Avishai Margalit's Books

On Betrayal

By: Avishai Margalit

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“Seamlessly combines analytic rigor with personal memoir . . . its arguments are drawn from political history . . . Biblical commentary . . . novels and biographies.” (Amélie Rorty, Tufts University) Adultery, treason, and apostasy no longer carry the weight they once did. Yet we constantly see and hear stories of betrayal. Avishai Margalit argues that the tension between the ubiquity of betrayal and the loosening of its hold is a sign of the strain between ethics and morality, between thick and thin human relations. On Betrayal offers a philosophical account of thick human relations?relationships with friends, family, and core communities?through their pathology, betrayal. Judgments of betrayal often shift unreliably. A traitor to one side is a hero to the other. Yet the notion of what it means to betray is remarkably consistent across cultures and eras. Betrayal undermines thick trust, dissolving the glue that holds our most meaningful relationships together. On Betrayal is about ethics: what we owe to the people and groups that give us our sense of belonging. Drawing on literary, historical, and personal sources, Maraglit examines what our thick relationships are and should be and revives the long-discarded notion of fraternity. “Provocative and illuminating.” —Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study “Witty and wise, precise and profound, On Betrayal is an easy but deep read: it sees life as it really is with all its turmoil.” —The Christian Century “The range of Margalit’s examples is astonishing. . . . He is much more knowledgeable about and comfortable with communities (and in communities) than most philosophers are, and so he is very good at recognizing when they go wrong.” —New York Review of Books

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301

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Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

067497395X

ISBN 13

9780674973954

Idolatry

By: Moshe Halbertal,Avishai Margalit

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Idolatry

By: Moshe Halbertal,Avishai Margalit

“You shall have no other gods besides Me.” This injunction, handed down through Moses three thousand years ago, marks one of the most decisive shifts in Western culture: away from polytheism toward monotheism. Despite the momentous implications of such a turn, the role of idolatry in giving it direction and impetus is little understood. This book examines the meaning and nature of idolatry—and, in doing so, reveals much about the monotheistic tradition that defines itself against this sin.The authors consider Christianity and Islam, but focus primarily on Judaism. They explore competing claims about the concept of idolatry that emerges in the Hebrew Bible as a “whoring after false gods.” Does such a description, grounded in an analogy of sexual relations, presuppose the actual existence of other gods with whom someone might sin? Or are false gods the product of “men’s hands,” simply a matter of misguided belief? The authors show how this debate, over idolatry as practice or error, has taken shape and has in turn shaped the course of Western thought—from the differentiation between Jewish and Christian conceptions of God to the distinctions between true and false belief that inform the tradition of religious enlightenment.Ranging with authority from the Talmud to Maimonides, from Marx to Nietzsche and on to G.E. Moore, this brilliant account of a subject central to our culture also has much to say about metaphor, myth, and the application of philosophical analysis to religious concepts and sensibilities. Its insights into pluralism and intolerance, into the logic and illogic of the arguments religions aim at each other, make Idolatry especially timely and valuable in these days of dark and implacable religious difference.

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318

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Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674264193

ISBN 13

9780674264199

The Ethics of Memory

By: Avishai Margalit

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The Ethics of Memory

By: Avishai Margalit

Much of the intense current interest in collective memory concerns the politics of memory. In a book that asks, "Is there an ethics of memory?" Avishai Margalit addresses a separate, perhaps more pressing, set of concerns. The idea he pursues is that the past, connecting people to each other, makes possible the kinds of "thick" relations we can call truly ethical. Thick relations, he argues, are those that we have with family and friends, lovers and neighbors, our tribe and our nation--and they are all dependent on shared memories. But we also have "thin" relations with total strangers, people with whom we have nothing in common except our common humanity. A central idea of the ethics of memory is that when radical evil attacks our shared humanity, we ought as human beings to remember the victims. Margalit's work offers a philosophy for our time, when, in the wake of overwhelming atrocities, memory can seem more crippling than liberating, a force more for revenge than for reconciliation. Morally powerful, deeply learned, and elegantly written, The Ethics of Memory draws on the resources of millennia of Western philosophy and religion to provide us with healing ideas that will engage all of us who care about the nature of our relations to others.

