“This,” writes James Booth about Memory, Historic Injustice, and Responsibility “is a book about one of the ways in which we care for the dead: by doing them justice” (p. 1). In contrast to more naturalist accounts of justice which place the limits on considerations of justice to the life of the mortal body, where, for purposes of justice the dead are reduced to “dust and nothing” (p. 7), Booth seeks to expand justice beyond this perceived limitation by “securing” the dead “as still members of their community and thus as persisting subjects of justice, and not allowing their fates to go unanswered” (p. 9). As the author notes, such an argument runs counter to a long liberal tradition in which, for the purposes of justice, the deceased are severed from the present political community, with the living and the dead existing as, in Jefferson’s phrase, “one independent nation to another” (p. 50). Likewise, Booth observes, drawing upon careful engagements with the work of – among others – John Rawls and Robert Nozick, when such thinkers do consider questions of intergenerational justice, they tend to focus on what the answers to such questions mean for justice in the here and now. Booth is not unconcerned with such questions – much attention is given to the Saville Inquiry into the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre of civil rights marchers by British soldiers in Northern Ireland, as well as, to a lesser extent, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and similar processes in Central and Latin America – but he identifies what he believes is missing from theoretical engagements with the deceased “absent victims” of injustice: “a consideration of the status of past persons as possible claimants on justice, and of the orientation our action ought to have in relation to those events and persons” (p. 43).

Given the persistence, and seemingly widespread appeal, of liberal intuitions about the relationship of the living to the dead with regard to questions of justice, and of the belief that such questions are relevant to contemporary politics only in so far as they pertain narrowly to the present, Booth’s argument is a difficult one to make. It is a testament, then, to the many fine qualities of Booth’s slender tome that he manages to make it in a convincing and compelling way, offering up careful readings of the texts that he brings to bear on the issues at hand, as well as creative – even poetic – formulations of concepts central to articulating his position for which there are no fixed or pre-existing terms capable of carrying his meaning. Foremost among the latter are “traces” and “archipelagos.” Drawing on examples both empirical and literary, Booth shows how everyday understandings, practices, and ways of speaking about the deceased belie Jefferson’s claim that the relationship between the living and the dead is akin to that between independent nations. Rather, he suggests, the absence of the dead is more than mere nullity, there is, instead, a missing something evidenced by “traces” or “small things remembered,” that constitute “bridges across time.” They are, he writes, “the markers, the presence that intimates an absent or missing something, there if only inchoately” (p. 21). Such traces are not, he argues, clear imperatives commanding action, but rather prompts to look at things sensed by their absence, “there but not visible; there but forgotten, and not recognized” (p. 24). The work of justice, Booth suggests, requires effort and engagement on the part of the living toward the dead, with traces serving as “calls for witnesses” (p. 27), who must “struggle to look around corners” (p. 25) in order to see the connections of history and memory that make considerations of justice towards past persons appropriate. It is a delicate argument delicately argued, and in this the author models with his analysis the careful work that this conception of justice demands. His other metaphor for conceiving of the relationship between the living and the dead is similarly generative. There is, Booth suggests, an “archipelago of absence” (p. 25) that connects the living to past persons: the idea of islands capturing their undeniable separation, and the idea that these islands are nevertheless part of a group capturing their continued connection. This conception of community is one drawn from, and elucidated by, the author’s engagement with Greek tragedy.

Classical tragedy, Booth argues, captures the way in which a community’s past is an integral part of its present. Moreover, he suggests, its recurrent concerns with blindness and forgetting – and the consequences thereof – underscore the necessity of seeking out the “absent invisible” (p. 5) and the importance of identifying its traces. Oedipus, he notes, is blind to his crime, but it is “nevertheless something real” (p. 8). As Booth points out, the idea that the living have a relationship to the dead has a long historical pedigree – evident in the work of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant (p. 71) – but there is something about the way in which community is modeled in Greek tragedy that makes it especially useful for considering questions of intergenerational justice. From Aeschylus, he draws the image of the “flaxen mesh” (p. 144), and asserts that to “be embedded in that often conflicted mesh is to become part of a plural and persisting subject, a ‘we’.” Crucially, however, for his argument, Booth suggests that this we, or “‘moi commun’” is “extended across time” (p. 141). That the dead are a part of that enduring mesh of relations – this archipelago of islands – and the bonds that they share with the living, including, but not limited to, shaping that mesh, Booth argues, gives them standing within the political community, not as tools of contemporary concerns but as agents whose experienced injustice matters. The claim is not that their status is identical to that of the living, rather that “the distance created by time and death does not erode that relational presence” (p. 106). It is, he suggests, “a relationship that is radically altered, thinned, but not entirely nullified by death” (p. 144). To exclude the dead from questions of justice is then, Booth argues, to deny them their status in a political community, a “second death” (p. 145) that is not only to perpetrate a further injustice against them, but also to damage the community itself (p. 106). This is a further example of the way in which this book is not only a meditation on intergenerational justice, but also upon the nature of political community broadly conceived.

The conventions of book reviewing require that the reviewer identify some problems with the text. I must admit that I am somewhat hard pressed to do so. On several occasions the author notes the ways in which a concern with the dead might promote vengeance rather than justice, but does not develop that concern; likewise, he makes a number of allusions to the ways in which his argument might also be applied to future generations. Neither point is, however, essential to Booth’s central argument, and while it would be fascinating to see how he might have developed them, his not doing so in no way detracts from the quality of this marvelous book.