The Myth of Evil: Demonizing the Enemy

The Myth of Evil explores a contradiction at the heart of modern thought about what it is to be human: the belief that a human being cannot commit a radically evil act purely for its own sake and the evidence that radically evil acts are committed not by inhuman "monsters," but by human beings. This contradiction can be seen most clearly when we consider the most extreme forms of evil: war crimes, serial murders, sex offences, murders committed by children. Taking the traditional position that evil is an active force creating monsters in human shape, this book shows that this idea is still at work--both in the popular imagination, cultivated in fiction and film (about vampires, monsters, and serial killers) and in real form (in the media, most recently in relation to migrants and terrorism.).

Phillip Cole is Reader in Applied Philosophy at Middlesex University. His previous bookPhilosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immigration received the North American Society for Social Philosophy's annual award for the best book on social philosophy to be published in 2000.