PUB: Forgiveness and Remembrance

Readers of the H-Net Network on Genocide may be interested in my new book which has just been published by Oxford University Press.

Forgiveness and Remembrance: Remembering Wrongdoing in Personal and Public Life (Oxford 2014).

The following is a brief synopsis:

This book examines the complex moral psychology of forgiving, remembering, and forgetting in personal and political contexts. It challenges a number of entrenched ideas that pervade standard philosophical approaches to interpersonal forgiveness and offers an original account of its moral psychology and the emotions involved in it. The volume also uses this account to illuminate the relationship of forgiveness to political reconciliation and restorative political practices in post-conflict societies.

Memory is another central theme that flows from this, since forgiveness is tied to memory and to emotions associated with the memory of injury and injustice. In its political function, memory of wrongdoing – and its victims – is embodied in processes of memorialization, such as the creation of monuments, commemorative ceremonies, and museums. The book casts light on the underexplored relationship of memorialization to transitional justice and political consequential interpersonal forgiveness. It examines the symbolism and the symbolic moral significance of memorialization as a political practice, reflects on its relationship to forgiveness, and finally, argues that there are moral responsibilities associated with memorialization that belong to international actors as well as to states.

Author: Jeffrey Blustein, Professor of Philosophy at City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.