Joan Copjec, Ed. Radical Evil. New York and London:  Verso, 1996.

The bicentenary of Kant's Religion within The Limits of Reason has brought the concept of radical evil into greater prominence, since Kant spent much time in this late book trying to analyse this notion which he saw as reaching down to the very source of freedom. He considered it to be an evil so radical that, far from being the rejection of some single moral maxim, it is a corruption of the source of all maxims as such. This is the principle of the categorical imperative, that one should always act so that the law behind the act should become the law for all. Freedom provides this possibility of counteracting the propensity for radical evil that is there from the very beginning. If it is radical, then it is rooted beyond the grasp to pull it up: Kant himself called it “inextirpable by human powers,” leaving open only the possibility that divine powers might assist. Faced with the Holocaust, the Gulag, the Khmer Rouge, Rwanda, Bosnia, East Timor, Algeria, thinkers at this moment would rather not embrace such pessimism.

Joan Copjec has had the timely idea of making a collection in which a wide variety of researchers,