \u201cthe capacity for wickedness in every human being.\u201d (NYT, Book Review, Sunday<\/em>, May 29, 2016, p. 19). In the course of her review of the book, Belinda Cooper observes that \u201cDinsdale briefly explains developments in neuropsychology and psychopathology…and skims through the usual suspects in social psychology…Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil, Stanley Milgram\u2019s and Philip Zombardo\u2019s experiments on obedience, Kitty Genovese and studies of bystander apathy.\u201d (p. 19).<\/p>\n

The third book in the group, Benjamin Madley\u2019s An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873<\/a>,<\/em> takes up the question of the 19th century slaughter of California\u2019s Indians. Alan Taylor, who reviewed the book,\u00a0 took issue with the anachronistic application of the category of genocide to the subject. \u201c[Genocide] distorts if projected back into the mid-19th<\/sup> century, when governments were far weaker and less cohesive in their purposes.\u201d (p. 19).<\/p>\n

Each of these works appears to resonate with themes in Arendt\u2019s writing that we will explore: how to understand specifically historical events and with what categories of analysis; what explanations for the commission of atrocious acts by people who otherwise appear \u201cnormal\u201d make the most sense\u2019 and, finally, what Arendt meant by \u201ccrimes against the human status.\u201d<\/p>\n

Be on the lookout for other sources as you engage with Arendt\u2019s work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A recent NYTimes Book Review carried reviews of three new books with relevance for the themes of the Arendt seminar. Phillippe Sands\u2019 East West Street: On the Origins of \u2018Genocide\u2019 and \u201cCrimes Against Humanity,\u2019\u201d explores the development of international law and justice around two key concepts that changed the way we view what Arendt called \u201cthe only entirely new crime\u201d of the twentieth century (EiJ,p. 257 ),\u201cthe new and unprecedented\u201d (p. 255) \u201c\u2018crime against humanity\u2019…or, as the French prosecutor Francois de Menthon called it, with greater accuracy, a \u201ccrime against the human status\u201d(EiJ,p. 257 ). As the philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy notes in his review of East West Street, Sands narrates the story of these concepts through the lens of the stories of the \u201ctwo men who brought them to life: Hersch Lauterpacht for the concept of the crime against humanity and Raphael Lemkin for that of genocide.\u201d (NYT, Book Review, Sunday, May 29, 2016, pp. 1, 18). The psychiatrist Joel Dimsdale writes about Nazi War Criminals through the perspective of psychology in his Anatomy of Malice: The Enigma of the Nazi War Criminals, attempting to answer the question of whether those who commit atrocities are \u201cmonstrous psychopaths\u201d or demonstrations of….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,109,5,111,6,110,13,113,16,24,26,112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts","category-banality-of-evil","category-comity-of-nations","category-crimes-against-humanity","category-displaced-persons","category-genocide","category-hannah-arendt","category-hersh-lauterpacht","category-human-rights","category-neh-summer-scholars","category-politics","category-rahael-lemkin"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arendt.sdsu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arendt.sdsu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arendt.sdsu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arendt.sdsu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arendt.sdsu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1288"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/arendt.sdsu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1298,"href":"https:\/\/arendt.sdsu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288\/revisions\/1298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arendt.sdsu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arendt.sdsu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arendt.sdsu.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}