EBOOK
About
The first part of this book is a detailed discussion of six horrible cases of evil: the Albigensian Crusade of about 1210; Robespierre's Terror of 1793–94; Franz Stangl, who commanded a Nazi death camp in 1943–44; the 1969 murders committed by Charles Manson and his "family"; the "dirty war" conducted by the Argentinean military dictatorship of the late 1970s; and the activities of a psychopath named John Allen, who recorded reminiscences in 1975. John Kekes includes these examples not out of sensationalism, but rather to underline the need to hold vividly in our minds just what evil is. The second part shows why, in Kekes's view, explanations of evil inspired by Christianity and the Enlightenment fail to account for these cases and then provides an original explanation of evil in general and of these instances of it in particular.
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Reviews
"Since it reflects aspects of human nature-envy, ambition, the need for belonging-evil is a permanent threat. We can best combat it, John Kekes believes, by cultivating 'moral imagination.'... An education in the literary and philosophical classics helps nourish the moral imagination.... There is much to admire in this lucid and morally serious book. Its concreteness sets it apart from the arid ab
First Things
"The principal value of The Roots of Evil is that the author squarely faces the challenge of evil, a task of no small importance when Islam fascism and much else are testing the mettle of the West. While some obsess over the 'root causes' of the appalling things people do to one another, Kekes reminds us that evil actions find their origin in the individual. His book closes with some sensible if c
The New Criterion
"This is an interesting, systematic, no dogmatic, and informed attempt to make sense of evil on secular grounds."
Times Literary Supplement