Eye for an Eye [Paperback]

William Ian Miller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 30, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0521704677 | ISBN-13: 978-0521704670

Analyzing the law of the talion--an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth--literally, William Ian Miller presents an original meditation on the concept of "pay back". Miller's unique theory of justice offers redemption via retaliation. It espouses the view that revenge is a highly structured phenomenon that requires a deep commitment to balance in order to get even in a strict but fair manner. As a result, we find that much of what is assumed to be justice, honor and respect is just a way of providing a means of balancing or measuring valuations. Moreover, according to its biblical roots, the law of the talion implies that the value of an eye can only be matched with another eye, suggesting that body parts are to be considered units of valuation. Pursuing this further, the talion seems to require such parts as a preferred means of payment. Thus body parts have a justified claim not only as money, but as the most valued type of payment as well--by uniquely fulfilling the most demanding (and thus most honorable) means of compensation. Applying this concept to the real world, Miller argues that Shylock's pound of flesh wager can be justified circumstantially in The Merchant of Venice and that blood oaths effectively ensure the most lasting bonds of trust over time. He also analyzes other societies and cultures, comparing the ancient and seemingly more primitive with their modern counterparts, by gauging the role of the talion, as a means of maintaining honor within them. Sadly, the ancient and more primitive seem to have functioned more righteously, for the most part, because the execution of violent retaliation was tightly controlled by the talion and accordingly limited its excesses. William Ian Miller is the Thomas G. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. He has also taught at Harvard, Yale, Chicago, and the Universities of Bergen and of Tel Aviv. The recipient of a J.D. and a Ph.D. in English, both from Yale, Professor Miller has written other books including Faking It CUP (2003), The Mystery of Courage (2000) and The Anatomy of Disgust (1967).

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Getting even, as the biblical precept implies, is the essence of justice, according to this engaging essay. It's a simple idea, but Miller, a University of Michigan law professor (The Anatomy of Disgust), finds a world of social complexity in humanity's efforts to get the accounting right. He explores the inventive methods people have used to assign a concrete valuation to body parts (in the seventh century, King Aethelberht of Kent prescribed 10 shillings' compensation for a lost big toe), to whole human beings, to injuries and intangibles like pain and humiliation. Miller considers the fine weighing of debts and even our intrinsic value as humans (he's big on rankings and 10-best lists) to be nuanced and even poetic. Drawing on history, philosophy, linguistics and cultural anthropology, Miller pursues these themes down many byways, meandering from Hammurabi's code to cannibalism themes in The Merchant of Venice and the eternal frustration of Wile E. Coyote. He doesn't have a thesis, but he has a decided admiration for "honor cultures," where justice is structured by personal obligation, payback and revenge rather than a modern regime of abstract rights conferred by an impersonal state. Miller offers a discursive, erudite, idiosyncratic but illuminating reappraisal of our urge to settle scores. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Widely dismissed as a relic of barbarism, the law of retribution--an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth--evokes in Miller a profound sense of respect. As a legal scholar well versed in literature and philosophy, Miller orchestrates a fascinating dialogue between the bards of heroic antiquity and the moral theorists of modern democracies, so exposing the smug complacency of modern idealism to the interrogation of bygone eras' stern legal realists. Readers see in this interrogation how the grim ancient arithmetic of corpse for corpse, flesh for flesh, ensured justice and protected life, often much more effectively than do the modern ideologies of individual rights. Clear illustrations drawn from Icelandic sagas and Hebrew scripture, from Shakespeare's plays and Clint Eastwood's films, draw readers into a legal investigation short on jargon and long on saucy humor. Miller hardly seeks a return to the lex talionis that scripted the way tribal chieftains once defended their honor and their peoples' security. But he does want readers to recognize how much modern protocols for justice and compensation are ultimately rooted in a primal calculus of vengeance and dismemberment. And he also wants readers to understand how often modern jurisprudence lapses into bureaucratic routine and statistical cost/benefit formulas that mean less to most moral sensibilities than the old rules for getting even. A provocative reminder of the primal passions hidden by sanitized legal theories. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (April 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521704677
• ISBN-13: 978-0521704670
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #973,492 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Unsurpassed Wealth of Insight about Justice., January 16, 2006

By 

Jane Friedman (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Eye for an Eye (Hardcover)

