Politics of Past Evil, TheOver the past two or three decades, all over the world, a formidable number of societies have sought to confront past evilthe injustices of communism, military dictatorship, apartheid, or civil war. Emergent is the concept of reconciliation, whose meaning philosophers and social scientists now debate in the context of political transitions in countries as diverse as South Africa, East Timor, Guatemala, and the Czech Republic. Most of these debates,