On Scandal: Moral Disturbances in Society, Politics, and Art

by Ari Adut

• ISBN13: 9780521895897
• ISBN10: 0521895898
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-08-04
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Scandal is the quintessential public event. Here is the first general and comprehensive analysis of this ubiquitous moral phenomenon. Taking up wide-ranging cases in society, politics, and art, Ari Adut shows when wrong-doings generate scandals and when they do not. He focuses on the emotional and cognitive experience of scandals and the relationships among those who are involved in or exposed to them. This perspective explains variations in the effects, frequency, elicited reactions, outcomes, and strategic uses of scandals. On Scandal offers provocative accounts of the Oscar Wilde, Watergate, and Lewinsky affairs. Adut also employs the lens of scandal to address puzzles and questions regarding public life. Why is American politics plagued by sex scandals? What is the cause of the rise in political scandals in Western democracies? Why were Victorians sometimes very accommodating and other times very intolerant of homosexuality? What is the social logic of hypocrisy?

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. xiii
Acknowledgments	p. xv
Introduction	p. 1
The Disruptive Publicity of Transgression	p. 8
What Is Scandal?	p. 11
The Transgression	p. 13
The Publicizer	p. 14
The Public	p. 16
More Complex Forms	p. 17
Publicity	p. 19
Scandal as Lived Experience	p. 21
Contamination	p. 24
Associative Contamination	p. 24
Audience Contamination	p. 25
Aggravating Elements	p. 27
Provocation	p. 31
What Follows	p. 34
The Fall of Oscar Wilde	p. 38
The Scandal of Homosexuality in Victorian England	p. 41
Victorians and Oscar Wilde before His Trials	p. 47
The Impending Scandal	p. 52
The Dynamics of the Oscar Wilde Affair	p. 53
The Libel Trial	p. 57
The Prosecution and Conviction of Wilde	p. 60
The Presidency, Imperial and Imperiled	p. 73
Political Scandal	p. 73
Democracy and Political Scandal	p. 75
The Media	p. 77
Moral Attack and Vulnerability	p. 81
The Vulnerabilities of Presidents	p. 82
Sociopolitical Conjuncture	p. 83
Mode of Presidential Governance	p. 85
The Traditional Presidency and Its Scandals	p. 86
The Modern Presidency and Its Protections	p. 93
The Making of Watergate	p. 99
The Transgressions	p. 103
The Unfolding of Watergate	p. 107
The Presidency after Watergate	p. 114
Imperial Tendencies in the 2000s	p. 124
Investigating Corruption in France	p. 129
Norm Entrepreneurship	p. 130
Scandal and Norm Entrepreneurship	p. 131
Corruption in France	p. 133
Transformations in the Eighties	p. 136
The French Penal Procedure and the Investigating Magistrates	p. 141
The Mobilization of the Investigating Magistrates	p. 143
The Scandal Strategies	p. 148
Techniques of Insubordination	p. 149
Targeting Higher-ups	p. 150
Publicizing the Transgression	p. 153
Challenging the Political Elite	p. 158
The Consequences of the Scandals	p. 160
The Limits and Discontents of Scandal	p. 168
Sex and the American Public Sphere	p. 175
Sex and Scandal	p. 182
Sex and Politics in the Nineteenth-Century United States	p. 185
The Rise of Modesty	p. 190
Sexual Liberalization and the Decline of Modesty	p. 197
The Rise of Sexual Politics	p. 203
The Making of the Lewinsky Affair	p. 209
Provocation in Art	p. 224
Transgression in Art and Its Effects	p. 225
Impressionism and Its Scandals	p. 234
The Moral Logics of Modern Art	p. 248
Subversive Content	p. 249
Form and Morality	p. 254
The Paradoxes of Contemporary Art	p. 271
The Crisis of the Art Object	p. 271
The Return of the Real	p. 283
Conclusion	p. 287
Notes	p. 291
References	p. 321
Index	p. 343
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