[Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Thomas Cushman: The Sociology of Evil and The Destruction of Bosnia

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Thomas Cushman: The Sociology of Evil and The Destruction of Bosnia
The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture
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          In sociology, the subject of evil has been avoided, argues
    Thomas Cushman, but the events of the twentieth century call for a
    sociological grappling with the term. Cushman argues for looking at
    evil as a form of social action, as something that human agents do,
    and employs such a theory of evil in examining the war in Bosnia. He
    focuses on the actions of Slobodan Milosevic, and the ways in which
    Milosevic created an identity for himself that obscured the evil for
    which he is responsible.

          Thomas Cushman is Associate Professor and Chair of the Sociology
    Department at Wellesley College, General Editor for the series
    "Post-Communist Societies and Cultures," and Editor of Human Rights
    Review. He has published numerous papers and books on Soviet society
    and the Balkans and has co-edited, with Stjepan G. Mestrovic, This
    Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia.

I

          There is an apocalyptic quality to much writing on Bosnia, a
    certain awestruck "homage to the extreme" as Michael Bernstein calls
    it, which presumes that the answers to the question "why did this evil
    happen?" lie outside the ken of normal human knowledge.[4]^2 Rather
    than assume that events in Bosnia reveal some greater metaphysical
    truth about evil or about some presumed stage of regression or
    apocalypse in Western culture, I suggest that there might be a way to
    offer at least some answer to the question of why those events
    occurred and that such an answer lies in the analysis of the discrete
    actions and interactions of specific agents within the contours of the
    social time and space in which such agents exist. In this essay, I
    would like to render the rhetorical question "why did it happen?" into
    a sociological one: "what brought individual agents to do such things
    and how were their acts facilitated by their social and cultural
    environments?" The answer to this question requires a sociology of
    evil that does not really exist, or if it does, only exists inchoately
    in a few explicitly sociological works that attempt to present the
    logic of evil and cruelty. My central purpose here is to work toward
    the provision of such a theory. There are, to be sure, problems that
    immediately arise in such a task.

          As a moral concept, evil is an "ancient, and heavily freighted
    term."[5]^3 The freight, in this case, is the baggage of morality,
    metaphysics, emotions, essentialism, psychology--in short, all of the
    things that sociology has defined itself against in the course of its
    development as an autonomous discipline. Sociology is grounded in
    philosophy. But if philosophy prior to the twentieth century seemed
    inordinately concerned with the question of evil (as can be seen, for
    example, in the works of Hegel, Kant, Hume, and Schopenhauer),
    sociology is characterized by a conscious distancing of itself from
    the term and a selective appropriation of ideas that fit the nascent
    discipline's idea of human nature and the positive telos of human
    evolution. Indeed, evil is sociology's Doppelgänger, always present,
    but unwelcome, haunting the discipline and its quest for enlightenment
    by calling to mind questions of metaphysics, agency, and the "dark
    side" of human progress.

          If evil appears at all in mainstream sociological theory, it
    does so as a "falling away" from the good. Evil is always "not-A"
    rather than "A." This moral stance--the idea that immorality,
    deviance, and evil are "fallings away" from the good--is deeply
    embedded in the history of sociological thought and has worked to
    disestablish the ontological reality of evil in social theory and, by
    way of that, to elide the presence of evil in social life. If evil
    does appear as an autonomous and independent reality, it does so as a
    sense of something negative about this or that social force rather
    than as an explicit quality of social forces. While sociology aimed to
    set itself apart from the question of evil (a question that was
    central to philosophy), its concepts often convey a sense that, even
    if evil is not specifically addressed, it is still present in the
    world.

          The first step in a sociology of evil, then, is to establish the
    ontological status of evil. Without such a status, there is only an
    emergent sociological evil or a purely relativistic conception, which
    makes it impossible to make any statements about the actual existence
    of something that we call evil.[6]^4 Pragmatic philosophy and "social
    theory in the pragmatic mode" decry the effort to fix an idea of evil
    over and above the language which is used by human beings to describe
    the sensations they have of extreme phenomena. Yet after all that such
    philosophies and theories have said and done to distance themselves
    from the reality of evil, we are left--especially in consideration of
    the brutal facts of the twentieth century--with a sense that there are
    still things on earth that are not dreamt of in the philosophies of
    those whose business it is to know the world.

