Professor Meister’s talk concerns his forthcoming book, After Evil: A New Discourse of Human Rights (Columbia, 2010). In what ways does a moral consensus that the past was evil require a political consensus that the evil is past? After Evil develops and criticizes the temporal logic of late 20th-century human rights discourse as an attempt to conceive the present as a time in which the project of putting evil in the past is also a postponement of justice.
Robert Meister is Professor of Social and Political Thought at UCSC; and Director of the Bruce Initiative for Rethinking Capitalism.