On Scandal
Moral Disturbances in Society, Politics, and Art

This book is about scandal in society, politics, art, and culture.

Ari Adut (Author)

9780521720403, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 13 July 2009

374 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.55 kg

"Historians of nineteenth-century Britain and twentieth-century France and the United States should be provoked, positively, by this thoroughly interdisciplinary treatment of Oscar Wilde's time, French political corruption, Watergate, and Monica Lewinsky."
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, RIR

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?

Introduction
1. The disruptive publicity of transgression
2. The fall of Oscar Wilde
3. The American presidency, imperial and imperiled
4. Investigating corruption in France
5. Sex and the American public sphere
6. Provocation in art
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Social theory [JHBA], Sociology [JHB], Society & culture: general [JF]