Synopses & Reviews
'A historical and philosophical meditation on retaliation and redemption, offering an original theory of justice.'
Review
'\"William Ian Miller has written a marvelous book that I found absolutely riveting. Eye for an Eye succeeds brilliantly in demonstrating that the lex talionis was often meant and taken literally; that it still plays a powerful, if submerged, role in our thinking about revenge and justice today; and that, in practice, it was not nearly as brutal or unfair as other, putatively more civilized ways of dealing with the need for revenge. The book is superbly written and often hilariously funny. I loved it.\" - Wendy Doniger, University of Chicago\"In Eye for an Eye William Ian Miller provides a full-bodied defense of retributive justice, of just deserts, and of an explicitly arithmetic approach to right and wrong that counts up the eyes, limbs, bodies, and lives on our various social fields of battle, and seeks to right the scales. Miller shows just how pervasive this drive to account for our rights and wrongs has been in legal history, how deeply we continue to feel it, and how limply inadequate are our modern liberal and utilitarian understandings of justice that try to aggressively to purge this elemental instinct from our law and laws. Provocative, erudite, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny -- it is also, often, convincing. Where it is not, it is nevertheless successful: Miller tells his stories in such a way as to make palpable just how much we have sacrificed, as we\'ve turned our collective backs on the age-old project of seeking the precise correction of commensurate wrongs.\" - Robin West, Georgetown Law Center\"A provocative reminder of the primal passions hidden by sanitized legal theories.\" -Booklist'
Synopsis
Miller presents an original meditation on the concept of "pay back." His unique theory of justice offers redemption via retaliation. It espouses the view that revenge is a highly structured phenomenon that requires a deep commitment to balance in order to get even in a strict but fair manner.
Synopsis
Analysing the law of the talion - an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth - William Ian Miller presents an original meditation on the concept of 'pay back'. Miller's unique theory of justice offers redemption through retaliation, espousing the view that revenge requires a deep commitment to balance in order to get even in a strict but fair manner. Looking at concepts such as Shylock's pound of flesh bargain, blood oaths, and other societies and cultures, Miller compares the ancient, and supposedly more primitive, with their modern counterparts.
About the Author
'William Ian Miller is the Thomas G. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. He has also taught at Harvard, Yale, Chicago, and the Universities of Bergen and Tel Aviv. Professor Miller holds a JD and a PhD in English, both earned at Yale. His various books, including most recently Faking It (2003), The Mystery of Courage (2000) and The Anatomy of Disgust (1997), have enjoyed critical acclaim throughout the world.'
Table of Contents
'Preface: a theory of justice?; 1. Introductory themes: images of evenness; 2. The Talion; 3. The Talionic mint: funny money; 4. The proper price of property in an eye; 5. Teaching a lesson: pain and poetic justice; 6. A pound of flesh; 7. Remember me: mnemonics, debts (of blood), and the making of a person; 8. Dismemberment and price lists; 9. Of hands, hospitality, personal space and holiness; 10. Satisfaction not guaranteed; 11. Comparing values and the ranking game; 12. Filthy lucre and holy dollars; Conclusion.\n
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