She Calls It Evil: Susan Neiman on Germany, Capitalism & the Banality of Trump

“If we leave words like evil in the hands of people who are fanatical, who are demonizing, we are leaving the most powerful weapons we have in the hands of people who don’t know how to use them.” — Susan Neiman Susan Neiman is cornering the market in books about evil. First there was her 2002 Evil in Modern Thought, an alternative history of philosophy. Then Learning from the Germans, her 2019 treatise about race and the memory of evil. And now Call It Evil, an attempt to understand the Trump era which offers an alternative history of contemporary economics. So what, exactly, is “evil”? Rather than defining what she describes as our most “explosive” word, she gracefully dances around it with all the elliptical subtlety of a clever philosopher. In spite of its Trumpian subtitle (“Understanding the Trump Era”), the book isn’t an inventory of Trump’s crimes. Instead, it investigates why half of America accepted a man whose (evil?) character was already blatantly self-evident. Her answer focuses on economics rather than politics. The major source of evil in our age, she argues, is an ideology built on a falsified Adam Smith — self-interest as the whole of human nature — propped up by evolutionary psychologists misreading Darwin, and sold so effectively that we now mistake it for common sense. In a word: neo-liberalism. The (a)moral universe of the Heritage Foundation, Milton Friedman and Margaret “there is no alternative” Thatcher. So is capitalism evil? Yes, the philosopher suggests, quoting Einstein and borrowing from contemporary economists like Amartya Sen. But rather than a return to Marx, she wants us to reimagine the 19th century Kantian socialist, Eduard Bernstein, in the context of the injustices of contemporary capitalism. Rather than evil, Neiman really is a philosopher of the good. She wants us to imagine that gap between the way the world is and the way it ought to be. Doing good means standing up to evil, she says. Like Henry Fonda’s performance as the morally defiant juror in the 1957 movie Twelve Angry Men. Five Takeaways • Why She Won’t Define It. Evil is “the most explosive word we have” — the gap between how the world is and how it ought to be. Abandon it to the fanatics and they get our sharpest weapon. • The Falsified Adam Smith. The major source of evil in our time: an ideology built on misreading Smith and Darwin. Is capitalism evil? “Oh, I do, actually” — quoting Einstein. • Not a Book About Trump. Not an inventory of his crimes but an answer to how half of America accepted him twice. Trump as the reductio ad absurdum of an idea we now call common sense. • Socialism Needs More Kant. Bernstein’s heresy, against Marx’s “foam on the beer” — and Mamdani as proof: affordability framed not as money in your pocket but as justice. • How Ordinary People Behave. Gaza, Truman’s bomb, Arendt’s banality and the Argentina tapes — and the prescription: tell the truth in private. She rewatched Twelve Angry Men the night before. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: @keenonshow Buy Call It Evil: wwnorton.com Chapters: 00:00:31 Introduction: looking at Trump’s America from Germany 00:02:12 Why distance helps — and why Berlin makes evil unavoidable 00:04:07 Partly repudiating Learning from the Germans 00:04:57 What does evil mean? Why definitions fail 00:06:17 The gap between is and ought — and why children see it first 00:08:27 That’s not fair: the bully in the sandbox 00:11:00 Whose title is Call It Evil? 00:11:14 Kant: born with a capacity for morality 00:13:25 The opposites: Hume, Nietzsche, and the limits of custom 00:15:20 Adam Smith falsified — Friedman, Heritage, Hoover 00:17:00 Darwin misread: altruism as a problem 00:18:09 Is capitalism evil? Einstein’s answer 00:19:30 Thatcher: economics is the method, the soul is the object 00:20:49 Not an inventory of Trump’s sins 00:23:00 The baby carriage, and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis 00:24:23 Trump as the reductio ad absurdum 00:25:57 Two sides of ourselves, in Kantian terms 00:28:56 Bernstein: socialism needs more Kant 00:31:25 The foam on the beer: what’s wrong with Marx 00:32:30 Mamdani: affordability as justice 00:34:52 Gaza — is it genocide? 00:36:27 Using one evil to justify another 00:38:13 Popular fronts, compromise, and what links left and liberal 00:45:28 Was Truman’s bomb evil? 00:46:21 Rawls and Kantian democratic socialism 00:48:40 Kehlmann’s The Director — how good people capitulate 00:51:46 How ordinary people should behave 00:53:30 Twelve Angry Men 00:59:55 Arendt, Eichmann, and the Argentina tapes 01:04:03 9/11: two different kinds of evil 01:05:22 The AfD in Saxony-Anhalt — too soon to tell?