A different kind of contract

Norman Geras

pp. 137-149

in: Iain MacKenzie, Shane O'Neill (eds), Reconstituting social criticism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

What follows is drawn from a longer piece of work currently in progress.¹ The idea which I shall present came to me more or less out of the blue. I was on a train some five years ago, on my way to spend a day at Headingley, and I was reading a book about the death camp Sobibor. Headingley, for those who may not know this, is a cricket ground in Leeds. At Sobibor between May 1942 and October 1943 the Germans killed a quarter of a million people. The particular, not very appropriate, conjunction involved for me in this train journey, reading about a place of death while bound one summer morning for an arena of entertainment, had the effect of fixing my thoughts on one of the more dreadful features of human coexistence, when in the shape of a simple five-word phrase the idea occurred to me. It was not a welcome idea when it did. I have been unable to evade it since that day. Unwelcome as it is, I now give formal shape to it. I do so in order to face up to things unpleasant, in the hope of finding, or prompting, an answer to them if there is one.