Conclusion

This chapter sums up what the three moral practices of resentment, apology, and forgiveness have come to represent in the modern age, given what issues were most contentious in their moments of origin and evolution. Forgiveness, at the dawn of the Christian era, went from being a form of divine absolution to a strategy for interpersonal reconciliation, resentment at the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries from being an individual property inspiring justice to a collective malaise of cultural spite, and apology at the end of World War II from being an essentially private to a manifestly public act. The chapter focuses in particular on the question of how the public–private division can explain the dynamics of these practices in different spheres of interpersonal and collective life.