Every so often, a startling book emerges that gives voice to a new of previously unexamined trend that is transforming society. In Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways, Alan M. Dershowitz, the renowned lawyer and educator, chronicles the world's fundamental shift in its approach to controlling dangerous and destructive human behavior. Dershowitz reveals that we are moving - whether in terms of fighting crime, profiling suspicious behavior, or combating terrorism - toward increasingly preventive and proactive measures and away from a traditional reliance on reactive responses. In showing the seismic shift that not only has profoundly altered foreign policy but also has affected matters as close to home as inoculation, Internet censorship, and stings, Dershowitz presents the reader with challenging dilemmas. For example, should one detain and interrogate a potential criminal solely on the basis of his profile, DNA, or predicted behavior? Should the Department of Homeland Security have the power to monitor law-abiding citizens just because they attend a certain mosque or church? Should a nation threatened by terrorism or nuclear attack be authorized to launch a preemptive attack or a preventive war? In presenting his finds, Dershowitz contrasts our approach to the Cold War - deterring a nuclear attack by threatening mutually assured destruction (MAD) - with our current approach to terrorism: kill them before they kill us. The tragic events of 9/11 have of course outwardly change the nature of American foreign policy, but Preemption convincingly demonstrated that the seeds were planted long before the collapse of the World Trade Towers and the deadly chain of al-Qaids bombings that have ripped through more than a dozen cities throughout the world. In tracing the emergence of a preemptive approach, particularly in this new century, Dershowitz examines the troubling implications not just for national security and foreign policy but for civil liberties and human rights as well. He calls for, and constructs, a new jurisprudence of preemption that seeks to balance security and freedom. With a remarkable flair for debate that has won him acclaim in the courtroom, Dershowitz brings his prodigious talen and firsthand expertise as lawyer to a topic of great philosophical and political import, The questions that he raises, both in his introduction and through the many lucid examples in Preemption, have already begun to define our age. In doing so, they will profoundly alter our fundamental understanding of how to confront crime, terrorism, and warfare. Indeed, the knife cuts both ways.

We live in a time when we are overwhelmed with talk and images of violence. Whether on television, the internet, films or the video screen, we canʹt escape representations of actual or fictional violence - another murder, another killing spree in a high school or movie theatre, another action movie filled with images of violence. Our age could well be called "The Age of Violence" because representations of real or imagined violence, sometimes fused together, are pervasive. But what do we mean by violence? What can violence achieve? Are there limits to violence and, if so, what are they? In this new book Richard Bernstein seeks to answer these questions by examining the work of five figures who have thought deeply about violence - Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, and Jan Assmann. He shows that we have much to learn from their work about the meaning of violence in our times. Through the critical examination of their writings he also brings out the limits of violence. There are compelling reasons to commit ourselves to non-violence, and yet at the same time we have to acknowledge that there are exceptional circumstances in which violence can be justified. Bernstein argues that there can be no general criteria for determining when violence is justified. The only plausible way of dealing with this issue is to cultivate publics in which there is free and open discussion and in which individuals are committed to listen to one other: when public debate withers, there is nothing to prevent the triumph of murderous violence. -- Publisher description