Cruelty. A History of Violence in Culture and the Fates of Humanity

Man is a “cruel animal.” This radical thesis is the starting point of a discursive history of cruelty. Cultural scholar Wolfgang Müller-Funk defines cruelty as part of the civilizational process and offers his perspective on this heart-wrenching aspect of human evolution that eludes conventional descriptions. In his story of twelve chapters — about Robert Musil and Ernst Jünger, Seneca and Friedrich Nietzsche, Elias Canetti and the Marquis de Sade, Jean Améry and Mario Luzi, Sigmund Freud and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ismail Kadare and Arthur Koestler — Wolfgang Müller-Funk tells an instructive story of cruelty and offers a philosophical way to resist its temptations.