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Public Trials
Burke, Zola, Arendt, and the Politics of Lost Causes
By (author)
Lida Maxwell
Genres:
Political science & theory, Comparative politics, Law & society, Social & political philosophy, Political structures: democracy
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Synopsis
How should we view moments of democratic failure, when both the law and citizens forsake justice? Do such moments reveal a wholesale failure of democracy or a more contested failing, pointing to what could have been?
There are certain moments, such as the American founding or the Civil Rights Movement, that we revisit again and again as instances of democratic triumph, and there are other moments that haunt us as instances of democratic failure. Public Trials looks at the writings of three theorists who diagnosed moments of the latter type: Edmund Burke's writings on Warren Hastings's impeachment in late 18th century Britain, Emile Zola's writings on the Dreyfus Affair, and Hannah Arendt's writings
on the Eichmann trial. All three claimed that law and legal officials failed to do full justice to the new crimes they confronted - Hastings's imperial oppression of Indians, the French government's "crime against society, " and Eichmann's "crimes against humanity. " They also argued that this legal
failure was enabled and supported by broad public complicity in the national myths that made injustice (or incomplete justice) appear as justice. Maxwell looks at these three instances in order to challenge two dominant understandings of popular and legal failure in democratic theory that obscure how unsuccessful judgments can be productive. The first is that popular failure of a judgment indicates an irrational public (as legal checks and/or procedures for deliberation ensure justice); the
second is that legal failure occurs when a judgment does not meet with the popular, national will. By contrast, Maxwell sees these instances as an opportunity to question dominant norms of democratic thought. She argues that these narratives of democratic failure reveal problems with the idea that law
can save the people from its failures. Burke, Zola, and Arendt recast instances of democratic failure in such a way that they become instructive in cultivating public responsiveness to such failures in the future. As Public Trials shows, such "lost cause narratives " foreground the importance of democratic action by telling stories about how the people could have pursued justice even in moments when the cause seemed foregone. New & Used
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What Reviewers Are Saying
Public Trials is an excellent book. Clearly written, well organized, and jargon free, it will be of interest to a wide range of scholars of democracy and law. * G. D. Mackin, Eastman School of Music/University of Rochester, CHOICE * If it is a commonplace that democratic causes are often defeated, even by the people themselves, it does not (indeed, it cannot!) follow that democratic thinkers and actors should abandon their commitments to realizing more just ways of living. Lida Maxwell's Public Trials advances an altogether original and inspiring alternative. Through rich readings of Burke, Zola, and Arendt, Maxwell exemplifies the 'art of losing causes.' Public Trials
demonstrates how to create new ways of speaking, writing, and acting in the face of past and present injustice. Vigorously, it summons readers to do the same. * Lawrie Balfour, Professor of Politics, University of Virginia, and author of Democracy's Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W.E.B. Du Bois * Lida Maxwell has produced a provocative and thrilling book on the 'politics of lost causes.' Seeing in democratic failure opportunity as much as loss, promise as much as pessimism, Maxwell shows how failure solicits action, demands accountability and builds counter-intuitive and unpredictable affiliations committed to lost causes and the possible futures they reveal. This is a risky and unconventional work on the art of losing. * Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of Failure * Maxwell's book is a highly innovative work that proposes to see public trials as exemplary sites for democratic politics. She brilliantly reads the 'lost cause' narratives of three public intellectuals, Burke, Zola, and Arendt as offering a productive reformulation of democratic failures and as occasions for responsiveness rather than resignation. It provides a fresh reading of these trials, by going beyond the legal texts to less familiar terrain of the literary
imagination. The major contribution of the book lies in its ability to redirect the literature on transitional justice from attempting to tame politics in order to allow for justice, to encouraging a politics of resistance as essential to the pursuit of justice. * Leora Bilsky, Professor of Law, Tel Aviv University, and author of Transformative Justice: Israeli Identity on Trial *
demonstrates
imagination.