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241

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Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674040597

ISBN 13

9780674040595

The Decent Society

By: Avishai Margalit

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The Decent Society

By: Avishai Margalit

Avishai Margalit builds his social philosophy on this foundation: a decent society, or a civilized society, is one whose institutions do not humiliate the people under their authority, and whose citizens do not humiliate one another. What political philosophy needs urgently is a way that will permit us to live together without humiliation and with dignity. Most of the philosophical attention nowadays is drawn to the ideal of the just society based on the right balance between freedom and equality. The ideal of the just society is a sublime one but hard to realize. The decent society is an ideal which can be realized even in our children's lifetime. We should get rid of cruelty first, advocated Judith Shklar. Humiliation is a close second. There is more urgency in bringing about a decent society than in bringing about a just one. Margalit begins concretely where we live, with all the infuriating acts of humiliation that make living in the world so difficult. He argues in a concrete way in the spirit of Judith Shklar and Isaiah Berlin. This is a social philosophy that resists all those menacing labels that promote moral laziness, just as it urges us to get beyond the behavior that labels other human beings. Margalit can't be earmarked as liberal or conservative. If a label is necessary, then the most suitable is George Orwell's humane socialism, a far cry from Animal Farm socialism with its many tools of oppression. How to be decent, how to build a decent society, emerges out of Margalit's analysis of the corrosive functioning of humiliation in its many forms. This is a thoroughly argued and, what is much more, a deeply felt book that springs from Margalit's experience at the borderlands of conflicts between Eastern Europeans and Westerners, between Palestinians and Israelis.

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336

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Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674040600

ISBN 13

9780674040601

The Decent Society

By: Avishai Margalit

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The Decent Society

By: Avishai Margalit

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336

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Harvard University Press

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ISBN 10

0674040600

ISBN 13

9780674040601

Apostasie

By: Avishai Margalit

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Apostasie

By: Avishai Margalit

English summary: Why betrayal ? It seems today that the idea of betrayal has lost its grip. After all, infidelity as a breach of sexual monogamy is relegated nowadays, in liberal countries, to the private sphere of personal relations. Apostasy is rendered, in liberal societies, not as an act of betrayal, but rather a basic human right. Avishai Margalits concern with apostasy is not a concern with theology, namely with God but with philosophical anthropology, namely with human beings. He believes that the main challenge to anyone who believes in the project of ethics, and in the importance and viability of the notion of betrayal, is to disentangle the notion of betrayal from its feudal underpinnings. In his concept of a decent society, Margalit succeeds in incorporating into any political pragmatism an indispensable ethical and moral dimension which is constitutionally and consistently orientated to the basic principle of human dignity. German description: Warum Verrat? Heute scheint die Vorstellung von Verrat kein Thema mehr zu sein. So bleibt heutzutage in liberalen Staaten etwa Untreue als Verletzung sexueller Monogamie auf die Privatsphare personlicher Beziehungen beschrankt. Apostasie ist in liberalen Gesellschaften von einem Akt des Verrats zu einem Grundrecht geworden. Avishai Margalits Interesse an Apostasie ist kein theologisches, sondern ein philosophisch-anthropologisches; es zielt nicht auf Gott, sondern auf Menschen. Seiner Meinung nach ist die grosste Herausforderung fur jeden, der an das Projekt der Ethik und an die Wichtigkeit und Brauchbarkeit des Begriffs des Verrats glaubt, den Begriff des Verrats von seiner feudalen Untermauerung zu befreien. Mit dem Entwurf einer anstandigen Gesellschaft gelingt es Margalit, jedem politischen Pragmatismus eine unverzichtbare ethisch-moralische Dimension einzuzeichnen, die sich grundlegend und konsequent am Leitbild menschlicher Wurde orientiert.

