The word problem: five political books and the vocabulary of the authoritarian turn
Susan Neiman wants the word 'evil' back. Byung-Chul Han wants 'respect'. Žižek and Butler think the words on offer are traps. Habermas, in a volume finished before his death, denied that anything was lost. The year's other book list, read as one argument.
The other half of the year's list has gone untreated as a group, and it is the stranger half. Within roughly two years, five books have appeared from writers who share no method and very little politics, and who are worrying at the same thing: whether the words available for describing the present are fit for the job. Susan Neiman thinks the load-bearing word was thrown away and should be picked up again. Byung-Chul Han thinks a smaller one was. Slavoj Žižek thinks the words on offer are traps and the task is to refuse them. Judith Butler thinks one of the loudest of them names nothing whatever. Jürgen Habermas, in a volume finished before his death in March, argued that nothing was lost in the first place, only mislaid, and that careful enough reading recovers it.
Put that way it sounds like a quarrel about usage. It is a quarrel about what political philosophy is for once the institutions it describes stop behaving as described. Get the vocabulary wrong and you moralise where you should explain, or explain where you should judge. Each of these books is a wager on which mistake currently costs more.
Neiman wants one word back, and she knows what it costs#
A popular thesis holds that Cold War repression drove American philosophers into the political safety of logic and language. Sander Verhaegh's Logical Positivism: An American History, from Oxford University Press, spent eight years in departmental archives and finds something less dramatic: a generation gap, a hiring freeze, a postwar boom and a culture that worshipped science.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, John Dewey, Nelson Goodman
Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era went on sale in the United States on 15 September, 240 pages from W. W. Norton at $27.99, with the British edition following on 6 October. It leads this group because it is the only one that names its quarry on the cover and then has to defend the naming for seven chapters.
Neiman was born in Atlanta in 1955, took her doctorate at Harvard under John Rawls and Stanley Cavell, taught at Yale and at Tel Aviv, and has run the Einstein Forum in Potsdam since 2000. She has been circling this subject for twenty-four years. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, 2002) proposed that the spine of modern philosophy is the problem of evil rather than the problem of knowledge, and that the official story from Descartes to Frege is a tidying-up after the fact. The new book turns that historical thesis on a single election result.
The argument, as Norton's own description has it, is that the return of Donald Trump to office follows not simply from political and economic forces but from the erosion of values that the educated classes spent decades declaring naive. Her targets are specific: market fundamentalism, the elevation of power over law, and what she calls identitarian politics, the left's own contribution to the collapse of universalist language. Reviewing it for Library Journal on 1 August, Ellen Gilbert reported Neiman's description of evil as "the most explosive word we have", and noted that the book closes on a reconsideration of democratic socialism, with Einstein as its unlikely advocate. Kirkus gave the sharper summary: the worst evil lies in the denial of evil, and what marks it is not malice but vacancy.
She is not an uncontested authority, and pretending otherwise would be a disservice. Left Is Not Woke (Polity, 2023; a paperback with new preface followed in 2024) argued that the contemporary left had traded universalism, the possibility of progress, and the distinction between power and justice for a tribalism inherited from Carl Schmitt and Michel Foucault. The reception was rough. Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books on 17 September 2023, Samuel C. Huneke found the book "chock full of ad hominem attacks and ungenerous readings", complained that Neiman never defines either "woke" or "the left", and reported that on looking for evidence behind the sweeping claims, "I was shocked — shocked! — to find no evidence." Kirkus detects the same habit in the new book: the attack on progressive politics rehearses familiar conservative lines, and the constructive half is thin on how any of it is to be done. That history matters, because Call It Evil asks readers to accept a word partly on the authority of the person using it.
The record of that particular word is bad, and the objection deserves its full weight#
The case against, put as strongly as it can be put, runs like this. "Evil" has been the operative vocabulary of the crusade, the inquisition and the pogrom. It was the vocabulary of the axis of evil, the phrase George W. Bush used in the State of the Union address of 29 January 2002 to bind Iraq, Iran and North Korea into a single object of policy — three states with almost nothing in common, made into one enemy by a moral adjective, with consequences that are still being counted in Baghdad. The word does not describe; it licenses. Once an opponent is evil, the questions that might have told you how he came by just under half the votes cast become impertinent. Explanation starts to look like excuse.
