Description: How to be decent, how to build a decent society, emerges out of Margalit's analysis of the corrosive functioning of humiliation in its many forms. This is a deeply felt book that springs from Margalit's experience at the borderlands of conflicts between Eastern Europeans and Westerners, between Palestinians and Israelis.
Brief description: Avishai Margalit is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and former George F. Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The recipient of numerous prizes, he is the author of The Decent Society, The Ethics of Memory, On Compromise and Rotten Compromises, and On Betrayal.
Review Quotes: A splendid book. It is serious without being ponderous, it is unassuming but ambitious, and it is engagingly unorthodox, both in its concerns and in the way it pursues them. At a time when the idea of decency appears in politics only in the mouths of politicians eager to keep sex off the Internet, it is a pleasure to come across an intelligent discussion of a much more serious subject, one that has had little attention from philosophers--how to build a society that doesn't humiliate its weaker members.--Alan Ryan "New York Review of Books"