Conceptions of evil have changed dramatically over time, and though humans continue to commit acts of cruelty against one another, today we possess a clearer, more moral way of analyzing them. In Narrating Evil, Maria Pia Lara explores what has changed in our understanding of evil, why the transformation matters, and how we can learn from this specific historical development.

Drawing on Immanuel Kant's and Hannah Arendt's ideas about reflective judgment, Lara argues that narrative plays a key role in helping societies acknowledge their pasts. Particular stories haunt our...

This innovative volume will be welcomed by moral and political philosophers, social scientists, and anyone who reflects seriously on the twentieth century's heavy burden of war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other evidence of people's desire to harm one another. Maria Pia Lara brings together a provocative set of essays that reexamine evil in the context of a "postmetaphysical" world, a world that no longer equates natural and human evil and no longer believes in an omnipotent God. The question of how and why God permits evil events to occur is replaced by the question of how and why humans...

This text argues that when dominated groups such as women create publicly-oriented social movements, they seek to frame their demands in compelling narrative forms. Through these new tales, they can become, for the first time, active subjects in their own stories. Developing this theoretical model, the author offers new interpretations of Habermas and Arendt as well as of feminist debates about their work. Critically relating Wellmers and Ricoeurs aesthetic ideas to public sphere theory, she also confronts the limitations of the Foucaultian tradition that informs so much post-structuralist...

In this original work, the Mexican political philosopher, Maria Pia Lara, develops a new approach to public sphere theory and a novel understanding of the history of the feminist struggle. When dominated groups create publicly-oriented social movements, she argues, they seek to frame their demands in compelling narrative forms. Through these new tales, they can become, for the first time, active subjects in their own stories.


Developing this theoretical model, Lara offers new interpretations of Habermas and Arendt as well as of feminist debates about their work....