Punishment is the imposition, by a legitimate authority, of a painful consequence upon one who has offended the social order by indulging in acts contrary to the social good. Punishment is understood to serve a primary objective in any society: it rehabilitates or reforms (re-forms or shapes anew) the psyches of social offenders to bring them in line with prevailing codes of behavior. Punishment thus is a highly conservative force, affirming simultaneously the codes of conduct deemed desirable within the society and the status quo of power relations that hold sway in the society. Punishment is a form of social teaching. One of the favorite forms of didactic pain to which legitimate authorities turn, in teaching conformity to social regulations, is the psychological pain of shame. Shame is a special favorite in the penology of societies of the Western world, whose governing logic is already grounded in the shame-based religions of Judaism and Christianity. Parents, school teachers, religious leaders, and state authorities readily employ shame as an effective method for teaching social lessons. Shame is a powerful force that reaches deep into the psyche of the offender and gnaws away at her sense of self-worth and identity, with longstanding and devastating existential effects. Shame has profound and enduring effects, because it has the capacity to transform an empirical fact (of having done something unacceptable) into an ontological reality (of being unacceptable as a human being). Shame dehumanizes. Shame is a powerfully effective tool for altering behavior, but because shame dehumanizes, it often fails to have the effect that the punisher is seeking to bring about. Shame sickens souls, rather than cures them. It sickens them to such a degree that shame more often acts as a promoter of criminality than as a teacher of the social good.

Punishment is the imposition, by a legitimate authority, of a painful consequence upon one who has offended the social order by indulging in acts contrary to the social good. Punishment is understood to serve a primary objective in any society: it rehabilitates or reforms (re-forms or shapes anew) the psyches of social offenders to bring them in line with prevailing codes of behavior. Punishment thus is a highly conservative force, affirming simultaneously the codes of conduct deemed desirable within the society and the status quo of power relations that hold sway in the society. Punishment is a form of social teaching. One of the favorite forms of didactic pain to which legitimate authorities turn, in teaching conformity to social regulations, is the psychological pain of shame. Shame is a special favorite in the penology of societies of the Western world, whose governing logic is already grounded in the shame-based religions of Judaism and Christianity. Parents, school teachers, religious leaders, and state authorities readily employ shame as an effective method for teaching social lessons. Shame is a powerful force that reaches deep into the psyche of the offender and gnaws away at her sense of self-worth and identity, with longstanding and devastating existential effects. Shame has profound and enduring effects, because it has the capacity to transform an empirical fact (of having done something unacceptable) into an ontological reality (of being unacceptable as a human being). Shame dehumanizes. Shame is a powerfully effective tool for altering behavior, but because shame dehumanizes, it often fails to have the effect that the punisher is seeking to bring about. Shame sickens souls, rather than cures them. It sickens them to such a degree that shame more often acts as a promoter of criminality than as a teacher of the social good.

Western civilization is founded upon the assumption that there exists a "natural order" to the world, an embedded principle of justice with which human reason is aligned. The imagery is seductive. However, Emil Fackenheim raises a troubling fact in his To Mend the World when he names the Holocaust the "rupture that ruptures philosophy." The Holocaust and countless other horrors over thousands of years of eager philosophical pursuit could not order the troublesome human soul to that state of justice that the Plato claims to be the most natural and happy state of human beings, if they can simply know their best interests. The philosopher, physician to the human soul, has proven impotent in healing the open ethical wound of human inhumanity; worse, the grand ontological and epistemological structures that philosophers have constructed may be linked to the ethical failures of the planet, to colonial and imperial worldviews. The work of post-Holocaust phenomenologist, Emmanuel Levinas, is written under the somber backdrop of the Holocaust. Levinas, by his own admission, stages a return to Plato. He shares Plato's sense of ethical urgency in the philosophical task, but he sets course for a new Platonism that thinks the difference separating (rather than the unity gathering) being. Levinas, more than Plato, appreciates that the exigencies and labor of everyday life can eclipse the needs of others and waylay the ethical life. Levinas too holds out more hope than Plato that the worst human beings can simply forget themselves and their self-interested projects, and become their brothers' keepers. Levinas quests for the good beyond being as he challenges the tradition of Western thought and the post-Holocaust world to a new ethos: we must decide between the starry skies above (the ordered ontologies of the Western tradition) and the moral law within. The Lesser Good represents a timely consideration of the ethical exigencies of human life, politics, and justice, demonstrating that philosophy's fa

