: Americans cherish the idea that good eventually triumphs over evil. After briefly arguing that a proper understanding of the moral harm of cruelty calls into question the credibility of popular American idioms of redemption, I argue that the epistemic dynamics of horror help account for the commanding grip of this rhetoric on the popular imagination, and I suggest that this idiom has morally problematic features that warrant the attention of feminists.

Americans cherish the idea that good eventually triumphs over evil. After briefly arguing that a proper understanding of the moral harm of cruelty calls into question the credibility of popular American idioms of redemption, I argue that the epistemic dynamics of horror help account for the commanding grip of this rhetoric on the popular imagination, and I suggest that this idiom has morally problematic features that warrant the attention of feminists.

This article provides a critical review of literature on ‘social suffering’. Analytical attention is focused upon the ways in which writers struggle to bring ‘meaning’ to this topic. All sense that there is always something in events of extreme suffering that resists conceptualisation and defies analysis. This problem of establishing a language for ‘thinking with suffering’ is explored with reference to the works of Hannah Arendt, Paul Ricoeur and Max Weber. An agenda for sociological research is proposed which focuses on (...) the struggle to make sense out of the phenomenon of suffering as a force of cultural innovation. In this context, it is suggested that what is most interesting here is the evidence to suggest that, when faced with the ‘brute fact’ of a world where there appears to be too much suffering, people are always moved to make this phenomenon productive for thought and action. (shrink)