Albie Sachs and Transformation in South Africa

Many critical theorists talk and write about the day after the revolution, but few have actually participated in the constitution of a revolutionary government. Emeritus Justice Albie Sachs was a freedom fighter for most of his life. He then played a major role in the negotiating committee for the new constitution of South Africa, and was subsequently appointed to the new Constitutional Court of South Africa. The essays in this book raise the complex question of what it actually means to make this transition without selling out to the demands of realism. The preface, written by Emeritus Justice Albie Sachs, and the exchange with Drucilla Cornell and Karin van Marle, further address almost all important questions about revolution in the twentieth and twenty first centuries: from armed struggle to the organization of a nation state committed to ethical transformation in the name of justice.