What Makes an Atrocity?

What turns violence into an atrocity? Is it scale, intention, cruelty, or the way an act is remembered and judged after the fact? Who has the authority to name an atrocity—and what political or moral work does that naming do?

This seminar treats atrocity not as a self-evident category, but as a persistent problem for moral and political thought. Rather than beginning with a settled definition, we will ask how extreme violence comes to be distinguished from ordinary violence, and what is at stake in drawing that distinction where we do. The course explores atrocity as a concept shaped by law, philosophy, history, and collective memory, as well as by the institutions that condemn such acts while often enabling their conditions.

Readings will bring philosophical, literary, and political reflections into conversation. Among other texts, we will read Seneca on cruelty, Aristotle on wickedness, and Montaigne on barbarism, alongside more recent attempts to make sense of atrocity by Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, and Albert Camus. Together, these texts press on the limits of moral explanation and challenge easy distinctions between the exceptional and the ordinary.

We will also examine how societies manage the visibility of violence, how thresholds of the permissible shift over time, how bureaucratic language and institutional mediation conceal brutality, and how some forms of violence come to appear ordinary while others become unspeakable. Atrocity, on this view, is not always spectacular. It often persists precisely by being normalized, rationalized, or displaced.