On evil

Terry Eagleton, Yale University Press, 176 pages, hardback, £18.99

On evil is the latest in a series of works by the literary critic Terry Eagleton in which he addresses some of the great philosophical questions others have tended to avoid.

For many enlightened, liberal-minded thinkers today, evil is an outmoded concept. It smacks too much of absolute judgments and metaphysical certainties to suit the modern age. In this witty, accessible study, Eagleton launches a surprising defense of the reality of evil, drawing on literary, theological, and psychoanalytic sources to suggest that evil, no mere medieval artifact, is a real phenomenon with palpable force in our modern world.

In a book that ranges from Saint Augustine to alcoholism, Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Mann, Shakespeare to the Holocaust, Eagleton investigates the frightful plight of those doomed souls who apparently destroy for no reason. In the process, he poses a set of intriguing questions. Is evil really a kind of nothingness? Why should it appear so glamorous and seductive? Is it really possible for human beings to delight in destruction for no reason at all?

His conclusion rightly returns us to our contemporary political dilemmas: “The result of defining terrorism as evil is to exacerbate the problem; and to make the problem worse is to be complicit, however unwittingly, in the very barbarism you condemn.”

Review contributed by Bookmarks, the UK’s leading socialist bookshop. Order online at: www.bookmarksbookshop.co.uk