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W. James Booth The Work of Memory: Time, Identity, and Justice I N TH IS ESSAY I D ISC U S S THE REL A TIO N SH IP BE TW E EN MEMORY, identity, and justice. Each of these term s adum brates a wide field of concepts, w ith deep practical, literary, and philosophical roots and controversies. Given the unm anageably large range of those concepts, I will focus on social or collective m emory as one of the sources of the persistence of a com m unity across time. That continuity, I will suggest, makes possible the com m unity as a subject o f justice, specifically as a subject of attribution, a body responsible for its past and (relatedly) able to commit itself to a future (Booth, 2006). Core parts of the underlying perplexities at issue here can be elicited from reflection on questions of the following kinds. ►In what sense does the period of slavery rem ain on America's ledger? Are reparations owed by modern-day Germany for the crimes of a now long-distant and profoundly different regime? How are we today, in the opening years of the new m illennium, the inheritors of a responsibility for a past of which we are not the authors, and from which we differ in so many respects? In general, w hat if anything do we owe to the past, or for its injustices? Consider now these variants, cast at a different level of agent: ►W hen we hold a corporation, Philip Morris or Volkswagen for example, accountable for actions com m itted in the past, w hat sort of continuity are we assum ing in order to be able to make that judgm ent? social research Vol 75 : No 1 : Spring 2008 237 ►Finally, at the individual level, in w hat sense am I responsible for my acts as a child, given the radical changes of all kinds that I have undergone in the intervening years? These question draw out the following: that underpinning the holding of someone or some com m unity responsible m ust be a notion of continuity or persistence across tim e and change. Absent that continu ity and instead of an accountable agent there would be multiple selves (see Parfit, 1973:141). And that persistence m ust in tu rn be relevant to the practical work it is called on to do—that is, grounding responsibility. This persistence is w hat I m ean by identity in the following essay: the enduringness through tim e and change of a subject (individual, corpo rate, social group or state) capable of being held responsible. Note that this use of the term "identity" does not m ean pervasively the same, the same all the way down, so to speak. Nor is the term used in its popular cultural signification, as a sort of individual or collective self-definition. Rather, we m ean enduring in a way pertinent to the possibility of attri bution and accountability. Related to this, as we shall see, is not only the persistence but the boundedness of that responsible agent, that is, the sense in which the agent (person, corporation, state or society) not only remains the same through time but is distinguishable (again, in a way relevant to accountability) from other subjects of attribution. LET US TURN FIRST TO THE IDENTITY OF MORAL AGENTS A N D THE PLACE o f m em ory in it. "In this personal identity," John Locke w rites, "is founded all the right and justice of rew ard and punishm ent" (Locke, 1959: 459). Identity of the subject across tim e is an essential precondi tion of accountability. And identity and the possibility of attribution are, in this core and m uch contested part of the canonical literature (especially that associated w ith Locke's arguments in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding), grounded in m em oiy (Locke, 1959: 444, 449-449, 458, 460). The principal thought here is th at m em ory runs through and binds together the m om ents of a person's life, giving that life a morally relevant unity that, for example, criteria of physical continuity...
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