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Moral Purity and Persecution in History PDF

175 Pages·2000·3.808 MB·English
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Moral Purity and Persecution in History ❋ This page intentionally left blank Moral Purity and Persecution in History ❋ B M , J . ARRINGTON OORE R PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY Copyright © 2000 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Moore, Barrington, 1913– Moral purity and persecution in history / Barrington Moore, Jr. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-04920-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Purity (Ethics)—History. 2. Persecution—History. I. Title. BJ1533.P97 M66 2000 323.44'2'09—dc21 99-048668 This book has been composed in Baskerville The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper) http://pup.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 TO MY STUDENTS AND MY TEACHERS ASHORE AND AFLOAT. ❋ This page intentionally left blank Contents ❋ ❋ Preface ix CHAPTER1 Moral Purity and Impurity in the Old Testament 3 CHAPTER2 Purity in the Religious Conflicts of Sixteenth-Century France 27 CHAPTER3 Purity as a Revolutionary Concept in the French Revolution 59 CHAPTER4 Notes on Purity and Pollution in Asiatic Civilizations 105 Epilogue 129 Notes 135 Index 151 This page intentionally left blank Preface ❋ ❋ T HISBOOKexamines when and why human beings kill and tor- ture other human beings who, on account of their different re- ligious, political, and economic ideas, appear as a threatening source of “pollution.” What the polluting ideas were and are is of course a major aspect of the problem. They change over time. Yet this book is in no sense a work of intellectual or religious his- tory. Instead it seeks to find out in what kind of a context this complex of ideas and action occurs. The complex itself one can easily recognize as a militant or very violent movement on be- half of moral purity. There is a good case for calling these move- ments against pollution attacks on moral impurity. Indeed, in this book moral impurity receives far more attention than its opposite. It is also rather more interesting. Still, impurity is im- possible without purity. That such movements have scarred the twentieth century and are well on the way to wounding the twenty-first is so obvious as scarcely to require comment. They were central to Fascism, Com- munism, and the imperial patriotism of Japan prior to its defeat in the Second World War. Since then they have cropped up, so far, in a relatively nonviolent form in the Christian right and in the Le Pen movement in France, and in a more violent form in Islamic movements and various others. These movements were the stimulus for writing this book. But they are not its topic. Instead, this book seeks at least limited answers to two sets of general questions, those of time and place. How far back in time do we find a search for moral purity with a powerful component of violence? The Old Testament, the subject of the first chapter, is an obvious answer. The Old Testament records the invention of monotheism and the bloody struggles that accompanied its spread and establishment. Monotheism, in the straightforward sense of belief in one God and only one God, was apparently in- vented only once in human history. It necessarily implies a mo- nopoly of grace and virtue to distinguish its adherents from sur- ix

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.