Rarely is a philosophy book able to keep its readers moving through chapters, as is the case of Robert Meister's After Evil. It is no wonder, then, that this work was conceived all at once, as the author confesses, with the ambition to answer the most basic question on the philosophical relevance of post-war justice: How can there be convergence on a shared notion of evil and on its temporal contextualization? Meister's very effective answer argues “that the past is evil is to agree, also, that the evil is past” (69). He further asks readers to consider that political transitions be conceived as “survivor stories,” reflecting “a non-neutral judgment on the history that preceded them” in order to “instantiate a temporal reconstitution of the ‘we’” (vii–viii).

To think of justice in transitional terms is not simply to propose yet another paradigm of justice, but rather to answer “the question of who does what to whom for whom and at whose expense” and to introduce a temporal dimension to traditional ways of conceiving normativity (84). As Meister writes, “Justice is an intertemporal problem,” and its claims arise from a history of struggles and neglected rights. How, then, can we think to a time for justice as an intertemporal period that is “as a time between times”? Here an analogy is made to Giorgio Agamben's interpretation of St. Paul and the time we live in: “the time it takes for time to come to an end” after Christ's rescue, but before God's justice (10). Such a reign of intertemporality is also, for Meister, the privileged locus for inter-messianic (and even anti-messianic) Human Rights Discourse—the grounding paradigm of the post-1989 policy on human rights. The temporal entrapment between a past-wrong (which is never completely past) and a future redemption (that is always yet to come), where former victims and beneficiaries wait to receive final judgment, shows “that now is never the time for justice” (12).

For Meister, while the post-1789 doctrine of the Rights of Man had an innovative power in revolutionary France, the post-1989 Human Rights Discourse represents a counterrevolutionary force deprived of a critical stand. In other words, it is the “war cry of a self-described ‘International Community’ led by the victors in the cold war” (7). The author gives an example of such “normalizing” policy for contemporary human rights discourse in the Responsibility to Protect strategy. One can certainly find in contemporary refugee camps a transfiguration, if not a complete possession akin to the body-control employed in the Nazi death camps. Indeed, even though in the former physical suppression or torture is abolished, the “rescuing” purposes of the Responsibility to Protect strategy legitimize a general disempowerment of “the rescued” and the idea of “bombs that rescue” (5). In addition, it claims a monopoly over the notion of “humanity” which is a new way to replicate a friend-enemy policy, or as Carl Schmitt (quoted by Meister) says, “whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat” (33).

The underlying general critique of human rights discourse as a permanent transitional role for justice is not new. In fact, as the author reminds us, it is found in Marx's critique of liberal societies and their reproduction of inequalities. There human rights discourses are employed to confine wrongs and victims as events of the past. The Human Rights Discourse, therefore, does not simply address the structural relations of victim and beneficiary. Rather, it defends the “general exoneration of all nonperpetrators” (26), blurring relevant moral distinctions between passively supporting subjects of past regimes and the current beneficiaries and supporters of reconstituted societies. To counteract injustices, it is claimed, is always more costly than to passively assist them as a spectator; therefore, in order to proceed further into social reconciliation, a radical shift must be made in becoming witnesses (and not just bystanders) of a past injustice. To shift from bystander to witness is not merely to place victims into a remembered past; it is rather, and more importantly, to (re-)construct a hypothetical other bystander as a counterfactual enemy had it been possible to achieve justice on time (212ff, 308). There are different strategies as well as descriptions by which processes of the interiorization of the other are realized. One interesting way, which places this book among the most advanced works of critical theory, conceives of the psychic analysis of social groups and socialization of individuals that Meister aptly refers to through Melanie Klein's theory of “projective identification” (35).

From a more historical perspective, the author uses great conceptual accuracy and documental sources to deal with some of the most significant key-stories of the contemporary crisis of civilization such as the recurrent problem of the Jewish question, the discussion of the Fourteenth Amendment in post-Civil War America, and finally (again) the “normalizing” effects of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, particularly in the South African transitional process.

As for the Jewish question, the discussion is still about how it is possible in today's world to conceive the uniqueness of “Jewishness” given the universality of human rights from which this issue has been regenerated in contemporary times. Meister also courageously addresses the paradoxical exchange of roles, from victims to wrongdoers, as in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (175). On the other hand, the discussion of Lincoln's strategy of Reconstruction sheds light on the idea of permanent transition as a strategy adopted in the American post-Civil War phase. This latter strategy has achieved a stabilizing effect in the American transition through the advancement of a distinct interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Meister claims very lucidly that Lincoln's vision of America avoided both a “return to civil war” as well as the “beginning of a race war” (102), which, in both cases, would have led to a zero-sum game in terms of political advancements. Finally, a detailed treatment is reserved for the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and for the general assessment of the transitional phase implemented there (50).

One of the problematic features of Meister's argumentative style is the often merely implicit reference to authors targeted by his criticisms. This demands that the reader perform an additional exegetical step in order to reconstruct the philosophical debate the author refers to. One example of this problem is the never fully explicit reference to a growing scholarship on what Meister defines in terms of the “post-idealistic […] version of liberal political thought” (5). Such authors are certainly united by a common emphasis on the “priority of evil” as a grounding concept for human rights. Nevertheless, important differences should be drawn between what are, for instance, the non-ideal accounts of justice defended by Amartya Sen, on the one hand, and the “negative” theories of human rights advanced by Michael Ignatieff and Alan Dershowitz on the other.

Overall, Meister dares to show that today we assist in a form of “humanitarianism” that paradoxically counteracts past injustices by transcending paradigms of justice through a sentiment of love for the victim. This final point concludes Meister's widely documented and well-argued analysis of today's discourse on human rights, since it favors the idea according to which the claims of justice are “neither originary nor self-sufficient—they always come after some form of human sacrifice” that is “after evil” (18).