After five dazzling books each penned - in its own way - at the outlands of the vast intellectual map he is master of - William Ian Miller now gives us Eye for an Eye - a supercharged book fixed inexorably, brilliantly and meticulously at the core of his unrivaled expertise on revenge cultures; a book which explicates with extraordinary sensitivity, precision, even delicacy Miller's tough-minded sensibility about justice. In his preface Miller calls his book "an anti-theory of justice." The appellation is less a description of his own work than a concise critique (so very concise, indeed, as to be a flat dismissal) of the abstract theories of justice that have dominated the academy in the past century and have made scholarly writings about justice irrelevant to 99.99% of the world. Yet Miller's book is a theory of justice - one which insists that justice is about righting the balance, achieving reciprocity and cultivating a willingness to bear the not inconsiderable costs of getting even. Miller explores and explains the nuances of balance in its relation to wrongdoing and he argues convincingly that revenge - to be worthy of the name - must be finely tuned, skillfully measured, and meted out with intelligence (not to mention style). Miller demonstrates the admirable sophistication of revenge cultures. He shows us both how vengeance within such cultures was not indiscriminate, unbridled violence and that much intellectual agility and practical reasonableness went into getting it right when getting even.

Eye for an Eye is also a theory of the body and the body in its relation to justice. We may call it an "anti-theory" here too, since to do so will imply an equally flat dismissal of the generation of academics whose cooler-than-thou theorizing about "the body" has successfully bullied us into to thinking about "the body" as a brainy idea - too feeble, however, to stray too far from its intellectual bolsters like "culturally constructed" "articulated" or "inscribed upon." Miller's theory of the body never lets us forget all that we already know only too well about eyes, teeth, arms, legs, hands, fingers, feet, toes and toenails. (Anyone who has lost a big toenail or broken their pinky will identify acutely with Miller's discussion of the value of these parts.) Miller proves that bodies can and have paradoxically done double duty both as the nuclei of human dignity and as more or less valuable currency in economies of getting even. Bodies and body parts are money, both as measures of value and sometimes also as means of payment.

The crucial - and genuinely earth shattering - insight of this book and the core of Miller's theory of justice is that the lex talionis - the law of an eye for an eye - facilitates rather than ruling out what we see as the more "civilized" processes of negotiation and compensation. He makes a fascinating and compelling argument that - in the language of Calabresi and Melamed - the lex talionis protects our eyes, teeth, and the like with "property rules" not "liability rules." This means that the victim not the wrongdoer, and not a third party, decides how much the wrongdoer must pay for putting his eye out. If the wrongdoer balks at the victim's price - very well. But the credible threat of a return brooch in the eye might just (as we would say) bring the wrongdoer back to the table. Miller masterfully show us that eyes, teeth and lives have greater value in such a regime; and it is in our own culture - not in the revenge cultures that we look down on as barbaric - that life is cheap.

Miller's discussions of the scales of justice, the subtlety of discourse particles like "just" and "even," circumcision, cannibalism, accountants, Shylock and The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, compensation and commensurability, and the significance of the seating arrangements at Viking feasts are among the many virtuoso performances in this book that are not to be missed.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Insightful Contrast of Approaches to Just Recompense, July 29, 2007

By 

Michael Zeleny "larvatus prodeo" (Hollywood Hills, U.S.A.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Eye for an Eye (Paperback)

William Ian Miller pinpoints the key difficulty in dealing with compensation for bodily loss: the market price of the lost part cannot match the value of its former contribution to the unmolested organism. Lex talionis affords a solution to this disparity by enabling the victim to opt for incurring a reciprocal loss in lieu of accepting monetary compensation offered by the party responsible for his injury. The ensuing threat of losing a valuable organ inspires the perpetrator to raise his offer to the level implicit in its ownership.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brian Nichols, hmm..., April 27, 2011

By 

Hibernating Hummingbird "hh" (Tempe, AZ USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Eye for an Eye (Paperback)

This is a daring book, it challenges the status quo.
It offers insight on the game-theory behind the current disaster in which there is NO SUCH THING as an OPEN and SHUT CASE. For example Brian Nichols, the defenders were able to get more than a million dollars of state-funds to defend him, when due to the shootings being accomplished with the gun he stole from his jailer, this WAS an open-and-shut-case if there ever was one.
SO this book, plus "The Forever War", in which the author describes that at least under the Taliban there WILL be payback, between these two books you see why foreigners looking for a justice system, they read about the trial of Brian Nichols, and they say no we can't afford a system lacking efficient processing of the open-and-shut-case, "An Eye for an Eye".