          To do evil is to intentionally inflict excessive pain and
    suffering on someone else. What is evil about human actions is, in
    Abigail Rosenthal's words, "that aspect of them that intentionally
    obscures, disrupts, or deflects the ideal thread of plot in human
    lives" and which does so in a way that is, from a normative
    standpoint, excessive, cruel, or aberrant.[7]^5 Neil Smelser notes
    that evil is "most appropriately applied to situations when force,
    violence, and other forms of coercion exceed institutional or moral
    limits."[8]^6 John Kekes sees evil actions as those which "cause
    serious and morally unjustified harm to other human beings. [The] harm
    is serious if it interferes with the functioning of a person as a
    full-fledged agent."[9]^7

          The second step in the sociology of evil is to raise the study
    of evil to a level on par with those of other phenomena usually
    studied by social scientists. Given the definition of evil offered
    above, it is easy to see why it is important to establish an
    operational idea of evil into the vocabulary of analysis of the
    destruction of Bosnia. It was a particularly cruel and ferocious
    event, one that was unimaginable in the context of late
    twentieth-century Europe. Yet, in the dominant discourse on the war,
    economic disparities, nationalism, historical precedent, and other
    background factors are usually offered as the explanatory variables
    that caused the war. These factors in and of themselves, though,
    cannot explain some of the most salient aspects of the war: the
    specific acts of barbarism and cruelty that characterize evil. Why did
    soldiers rape and kill wives and children in front of husbands and
    fathers and then leave the latter to live with the memory? Why did
    soldiers destroy beautiful and ancient architectural monuments which
    had no strategic value? Why were 12,000 people 1,800 of whom were
    children--intentionally murdered in Sarajevo? The answers to these
    questions can never be found purely in the analysis of political,
    economic, or even cultural factors because, in the first instance,
    politics, economics, and culture never do anything by themselves. It
    is individuals who are enmeshed in politics, economics, and culture
    who do things through or in relation to politics, economics, and
    culture. That is to say, the true character of cruelty in Bosnia and
    Herzegovina (and I think of cruelty in general) is to be found in the
    acts of agents in relation to the structures that enable and constrain
    them.

          At base, evil is action, and as such the theory of evil that I
    present here is a theory of action. It presents a view that contrasts
    with those accounts that rely on some kind of historical or cultural
    determinism to explain social outcomes in the Balkans: "The war was
    caused by age-old hatreds." "The Serbs are products of a cruel
    culture." "The Croats have a natural affinity for Nazism and
    genocide." These views constitute the main parameters of both popular
    and social science discourse on the war. They not only rely on crude
    stereotypes and errors of fact, but also fail to capture the sense of
    agency that is necessary in order to understand the specific qualities
    of evil and cruelty. It was individuals who destroyed Bosnia, and they
    did so not as automatons or dupes of historical or cultural forces,
    but as willful agents who reflexively responded to the contours of
    both local and global history, who reflexively adapted themselves to
    the exigencies and contingencies of the unfolding present, and who
    reflexively presented an ideal vision of the future that their actions
    would, ideally, bring about.

II

          While I want to develop a sociology of evil by way of reclaiming
    what is important from the philosophy of evil, I do want to distance
    myself from the idea of essential evil. The basis for a sociology of
    evil is not metaphysics, but theories of social action. Evil is not an
    essential quality of human beings, but is intentional action, the
    result of the conscious reflection of actors and the willful decision
    to do something severe to someone else.

          If evil is agentic and intentional action that is reflexively
    chosen, it should be fairly easy to account for it from the standpoint
    of existing sociological theories of action and agency. We could just
    adapt the latter to interpret actions that we consider evil. Yet,
    sociological theorists of agency have, like sociological theorists in
    general, displaced evil. This displacement has much to do with the
    unbridled political optimism of the progenitors of the pragmatic
    theories of social action. Action and reflexivity was, for these
    thinkers and their later followers, always considered as progressive.
    This development was ironic since such theories developed in a world
    historical context in which it was rather evident that agents used the
    infrastructure of modernity for nefarious rather than progressive
    ends.

