“At the heart of law is not justice but the will to punish. And it is when this will to punish becomes a pervasive political impulse, a mass phenomenon, that we leave democracy and enter what we call neodemocracy: the idea that the law is here not to protect the vulnerable, or be responsible to those who are outnumbered. When punishment becomes the guiding force in and of law, we have left the realm of human freedom. We have entered into what liberals call the rule of law.”
What, Mutant asks, does the law yield? What does the law make of us — and what does the law break in us?
Not only does violence have the capacity to become normative, we also seem to wholly lose our capacity for moral judgement in its wake....
At the heart of the modern democratic contract is the principle — and the faith — that the majority will decide for everyone. But...
Few words in our political lexicon are as fragile and as paradoxical as hope. Is hope a privilege of the smug? Or is it...