And the strongest version of the objection is not political but philosophical, and it comes from the thinker Neiman is most often compared to. Hannah Arendt spent the 1950s working with the concept of radical evil, borrowed from Kant and applied to the camps in The Origins of Totalitarianism. She then abandoned it. Watching Adolf Eichmann in the glass booth in Jerusalem in 1961, she concluded that the category had been the wrong instrument all along, that what she was looking at was thoughtlessness rather than depth. In a letter to Gershom Scholem in 1963 she stated it flatly: evil "is never 'radical', it is only extreme, and it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimensions. Only the good has depth and can be radical." The banality thesis, whatever else it was, was an argument against exactly the vocabulary Neiman wants to restore. It said that reaching for the grand moral word makes the perpetrator more interesting than he is, and thereby makes him harder to prevent.
Neiman's answer, which the book has to earn rather than assert, runs roughly like this. Arendt dropped one adjective, not the noun; Eichmann in Jerusalem is subtitled A Report on the Banality of Evil, and the evil is still there in the subtitle doing work. The banality claim is about the psychology of the functionary, not about the moral status of the deed, and conflating the two is how a useful observation about bureaucracy turned into a general licence to stop judging. More to the point, the word is not going to be left unused. If moral vocabulary is vacated by people who worry about its metaphysical baggage, it is occupied within the year by people who have no such worries and much worse intentions. On that narrow point she seems to me plainly right, and the record of the past decade supports her: the political use of "evil" did not decline when philosophers stopped using it.
Whether that justifies her particular deployment of it is a different question, and I am not persuaded that the book settles it. There is a difference between defending a word's availability and demonstrating that this is the occasion for it.
Ohne Respekt: Eine soziale Krise appeared from Matthes & Seitz Berlin on 26 February, 94 pages for twenty euros, which is roughly the price per page one has come to expect from Byung-Chul Han. No English edition has been announced. Polity, which holds most of his back catalogue, has nothing scheduled that I can find.
The argument is a miniature of Neiman's. Respect, Han says, has been displaced by attention, and courtesy by shaming. Respect requires distance, the Latin respicere being a looking back or a looking again, which presupposes something to look across; the digital public sphere abolishes distance as a matter of design. What is left is a competition for visibility in which the loser despises himself and everyone else. Han's exit is a politics of friendship built on distance and mutual recognition, offered as a precondition of democratic argument rather than a private virtue.
The objection to Han is not that he is wrong but that he does not argue. The books are short, the assertions large, and the aphoristic manner gives a claim about neoliberal subjectivity the same weight as a claim about etymology. The Princess of Asturias Foundation gave him its award for Communication and Humanities on 7 May 2025, citing the burnout society, the transparency society and the concept of shanzhai; prizes are not arguments. Still, ninety-four pages that isolate one structural feature of digital publics do more work than a good deal of what is published at four times the length.
Žižek and Butler go the other way and refuse the terms#
The opposite strategy treats the available vocabulary as the problem rather than the resource.
Against Progress (Bloomsbury, 31 October 2024, 136pp) is Žižek's attack on the word that organises technological optimism and a good deal of the left's self-understanding at once. To define progress is to claim the future, and every such definition licenses a present sacrifice on behalf of a promised improvement. The application to the machine-learning industry is not incidental: the sales proposition for the next model is that it will be better, which is also the argument for tolerating the damage done by this one. Zero Point (Bloomsbury, 20 March 2025, 160pp) is the companion and the better book. It turns on a distinction between defeat and catastrophe, using Lenin's 1922 image of the climber who descends in order to find another route up the same mountain. The second half collects unpublished writings on his interrupted 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair speech and the accusations of antisemitism that followed, which makes it the most exposed thing he has published in years. Our profile from 11 September is less forgiving about the performer than this paragraph is about the books.
Butler's refusal is more precise, and more consequential. Who's Afraid of Gender? (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 19 March 2024, 320pp; paperback February 2025) argues that "gender ideology", as deployed by the Vatican, by Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary and by American state legislatures, is a phantasm: not a doctrine anyone holds, but a figure onto which unrelated anxieties about migration, economic insecurity and the family are loaded, precisely because it has no fixed content and can therefore absorb any of them. The book is an account of how a nonsense term acquires state power, not a contribution to gender theory. The Vatican's declaration Dignitas Infinita, published on 8 April 2024 by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, condemned "gender theory" three weeks after Butler's book appeared. Our report on Butler at the New School covers the lecture version of the argument.