          There is no logical or empirical reason to assume that
    reflexivity is fundamentally oriented to optimistic, progressive,
    Enlightenment ends. Indeed, if we are interested in looking at the
    ways in which agency is enabled by the infrastructures of modernity,
    we are likely to find our best examples in those whose acts would be
    classified as "transgressive." The archetypal, ideal-type model of the
    evil agent is to be found in the fictional characters of James Bond
    stories: brilliant geniuses who have mastered modern technologies in
    the service of grand anti-Enlightenment schemes. Such characters are
    highly reflexive agents, perhaps even hyperreflexive. But the ends of
    their agency and reflection are to maximize the pain and suffering of
    others, to deliberately obscure the plot lines of others' lives
    through creative intervention. This conception, of course, involves a
    break with the view that reflexivity and moral progress go hand in
    hand: reflexivity, in my view, is neither moral nor immoral,
    progressive nor regressive, modern nor barbaric by nature. Rather,
    evil is reflexive, creative, imaginative, adaptive, and cunning,
    whatever its axiological ends, and especially so in relation to the
    more technologically complex condition of modernity. To miss or
    underestimate the reflexivity of evil is, I think, to fail to capture
    the most important quality of evil. So what we need is a conception of
    agency that allows us to examine evil as a form of social action.

          Such a conception can be found in an imaginative article on the
    nature of agency by Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mirsch, in which they
    note that agency always proceeds in relation to past, present, and
    future:

      Actors are always living simultaneously in the past, the future,
      and present, and adjusting to the various temporalities of their
      empirical existence to one another (and to their empirical
      circumstances) in more or less imaginative or reflective ways. They
      continuously engage in patterns and repertoires from the past,
      project hypothetical pathways forward in time, and adjust their
      actions to the exigencies of emerging situations.[10]^8

          This "relational pragmatics," as the authors refer to it, allows
    us to conceive of agency as a function of a reflexive consciousness
    that is oriented toward three temporal planes: past, present, and
    future. The latter constitute a kind of "chordal triangle" which
    actors "play" as they engage in reflexive social action.

          In stressing the temporal bases of action, Emirbayer and
    Mirsch's approach is much more sophisticated than that found in most
    theories of agency and offers an imaginative basis for examining the
    specific actions of agents under specific conditions of social time
    and space. Their view is also especially useful for understanding
    agency in the postmodern world in which past, future, and present are
    made manifest to actors in many more ways, through many different
    media. Curiously, though, the authors note that their analysis only
    delineates the "analytical space within which reflective and morally
    responsible action might be said to unfold."[11]^9 There is no
    inherent reason why "relational pragmatics" should be considered
    inherently positive and morally responsible. Indeed, it is the central
    point of the present analysis that pragmatics are oriented in what
    might be called, to invert Emirbayer and Mirsch's terminology,
    "morally irresponsible ways." The connection between agency and moral
    responsibility is not grounded in an empirical assessment of the range
    of human activities, but rather is a product of the homage to the
    idealism of pragmatic social theory. It is, in fact, deceiving to
    restrict the analysis of action to those projects that are thought to
    be morally constructive and progressive. The destruction of Bosnia is
    only one recent case that illustrates that the forging of
    un-democratic politics, the perpetration of cruel and ferocious acts,
    and the masking of all the latter by the perpetrators and social
    science interpreters is the product of highly reflexive agents who
    insert themselves into the past, adapt to the present, and imagine a
    future. Such cruelty does not just happen; it is made.

III

          There is a saying in the Serbo-Croatian language: "riba se truje
    od glave nadolje," which means that "fish rots from the head down."
    The principle architects of the destruction of Bosnia--Serbian
    elites--set into motion a whole process, a whole machinery of agents
    who, in toto, effected the destruction of Bosnia. The Bosnian war was
    perhaps the most widely covered war in history; phalanxes of
    journalists were constantly on the scene to capture events as they
    unfolded. The presence of these journalists was a major factor in the
    reflexive considerations of the perpetrators of violence, and it is
    through these media that we witnessed the destruction of Bosnia and
    the reflexive accounts of the agents who effected that destruction and
    provided a rationale for them. My data is the actual footage of these
    figures by Western journalists and the "presentations of self" that
    these elites put forth through local and global media. The words of
    these agents provide indications of the ways in which they consciously
    and reflexively played the past, present, and future as the basis for
    their ongoing social actions. In this essay, I will focus on the
    principal agent in the dissolution of Bosnia, Slobodan Milosevic.

          Slobodan Milosevic did not create himself as a nationalist, but
    actually inserted himself into an existing historical current of
    Serbian concern about the encroachment of national minorities on
    Serbs, particularly in the autonomous region of Kosovo. The special
    importance of Kosovo as the place where the Serbs suffered defeat at
    the hands of the "Turks" in 1389 is quite well known. But all through
    Serbian history, Kosovo has been a special site of tension between
    Albanians and Serbs; this tension had been exacerbated in the
    nineteenth and twentieth centuries by patterns of out-migration of
    Serbs and in-migration of Albanians.