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110

Publisher

Mohr Siebeck

Published Date

ISBN 10

3161523245

ISBN 13

9783161523243

Occidentalism

The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies

By: Ian Buruma,Avishai Margalit

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Occidentalism

The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies

By: Ian Buruma,Avishai Margalit

Twenty-five years ago, Edward Said's Orientalism spawned a generation of scholarship on the denigrating and dangerous mirage of "the East" in the Western colonial mind. But "the West" is the more dangerous mirage of our own time, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit argue, and the idea of "the West" in the minds of its self-proclaimed enemies remains largely unexamined and woefully misunderstood. Occidentalism is their groundbreaking investigation of the demonizing fantasies and stereotypes about the Western world that fuel such hatred in the hearts of others. We generally understand "radical Islam" as a purely Islamic phenomenon, but Buruma and Margalit show that while the Islamic part of radical Islam certainly is, the radical part owes a primary debt of inheritance to the West. Whatever else they are, al Qaeda and its ilk are revolutionary anti-Western political movements, and Buruma and Margalit show us that the bogeyman of the West who stalks their thinking is the same one who has haunted the thoughts of many other revolutionary groups, going back to the early nineteenth century. In this genealogy of the components of the anti-Western worldview, the same oppositions appear again and again: the heroic revolutionary versus the timid, soft bourgeois; the rootless, deracinated cosmopolitan living in the Western city, cut off from the roots of a spiritually healthy society; the sterile Western mind, all reason and no soul; the machine society, controlled from the center by a cabal of insiders—often Jews—pulling the hidden levers of power versus an organically knit-together one, a society of "blood and soil." The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for a number of legitimate reasons, they argue, but in no way does that make it an exclusively Islamic matter. A work of extraordinary range and erudition, Occidentalism will permanently enlarge our collective frame of vision

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180

Publisher

Penguin

Published Date

ISBN 10

0143034871

ISBN 13

9780143034872

Idolatry

By: Moshe Halbertal,Avishai Margalit

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Idolatry

By: Moshe Halbertal,Avishai Margalit

Ranging with authority from the Talmud to Maimonides, from Marx to Nietzsche and on to G.E. Moore, this account of a subject central to our culture also has much to say about metaphor, myth, and the application of philosophical analysis to religious concepts and sensibilities.

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318

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Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674443136

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9780674443136

The Ethics of Memory

By: Avishai Margalit

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The Ethics of Memory

By: Avishai Margalit

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241

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Harvard University Press

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0674040597

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9780674040595

On Betrayal

By: Avishai Margalit

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On Betrayal

By: Avishai Margalit

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301

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Harvard University Press

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067497395X

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9780674973954

On Compromise and Rotten Compromises

By: Avishai Margalit

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On Compromise and Rotten Compromises

By: Avishai Margalit

When is political compromise acceptable--and when is it fundamentally rotten, something we should never accept, come what may? What if a rotten compromise is politically necessary? Compromise is a great political virtue, especially for the sake of peace. But, as Avishai Margalit argues, there are moral limits to acceptable compromise even for peace. But just what are those limits? At what point does peace secured with compromise become unjust? Focusing attention on vitally important questions that have received surprisingly little attention, Margalit argues that we should be concerned not only with what makes a just war, but also with what kind of compromise allows for a just peace. Examining a wide range of examples, including the Munich Agreement, the Yalta Conference, and Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, Margalit provides a searching examination of the nature of political compromise in its various forms. Combining philosophy, politics, and history, and written in a vivid and accessible style, On Compromise and Rotten Compromises is full of surprising new insights about war, peace, justice, and sectarianism.

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240

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Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691133174

ISBN 13

9780691133171

Occidentalism

The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies

By: Ian Buruma,Avishai Margalit

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Occidentalism

The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies

By: Ian Buruma,Avishai Margalit

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180

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Penguin

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0143034871

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9780143034872

Views in Review

Politics and Culture in the State of the Jews

By: Avishai Margalit

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Views in Review

Politics and Culture in the State of the Jews

By: Avishai Margalit

In a collection of essays for American readers written over the past two decades, a well-known political commentator in the Israeli press ranges across the whole terrain of Israeli life and history, from Zionism to the meaning of the Holocaust. 10,000 first printing.

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336

Publisher

Farrar Straus & Giroux

Published Date

ISBN 10

0374249415

ISBN 13

9780374249410

Book's by Avishai Margalit

On Betrayal

On Betrayal

Idolatry

Idolatry

The Ethics of Memory

The Ethics of Memory

The Decent Society

The Decent Society

The Decent Society

The Decent Society

Apostasie

Apostasie

Occidentalism

Occidentalism

Idolatry

Idolatry

The Ethics of Memory

The Ethics of Memory

On Betrayal

On Betrayal

On Compromise and Rotten Compromises

On Compromise and Rotten Compromises

Occidentalism

Occidentalism

Views in Review

Views in Review

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