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Public Trials - Burke, Zola, Arendt, and the Politics of Lost Causes (Paperback)
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Public Trials - Burke, Zola, Arendt, and the Politics of Lost Causes (Paperback)
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There are certain moments, such as the American founding or the
Civil Rights Movement, that we revisit again and again as instances
of democratic triumph, and there are other moments that haunt us as
instances of democratic failure. How should we view moments of
democratic failure, when both the law and citizens forsake justice?
Do such moments reveal a wholesale failure of democracy or a more
contested failing, pointing to what could have been, and still
might be? Public Trials reveals the considerable stakes of how we
understand democratic failure. Maxwell argues against a tendency in
the thinking of Plato, Rousseau and contemporary theorists to view
moments of democratic failure as indicative of the failure of
democracy, insomuch as such thinking leads to a deference to
authority that unintentionally encourages complicity in elite and
legal failures to assure justice. In contrast, what Maxwell calls
"lost cause narratives" of democratic failure reveal the
contingency of democratic failure by showing that things "could
have been" otherwise - and, with public action and response, might
yet be. A politics of lost causes calls for democratic
responsiveness to failure via practices of resistance, theatrical
claims-making, and re-narration. Maxwell makes a powerful case for
the politics of lost causes by examining public controversies over
trials. She focuses on the dilemmas and diagnoses of democratic
failure in four instances: Edmund Burke's speeches and writings on
the Warren Hastings trial in late eighteenth century Britain, Emile
Zola's writings on the Dreyfus Affair in late nineteenth century
France, Hannah Arendt's writings on the Eichmann trial in 1960's
Israel, and Kathryn Bigelow's recent narration of (the lack of)
trials of alleged terrorist detainees in Zero Dark Thirty. Maxwell
marshals her subtle, historically grounded readings of these texts
to show the dangers of despairing of democracy altogether, as well
as the necessity of re-narrating instances of democratic failure so
as to cultivate public responsiveness to such failures in the
future.
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