Neiman and Butler are usually filed on opposite sides of a culture war. On method they are closer than either would enjoy hearing: both hold that the first political task is getting a description right, and both think the wrong description does the damage.
Also a History of Philosophy, Volume 3: Rational Freedom. Traces of the Discourse on Faith and Knowledge reached English on 28 March 2025 from Polity, 578 pages in Ciaran Cronin's translation, after a first volume of 426 pages in 2023. It is not a response to any of these books, and its argument dissolves the premise they share.
Habermas's claim is that the moral vocabulary of modernity was neither lost nor invented but transferred: the semantic content of the Judaeo-Christian inheritance was progressively translated into secular reason, and postmetaphysical thinking is what survived the translation. The genealogy runs from Hume and Kant through Schleiermacher and Humboldt to Hegel, and ends with Feuerbach, Marx, Kierkegaard and Peirce. Reviewing it for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews on 6 February, Andrew Buchwalter singled out Habermas's estimate of Kant's practical self-legislation as one of the very few major innovations in the history of philosophy (page 262), alongside the complaint that Kant remained half-captive to the two-world doctrine he was trying to escape.
If Habermas is right, Neiman is making a category error. There is no need to recover "evil" from the theologians, because the work the word once did was long ago redescribed in the language of autonomy, mutual accountability and the reasons we owe each other. What looks like impoverishment is a forgetting of a translation already performed. The weakness is equally plain: a 578-page demonstration that the resources exist is of limited use to anyone who has to describe a deportation flight this month. Habermas died on 14 March in Starnberg, the Bavarian town where he had directed a Max Planck institute from 1971 to 1981; our obituary covers the life. This was his last long argument, and it is an argument for patience.
Lara's alternative: build the vocabulary rather than reclaim it#
The most useful book in this discussion is nineteen years old and out of the news. María Pía Lara's Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment (Columbia University Press, 2007, in the New Directions in Critical Theory series) asks how moral concepts are actually assembled, and answers: through narratives that provoke reflective judgement in Kant's sense, where no rule is given in advance and the concept has to be found for the particular case. Societies did not acquire the concept of genocide by consulting a dictionary. They acquired it from testimony, trials and books that forced audiences to judge without a rule to hand, after which the word existed and could be applied. Lara, who teaches at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City, is cited far less often than the argument warrants.
Read against Neiman, Lara is a standing objection. Reclaiming a word is a short cut around the labour that gives a word its purchase. "Evil" is available to Neiman because of Nuremberg, Arendt's reporting, Primo Levi and fifty years of argument about them; it is not available in the same way for a second Trump administration, because that labour has not been done and cannot be done in advance. A word restored by fiat is a word without a case history.
Where I come down, and it is a position rather than a finding#
My view is that the choice between recovery and refusal is badly drawn, and that on the terms actually in dispute the refusers have the better of it for now — not because moral language is suspect, but because the specific reclamation on offer is under-argued. Neiman is right that vacating moral vocabulary is a unilateral disarmament, and right that the erosion she describes precedes the politics it produced. She has not shown that "evil" is the word that does the work she needs, as against cruelty, corruption, contempt for law, or simple lying, all of them more specific, all surviving translation into policy, and none inviting the reader to stop asking how it happened.
Butler's phantasm and Han's distance are new descriptions of mechanisms, and a new description is harder to come by than a restored one. Habermas supplies the reason to think restoration unnecessary; Lara the reason to think it insufficient. Four books against one is not how philosophy is settled, and Neiman may yet turn out to have been the one watching the right thing. Her instinct that the collapse is moral before it is institutional goes unrefuted by anyone in this group, including me.
Two more books sit at the edge of the argument and were covered here separately: Martha Nussbaum's The Republic of Love on the emotions democracies require, and Robert Alexy on the dual nature of law, the same dispute in the drier idiom of constitutional theory. Neither changes the shape of the disagreement. Both suggest it runs wider than five books.
Rivka Weinberg's The Meaning of It All (Oxford, March 2026) argues that a life as a whole cannot have a point, that death is overrated as a threat to meaning, and that time is the real thief. A close reading, then the autumn's other titles: Ganeri's revised Indian philosophy introduction, Han, Žižek and Habermas.
Herman Cappelen and Rachel Sterken's open-access collection asks whether what passes between a person and a language model is communication at all. Sixteen chapters, one of which argues the volume's own premise is false. A review of the arguments, and of what the book declines to notice.
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