How do we conduct scholarly inquiry on events that lie so far beyond the ordinary that we lack the language with which to discuss them adequately? This issue confronts scholars analyzing events such as the Holocaust or wars in which the human suffering and barbarism lie so far outside the realm of everyday morality that the very concept of moral choices seems to exist on a different plane, one long relinquished by civilized human beings. Such is the task addressed by Simona Forti in New Demons: Rethinking Power and Evil Today. In responding to this challenge, Forti tackles an even greater challenge, however: attempting to explain evil as it relates to power today and illuminate it within the context of post-modern continental philosophy.

Forti’s post-modern perspective is one in which absolute values and general laws of social science give way to a historicist perspective. This intellectual framework exposes Forti to immediate problems. What guideposts can we use to direct ethical behavior in a world in which judgment no longer makes sense? Forti’s concern is human suffering and her goal in New Demons is “to examine the relationship between evil and power, focusing on the political repercussions of … different philosophical presuppositions” (p 3). Forti’s consideration of evil in modern political theory begins with Kant and moves quickly through Schelling and Heidegger to Nietzsche. Forti briefly visits Levinas, Freud and Lacan before settling on what she refers to as the Dostoevsky paradigm (Chapter 1). This paradigm posits a dualistic vision of helpless victims at the mercy of an omnipotent power, often the State. Forti finds this dualistic Dostoevskyian paradigm useful in revealing insights on evil not found in the Kantian approach. Indeed, Forti criticizes the Kantians for producing a paradigm insufficient for understanding evil today, when the structures of power have been transformed, leaving us instead to deal with evil that results from the passive attitude toward rule-following, a desire for obedience and the search for normalcy. Finding this a critical problem for contemporary democracies, Forti argues that the challenge for political philosophy is to disassemble this “demonological vision of power,” in which we think of wicked demons versus absolute victims and instead adopt an analytical model that does not attribute evil “exclusively to the desire for and will to death” (6). Forti credits Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault with shifting philosophical focus from thinking in terms of “the power of putting to death” to one that instead emphasizes “strategies for maximizing life” (6).

As Forti rethinks the relationship between evil and power, she turns toward genocide, raising questions about the “process of dehumanization and [the] de-subjectification of the … victim” (7) that accompanies genocide. Forti’s complex theoretical critique of philosophical thought about victim and perpetrator concludes that we need a different way of thinking about the “Hendiadys of evil and power” (8). Forti proposes to offer a new paradigm: one of “mediocre demons or the normalcy of evi,” a term that signifies her obvious, and acknowledged, debt to Arendt. (Indeed, one of Forti’s stated aims is to complete Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, in which Arendt connects evil to an absence of judgment and to conformity.)

While Forti finds Arendt’s legacy in social psychology, Forti dubs these approaches limited from a philosophical point of view, critiquing especially approaches that find evil the result of an authoritarian context rather than an innate disposition. Her own approach argues for moving beyond theories emphasizing the “exclusive role of the will to and desire for death and instead viewing the scenes of evil as powerfully inhabited by the will to life, as the result of an attempt to maximize life itself” (9). In developing what she presents as a “geneaology of mediocre demons” (9) Forti focuses on Nietzschean thought, and its critiques of passivity, conformism and democracy, and in which the will to life plays an “extremely ambivalent role” (9). Her analysis of Nietzsche and Christianity links subjectivity and power; this approach is further pursued by Forti’s discussion of Foucault and the possibility of locating political evil as the highest point of subjective dependency, all of which focuses the reader on “those ‘states of domination’ that suppressed the play or the movement between freedom and power” (10). Forti draws on Foucault’s work on governmentality, pastoral power and the “care of the self” to develop her theory of mediocre devils. She intends her theory to reconstruct theoretical ties between Foucault and the philosophy of dissent in Eastern Europe.

More a way of thinking than a theory as classically defined, Forti’s claims suggest we cannot discuss evil without at the same time considering the tenacious human desire to stay alive at all costs. (Indeed, one of her claims seems to be that evil results from the desire of ordinary people to stay alive, hence the centrality bystanders in allowing the evils of wars and genocides.) Her thoughts on the evil of docility (Chapter 6) and of strategies of obedience (Chapter 7) and how both these tendencies interact with, and harm, freedom, will resonate with followers of Arendt and Nietzsche, as well as with analysts of the horrors of war and the Holocaust. Her discussion of Parrhesia (Chapter 8)—speaking truth boldly—and the section on caring for the self—by which Forti means caring for the soul—relates the practices of dissidence in Europe to the general philosophical themes developed so carefully throughout the earlier sections of the book. In her conclusion, Forti analyzes the work of Primo Levi to suggest that the fear of death must relate closely to the way we value both life and ourselves as human beings.