          This motif of Serbian nationalism ran through twentieth-century
    Serbian history and found expression and intensification in later
    pronouncements of Serbian intellectuals. In January 1986, two hundred
    prominent Belgrade intellectuals signed a petition to the Yugoslav and
    Serbian national assemblies.[12]^10 This petition laments the
    "genocide" of the Serbian people and demands the

      right to spiritual identity, to defense of the foundations of Serb
      national culture and to the physical survival of our nation on its
      land. We demand decisive measures, and that the concern and will of
      all Yugoslavia be mobilized in order to stop the Albanian
      aggression in Kosovo and Metohija.[13]^11

          The petition was signed by notable intellectuals, including
    former "Marxist humanist" editors of the prominent Yugoslav Marxist
    journal Praxis: Zaga Golubovik, Mihailo Markovik, and Ljubomir Tadik.
    The alignment of these prominent intellectuals with aggressive
    nationalism not only puzzled left acolytes of Yugoslav Marxism, but
    also pointed to a close connection between the latter and nationalism
    that has often been elided in contemporary accounts. In a later
    pronouncement on February 26, 1987, the three editors published a
    rejoinder to a criticism by Michele Lee of their support of
    nationalism.[14]^12 While claiming to continue to uphold the
    principles of democratic socialism in the journal and the general
    rights of all minorities, the three editors stress that, as Serbs,
    they are also defending the "Serbian victims of oppression."[15]^13
    They refer to the Albanian people as the "little David" which

      always had the upper hand most of the time because it was amply
      supported by overwhelming allies: the Islamic Ottoman Empire during
      five centuries until 1912; Austria Hungary which occupied the
      entire territory during World War I; fascist Italy and Germany
      which did the same during World War II; the Soviet Union and China
      after 1948; eventually a dominating anti-Serbian coalition itself
      over the last twenty years.[16]^14

          Notice in this description the highly relational articulation of
    Serbian victimization: it emerges through the long durée of the
    history of domination by foreign peoples, by enemies of all
    ideological stripes and continues to this day, ostensibly embodied in
    the nascent movements for autonomy taking place in other parts of
    Yugoslavia. The past is always present and all the more so in the most
    reflexive elements of the population, namely, the intellectuals.

          These contours of Serbian history formed the central aspect of
    the more general cultural milieu in which political leaders in the
    disintegrating Yugoslavia existed. Serbian history really was
    characterized by the series of oppressions named. What was decisive
    for the fate of Bosnia was the ways in which this history was "played"
    by politicians in the present. No one was a more skillful player than
    Milosevic; his very power depended fundamentally on his exploitation
    and intensification of these anti-Albanian sentiments and the
    perception of the danger posed by Albanians to the Serbs. Indeed, what
    is remarkable about the tense situation in Kosovo, both in the late
    1980s and now, is the way in which the present-day Albanians are seen
    as "Turk-surrogates," symbolic stand-ins for the real Turks who
    defeated Prince Lazar 600 years before in 1389 at the Battle of
    Kosovo. In terms of the temporal plane of history, what distinguishes
    so much of the social action in the Balkans is the way in which
    history resides so close to the surface, always ready to be taken into
    consideration as the justification for this or that act in the
    present. Milosevic set the stage for this contemporaneization of
    history in a famous speech to Kosovo Polje on April 24, 1987.
    Milosevic used the tensions in Kosovo to effect a transformation of
    his own political identity from a communist apparatchik to nationalist
    "savior of the Serbian people." This was a highly intentional act, and
    while it no doubt "brewed" for some time, we have actual footage that
    shows the exact moment when Milosevic recreated his identity.

          The Kosovo gathering shows the volatile mix of crowd dynamics,
    political calculations, the construction of charisma, and conscious
    insertion of the self into history that comprise acts of agency in the
    Balkans. While it is clear that Milosevic emerged victorious at this
    time, what is not often commented on is the high degree of contingency
    and unpredictability of this event. Like other reflexive interactions
    in situations of co-presence, the interactions of a political leader
    with masses is a precarious endeavor, even more so perhaps since the
    reflexivity of the "masses" is not highly developed and, thus, the
    leader is forced to play to the mob rather than the other way around.
    Milosevic might well have emerged a villain rather than a hero, and
    the contingency of the event is evident in the way the situation
    played itself out. While the event was highly orchestrated, the leader
    seemed ever conscious of the precariousness of the situation and only
    "struck" when he was sure that the identity he had chosen would
    resonate with the crowd.

