The victimological imagination

A genealogy of the present disorder.

Mark Shiffman is one of the most interesting political theorists writing these days. He has been busy tracing the roots of our current upheaval back through the history of the West. Veteran Archedeliacs will remember Mark’s post “What is Ideology?”

In the present essay, Mark argues that the origin of our victim-obsessed politics lies in the idea of rights, the very principle on which the modern state pins its legitimacy. This is significant, as it suggests that identity politics is not so much a departure from liberalism as a consummation of its basic logic. In rights-talk, just as in identity-talk, the basic posture is one of being alert to harms. The hope seems to be that our regime’s “relentless official devotion to the elimination of victimhood will sustain its aura of legitimacy.” The essay also sheds light on the prickly psychology of the bourgeois revolutionary: “the spirited moral stance of protest and resistance, self-exoneration through commitment and compassion, and the heaping of all guilt onto the evil reactionary oppressors.” This figure takes as his object of hatred nothing less comprehensive than the human condition: cosmic injustice.

I am honored that Professor Shiffman has agreed to share this important essay with the readers of Archedelia.

-Matt