Savage Constructions composes a critical examination of the popular assumption that violence is an essential quality of certain ethnic or racial populations. Wendy Hamblet challenges the supposition, all too common in the West, that darker-skinned peoples are inherently violent. To challenge this myth, Savage Constructions offers a theory of subjectivity transformed by historical violence. It rethinks how African peoples, once living in simple neighborly communities more democratic and egalitarian than modern states, have come to the condition of abjection, misery, and fierce aggression, in which we find them today. This rethinking she argues that Western affluence is built upon slaughter, slavery, and colonial oppression, and suggests that prosperous nations of the West owe a great debt to the societies they trampled en route to their prosperity. This work is important because Nnewly independent nations of Africa are a primary example of a much vaster phenomenon. Western powers continue to sack poorer, weaker countries through covert intrigue, outright war, crippling debts, and unfair global labor and trade policies. The violences continue because many Westerners still harbor metaphysical assumptions about the supremacy of white Christians over less "civilized," darker-skinned peoples. These assumptions depress the possibilities of ethnic minorities within the West, continue to influence foreign policy and frustrate global relations, and ensure that the overwhelming collateral damage of modern wars is color conscious. Savage Constructions will appeal to all levels of scholars and students.

Savage Constructions composes a critical examination of the popular assumption that violence is an essential quality of certain ethnic or racial populations. Wendy Hamblet challenges the supposition, all too common in the West, that darker-skinned peoples are inherently violent. To challenge this myth, Savage Constructions offers a theory of subjectivity transformed by historical violence. It rethinks how African peoples, once living in simple neighborly communities more democratic and egalitarian than modern states, have come to the condition of abjection, misery, and fierce aggression, in which we find them today. This rethinking she argues that Western affluence is built upon slaughter, slavery, and colonial oppression, and suggests that prosperous nations of the West owe a great debt to the societies they trampled en route to their prosperity. This work is important because Nnewly independent nations of Africa are a primary example of a much vaster phenomenon. Western powers continue to sack poorer, weaker countries through covert intrigue, outright war, crippling debts, and unfair global labor and trade policies. The violences continue because many Westerners still harbor metaphysical assumptions about the supremacy of white Christians over less 'civilized,' darker-skinned peoples. These assumptions depress the possibilities of ethnic minorities within the West, continue to influence foreign policy and frustrate global relations, and ensure that the overwhelming collateral damage of modern wars is color conscious. Savage Constructions will appeal to all levels of scholars and students.

Wedding an analysis of relevant anthropological literature and philosophical theory, this important book re-positions violence long trivialized by philosophers as an incidental or anomalous feature of humanity as a central concern for ethical thought. Wendy Hamblet focuses on a fundamental paradox that emerges when well-meaning communities and individuals attempt to implement their ideals in our social, or socialized, world. Very often the unintended consequences of these individual or communal ideals run headlong into the brute fact of bloody human engagement. Through her investigation of violence-legitimization in myth and ancient tales, philosophical accounts (from Plato to Nietzsche), the concept of home as 'refuge, ' and recent social scientific data, Hamblet takes up the charge that violence is steeped in our being it pervades human history and is embedded in the ethos of our modern institutions and gives us essential tools for better understanding how violence actually operates."

Wedding an analysis of relevant anthropological literature and philosophical theory, this important book re-positions violence--long trivialized by philosophers as an incidental or anomalous feature of humanity--as a central concern for ethical thought. Wendy Hamblet focuses on a fundamental paradox that emerges when well-meaning communities and individuals attempt to implement their ideals in our social, or socialized, world. Very often the unintended consequences of these individual or communal ideals run headlong into the brute fact of bloody human engagement. Through her investigation of violence-legitimization in myth and ancient tales, philosophical accounts (from Plato to Nietzsche), the concept of home as 'refuge, ' and recent social scientific data, Hamblet takes up the charge that violence is steeped in our being--it pervades human history and is embedded in the ethos of our modern institutions--and gives us essential tools for better understanding how violence actually operates