While Forti’s work explicitly rejects the approach of contemporary Anglo-American political theory, with its heavily Kantian ratiocination, Forti does not discuss her work’s relation to analyses of evil that emanate from contemporary empirical political theory, an approach drawing on the methods and assumptions of post-behavioral social science. These differences in foundational assumptions carry critical consequences for the substantive findings. For example, analysts using a more empirical approach to understanding evil might ask how actual people make moral choices in difficult political/ethical situations. They might quiz people—both ordinary citizens caught up in genocide or decision-makers setting policies—directly about the claims made by Forti, trying thus to test her arguments that when structures of power are transformed a major form of evil results from the populace’s passive attitude toward rule-following, its desire for obedience and a putative search for normalcy. Such an approach could provide a bridge between Forti’s work and the more wide-spread approach to evil found in the traditional Kantian approach to moral choice Forti rejects. I suspect the response by readers to Forti’s claims will be closely related to the reader’s own position concerning Kantian ethics versus the post-modern/continental philosophical tradition that drives Forti’s analysis.

What is more interesting, however, is Forti’s failure to address a virtue-ethics approach to evil. Emanating in the Greek emphasis on human flourishing, the origin of virtue ethics traces back to Plato’s discussion of the human virtues and Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. Virtue ethics resonated with Roman ethicists (Livy, Plutarch, Tacitus and Cicero) and that of Christian scholars (St. Ambrose and St. Thomas Aquinas) but fell into disuse after the Renaissance. It enjoyed a resurgence only in the mid-20^th century, with G. E. M. Anscombe’s work and continuing today with scholars like Martha Nussbaum, Phillipa Foot, Alasdair MacIntyre and the late Bernard Williams.

Virtue ethics seem directly relevant given Forti’s interest in the role of individual character, especially the virtues our characters exert in both influencing and assessing ethical behavior. This is immediately evident if we contrast a virtue ethics approach with the other two dominant approaches to normative ethics: (1) the deontological emphasis on duty and rules and (2) consequentialism’s stressing the outcome of the act itself to derive its rightness or wrongness. For example, a consequentialist approach would find lying morally wrong because of the negative consequences lying produces. In contrast, a deontological perspective would find lying always wrong, even if some potential “good” might ensue. A virtue ethics approach focuses us less on lying in any particular instance and would rather ask us to consider what a decision to lie discloses about our character and moral behavior. This general illustration suggests how powerfully the particular approach followed can impact the substance of the analysis produced.

A more specific illustration of how a virtue ethics approach might inform Forti’s concern with the individual, and the role an individual’s passivity in the face of evil, comes when we consider Forti’s emphasis on bystanders, a group Forti makes critical to the existence of contemporary evil. Forti suggests bystanders’ desire to live causes them to look away, to avoid becoming involved and thus allows the evil to continue. (Forti never explains how this desire to live differs significantly from a desire to avoid death.) A virtue ethics approach might advance this explanation, by noting how bystanders’ failure to help is the result of their own self-perceptions. (Indeed, I find bystanders describe themselves as people who lack agency, are weak, not able to help others.) The critical point here is that if we emphasize character in our analysis, then we can see how character limits and determines our moral choices. This produces a quite different explanation for moral choice that the one Forti offers.

Forti does not speak directly of moral choice but that idea runs as a kind of chorus backing up her main argument. Had Forti explored the role of character more fully, she might have concluded that bystanders—indeed, all participants in the Holocaust, for example—speak in the language of character and not in the language of agonistic and deliberative choice found in Kant. But this rejection of Kant does not necessarily land us in a world without ethical guideposts. A virtue ethicist—or even a moral sense theorist—could confront the same issues as those that drive Forti’s work and yet arrive at quite different explanations. The choice of theoretical lens through which political and ethical reality are analyzed will produce dramatically different substantive analyses.