P. E. Digeser argues that we can rescue a “secular, performative” (p. 3) notion of forgiveness for politics by dropping its religious, emotional, and utopian baggage. The book notes a number of recent events that display political forgiveness—presidential pardons, debt cancellation, official apologies—but does not claim a special urgency for its examination other than conceptual disorganization and neglect within political theory. Nor does the book trace forgiveness in political history. It is mainly an analytic examination of what might be a politically admissible notion of forgiveness, not a piece of engaged advocacy. Digeser impressively details the considerations involved in acts of political forgiveness, but ultimately misses its significance.

In Digeser's estimation, there are four main objections to the idea of political forgiveness— forgiving a crime always violates what justice requires but justice should always be satisfied; the concept of forgiveness is irremediably Christian and so sectarian; forgiveness in the political realm is connected to utopian dreams of reconciliation; and forgiveness requires a change in the forgiver's emotions of anger or resentment and entails love, but emotions are difficult to discern and a politics based on them may be “deeply intrusive and potentially tyrannical” (p. 18). This last challenge he appears to consider the most threatening, and yet his stipulation to exclude talk of emotion in political forgiveness ends up as the most questionable element of his theory.

In response, he argues that political forgiveness should be conceived not on the model of personal acts and feelings of forgiving, but rather on the public acts of relieving loan debts and executive pardons, acts not usually thought to involve bankers who overcome resentment and presidents who realize love (p. 20). In his conception of political forgiveness, “a party … convey[s] the message of forgiveness with the appropriate standing through appropriate signs or utterances” (p. 28), and the effect is to release debtors and transgressors from their debts (p. 33). Here the forgiver must say “I forgive” or “I pardon,” and this saying must have the actual consequence of removing the debt of punishment or fine. In other words, political forgiveness is “illocutionary.” Such public authoritative forgiveness requires no emotion, sentiment, or internal state on the part of either transgressor or forgiver (pp. 20–21).

The point of political forgiveness is to protect values greater than justice, especially “reconciliation” and ultimately perhaps civic friendship. In fact, it is the main asset of the book that Digeser defends political forgiveness from the charge that it violates justice and thus must be invariably wrong. True, he reasonably considers rectificatory justice, in the sense of getting one's due, as a more fundamental value than forgiveness; it sets the terms. Nevertheless, it does not always and everywhere override forgiveness. Since justice can never be completely achieved even in the best cases, forgiveness can act as a supplement to justice. Also, justice is potentially only one value among others, so that peace, stability, and prosperity might in particular instances be more critical than justice. In the end, political forgiveness still requires a minimal level of justice in the form of a publicly verifiable account of what is due.

In general, governments can both do wrong and suffer wrong, and so can either be forgiven or forgive. But only nearly just governments can be forgiven, since when a government is fully unjust, the individual actors are responsible (p. 168). When government officials do wrong for good consequences, for example, dirty hands or tragic choices, then their acts should not be forgiven or forgotten but also should not be punished. Instead, citizens should adopt an “angle of repose” but not too reposed, especially during national emergencies. Imperfect procedures should be forgiven or forgotten. But surely this needs more discussion. While we may not prosecute for imperfect procedures, we may have an obligation to correct them. Imperfections in electoral procedures, say, in presidential elections and in campaign financing, surely cannot just be forgiven and forgotten.

Digeser treats only one case at any length, and this one only in two main sections. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) he sees as a “many to one” form of political forgiveness, comparable to pardoning. The many forgiving compose the successor government; the acts forgiven are those “wrongs done to the successor government's interest in securing the welfare interest of its citizens” (p. 140). This formulation is strange, especially in the context of the innovative TRC, which famously included, in separate hearings, testimony by victims and their relatives about their experience of political violence. The TRC was therefore more than an interaction between perpetrators and the state, but also included citizens. And while forgiveness by the victims was not required, it was enabled by the documentation of crimes and by the experience of public recognition of the victims’ grief and anger.

The main problem with Digeser's overall position is his excision of emotions and sentiments. While it is true that for governmental acts of forgiveness, changes of sentiments or emotion should not be required, nor should or could they be policed, the whole idea of a changed relationship between the forgiver and the forgiven relies ultimately on a changed emotional and cognitive attitude toward the former perpetrators. Here is the danger of his using debt forgiveness as a model. Bankers and creditors forgive only when directed to by political authorities and bankruptcy laws; and they are never interested in anything like “reconciliation” with their unlucky debtors. Part of the problem is that Digeser understands emotions as “internal states” (p. 20); so attending to emotion suggests tyrannical, even totalitarian, intrusions into psychic life. Indeed, he says he prefers what he calls an “agent-based” politics and not a “sentiment-based politics” (p. 17). Now as he acknowledges, this is no more than a stipulation, one that he cannot support in the space of this book. But emotions are not just individual states but are also systems of social communication, patterned and shaped by cultural and political practices, and discourses about emotion have political effects, as the most powerful recent reconsiderations of emotion have argued.

The ultimate poverty of this individualized conception shows up most when Digeser discusses the point of political forgiveness as social reconciliation. What does it mean? He distinguishes a “process” and a “state” of reconciliation, a distinction that, while promising, does not get him too far. The most he does is establish that political forgiveness is neither necessary nor sufficient for reconciliation, and that it is most likely to set citizens on a path to reconciliation, rather than to achieve reconciliation. But he coyly refrains from explaining with any certainty what reconciliation involves. Does it suggest “no more than that the civil strife has ended, the wrath of the parties has subsided, and a modus vivendi has been established” (p. 65), establishing trust and civility but not guaranteeing civic friendship (p. 67), or “restoration, or creation of civic friendship” (p. 70)? In any case, it clearly involves some emotion or emotional attitude and cannot seriously be addressed unless we are free to address sentiment and emotion in politics. Political Forgiveness is well worth grappling with, but the subject needs a more generous account.