Review: Can Politics Be Beautiful?

Abstract

All wars, even those conducted justly (jus in bello), involve harsh scenes. But since the invention of the camera, in the mid-nineteenth century, these scenes are documented. And ever since the invention of television and the Internet, in the 20th century, these scenes are brought ever closer to us. Each of us, as Susan Sontag argues in her classic book On Photography, has watched more suffering than any other person who lived before the age of photography. Visual images, violent and non-violent, increasingly dominate the way we perceive and judge the events that they document. But even if the visual images do not determine how people judged the war, they certainly do determine the starting point of the debate about the war. Such images, everyone agreed, call for either severe condemnation or for convincing justification.