          Milosevic's declaration, "You will not be beaten again," is an
    utterance which places him, at once, in the past, present, and future:
    the reference to "again" does not refer to the immediate past of the
    staged and contrived attack on Serbs outside the lecture hall just a
    few moments ago, but to the long-standing beating of the Serbs by
    Albanians which has occurred since 1389. The utterance itself is a
    reflexive orientation to the audience which, in the present, demands
    something immediate of Milosevic, and the use of the future tense
    means that Milosevic has defined a vision of the future in which the
    Serbs will be safe from other threats. While I would not like to make
    too much out of one utterance, I would say that the pattern of
    "playing" the chordal triangle of past, present, and future which is
    so evident in this utterance was to establish itself as the principle
    grounding for destructive acts in Bosnia.

          Milosevic continued this playing of past, present, and future as
    he assumed more power. On May 8, 1989, Milosevic assumed the
    presidency of Yugoslavia. The next month, on June 28, again at the
    very battlefield where the "Turks" had defeated the Serbs, a mass
    rally of over one million people was staged. Milosevic as the
    transformed Serbian nationalist leader played the key role in the
    spectacle, which took place at Gazimestan, at the actual site of the
    battle of Kosovo. Mass audiences were convened to greet Milosevic who,
    just as Hitler had descended to Nuremberg sixty years before in an
    airplane, descended to the field in a helicopter to greet the people.
    This spectacle continued Milosevic's reflexive transformation of his
    own identity. I want to stress this because, for the purpose of my
    general argument here, history is not simply a background force that
    caused the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the attendant destruction of
    Bosnia: it was a force that was activated by agents to refashion their
    identities and, by way of that, to alter the specific contours of the
    present and future.

          The consideration of Milosevic as a reflexive agent is not meant
    to decide the question about whether or not Milosevic is actually
    "evil" in some essential sense, although the case could be made
    philosophically that he is wicked, that is, he is an individual who is
    an "habitual evildoer."[17]^15 The point is that in his actions we see
    a strong intersection between the reflexive remaking of Milosevic's
    self and the investing of that self into a series of social actions
    that had a specific effect on the present and Serbian future. If it is
    the case that Milosevic's actions in the beginning of the war were the
    pretext for the destruction of Bosnia, it is also the case that his
    own actions enabled others who were the executors of his plans for the
    forcible repression of newly independent states of the former
    Yugoslavia. While Milosevic's transformation set the ball in motion,
    there is a seeming inconsistency between Milosevic's rather
    dispassionate and bureaucratic demeanor and the events that have come
    to characterize the war in ex-Yugoslavia: the brutal rapes, the acts
    of torture and mutilations, the killing of civilians and
    non-combatants. It is very easy to see Machiavelli rather than
    Rousseau in him.

          Yet Milosevic's own transformation set in motion a general
    movement away from pure Machiavellianism to a more "fragrant,"
    contractual, and aestheticized version of transgression--transgression
    that manifested itself almost as a kind of Durkheimian ritual of
    negative solidarity. We can move from the analysis of the reflexive
    self of a former communist party leader who turned nationalist for his
    own benefit to the analysis of the true believers who precipitated
    acts of cruelty in the name of the nation, the self-defense of the
    victimized Serbian people. In such a movement, we see manifestations
    of an autonomous evil, in which agents such as Milosevic are well
    aware of what they are doing, and what John Kekes calls non-autonomous
    evil, in which actors perpetrate evil acts, but are convinced that
    what they are doing is good, righteous, or just.[18]^16 Whether
    autonomous or non-autonomous, like Milosevic, these same actors played
    the chordal triangle of past, present, and future as they committed
    their acts of transgression.

IV

          In his work Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hegel
    noted, quite rightly, that "it is in world history that we encounter
    the sum total of concrete evil." He was wrong, however, to surmise
    that the ultimate design of the world has been realized and that "evil
    has not been able to maintain a position of equality beside
    it."[19]^17 Nowhere is the fact that we have not approached the "end
    of history" more evident than in Bosnia: the postmodern world, with
    its swirl of accounts, each circulating through the plethora of media
    outlets and each sounding as plausible and true as the other, has
    actually set the stage for the enabling of extreme behavior. The late
    twentieth century became, in David Rieff's terms, the age of genocide,
    a period in which we witnessed a particularly volatile reemergence of
    evil that is troubling precisely because we have perhaps lost not only
    the moral ability, but also the cognitive ability to recognize it or
    even name it.

