INTRODUCTION

The question of forgiveness in politics has attained a certain cachet. Indeed, in the fifty years since Hannah Arendt commented on the notable absence of forgiveness in the political tradition, a vast and multidisciplinary literature on the politics of apology, forgiveness, and reconciliation has emerged. A number of historical events can account for this sudden turn: the efforts of former Soviet Bloc countries to acknowledge state spying and other infractions on the rights of their citizens; the establishment of truth commissions in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile (among others) to investigate state-sanctioned disappearances, kidnappings and tortures; and, perhaps most famously, the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa. At the same time, there have been gestures by parties to World War II on both sides of the conflict to apologize and repair for various war crimes and infractions, and settler societies like Canada, the USA, and Australia have been called to task for past injustices by various members of their own citizenry: indigenous peoples, the descendants of former slaves, linguistic and ethnic minorities, and immigrant groups who have suffered from discrimination and exploitation.

Analyses of these new politics typically touch on the potential role for a political notion of forgiveness, although few have provided a detailed or consistent theoretical explanation of what would make an act of forgiveness political, and what distinguishes political forgiveness from its more familiar counterparts in everyday life. Instead, this task has fallen to philosophers, and they have embraced it with no small degree of cynicism. To a novice scouring the relevant literatures, it might appear that the only discordant note in this new veritable symphony of writings on political forgiveness has been sounded by philosophers writing on the topic. Where others see new hope for politics, philosophers fear an uncritical promotion of forgiveness, which risks distorting and cheapening forgiveness as a moral ideal, on the one hand, and ignoring justice, accountability, and the need to end harmful relationships, on the other. After all, when philosophers take up the question of forgiveness, it is usually in order to shape it into something resembling a rationally defensible moral ideal.