          Social theorists such as Zygmunt Bauman and Norbert Elias have
    noted, each in their different ways, that modern civilization is a
    condition in which good and evil present themselves together. To the
    Enlightenment minds, there was a troubling aspect to the pairing of
    good and evil, for part of the "grand design" of the Enlightenment
    project was that, through the march of time, the former was supposed
    to displace the latter. Yet it is the very technologies that are
    supposed to eradicate evil--the media, the rise of systems of mass
    education, more refined and differentiated political systems--that
    have also contributed to the emergence of new forms of cruelty and,
    ironically, to the maskings of their painful truths. Hegel was wrong
    to assume a telos of good or evil in world history; modernity is an
    engine that drives good and evil and if, indeed, we live in a
    postmodern era, it is an era in which new engines drive the history of
    good and evil in different directions.

          Barbarism lurks beneath the veneer of civility and not so much
    as a foreign body, but as an integral part of the very constitution of
    modernity. Its existence itself is troubling to the modern
    consciousness, but even more troubling is its unpredictability: we
    simply do not know when or where it will emerge. This
    unpredictability, as much as the existence of evil itself, is a
    constant source of consternation for the liberal mind. No one
    predicted that Sarajevo would be transformed from a metaphor of human
    cooperation into an abject symbol of hell on earth. Bosnia itself
    became a metaphor of how far we could fall so fast, of the existence
    of evil, geographically only hours away and in the media only
    nanoseconds away from the comforting "good" of capitalist, liberal
    democracy. The evil that supplanted the good in Bosnia was, however,
    near the "surface" of present time, inchoate and unseen, waiting to be
    put into play by specific agents in particular times and places who,
    through their actions, make history.

          Perhaps there is a new logic of evil in postmodernity. Agency
    exists in a cultural context of swirling simulacra in which claims for
    some kind of truth about the world seem absurd or simply naive. Agency
    exists in relation to new forms of global media and information flows
    that allow agents to more easily excavate history, manipulate the
    present, and construct futures in new and even more creative--but not
    necessarily progressive--ways. This dialectic is likely to yield new
    expressions of evil that, at present, we can only imagine.
    ________________________

    [20]^1 This essay was written before the atrocities committed in
    Kosovo and the subsequent NATO war against Yugoslavia. As such, I have
    not dealt with that case at length, although the general model
    articulated here could be applied to interpret that case. This paper
    has benefited from remarks by John Kekes, John Rodden, and William
    Cain. ] [21]^2 Michael Bernstein, "Homage to the Extreme: The Shoah
    and the Rhetoric of Catastrophe," The Times Literary Supplement (6
    March 1996): 6. ] [22]^3 Nevitt Sanford and Craig Comstock, "Sanctions
    for Evil," Sanctions for Evil: Sources of Social Destructiveness, ed.
    Sanford, Comstock, and Associates (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1973)
    5. ] [23]^4 One of the key works to recognize that the character of
    evil acts is to be found in the acts themselves and in subjectivity is
    Jack Katz's Seductions of Crime: The Moral and Sensual Attractions of
    Doing Evil (New York: Basic Books, 1988). Katz establishes the basis
    for the sociology of evil when he notes that crime is not just a "fall
    from grace, but an act of 'genuine experiential creativity'" (8). ]
    [24]^5 Abigail Rosenthal, A Good Look at Evil (Philadelphia: Temple,
    1987) 3. ] [25]^6 Neil Smelser, "Some Determinants of Destructive
    Behavior," Sanctions for Evil, 16. ] [26]^7 John Kekes, "The
    Reflexivity of Evil," Social Philosophy and Policy 15.1 (1998) : 217.
    ] [27]^8 Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mirsch, "What is Agency?," American
    Journal of Sociology 103: 1012. ] [28]^9 Emirbayer and Mirsch, "What
    is Agency?," 1012. ] [29]^10 The document is reprinted in its entirety
    in Branka Magas, The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Break-up
    1980-92 (London: Verso, 1993) 49-52. ] [30]^11 Magas, The Destruction
    of Yugoslavia, 51. ] [31]^12 This document is reprinted in its
    entirety in Magas, The Destruction of Yugoslavia, 55-61. ] [32]^13
    Magas, The Destruction of Yugoslavia, 57. ] [33]^14 Magas, The
    Destruction of Yugoslavia, 57. ] [34]^15 John Kekes' definition of a
    wicked person is one who is ruled by his or her vices and who is an
    habitual evildoer. ] [35]^16 Kekes, "The Reflexivity of Evil," 218. ]
    [36]^17 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of
    World History: Introduction, Reason in History (Cambridge: Cambridge
    University Press, 1980) 42-43. ]