These circular arguments are symbolically important — the endless cycle of evil, guilt and self-loathing, the witches of Macbeth who live in cyclical time, who dance in circles and follow moon cycles, all help to represent the futile and constant nature of evil in our lives. Time isn't linear so that one day we'll progress past evil — time is cyclical, so that evil is always with us. Eagleton wishes to break this cycle and dispel the myth of evil as a "fixed ontological feature of the human condition". It's not that people are evil and there's nothing we can do about it, or that people are innocent because their circumstances have forced them into evil acts. It's understanding that evil can exist and still be explainable. 

In On Evil, Eagleton relies on Freud for an explanation, arguing that the modern age has witnessed a transition from traditional religious explanations of evil to psychoanalytical theories. Instead of the soul, we have the psyche; theology becomes psychoanalysis; original sin is now identified as repression. And with the Freudian explanation, evil is all about death. In each of us there is a deadly yet delightful drive to destruction, a "malignly sadistic force", as Eagleton puts it, a drive to absolute nothingness, an "orgiastic revolt against meaning". Many of us are able to keep this death drive under control, but for those who are deficient in the art of living this becomes impossible, and we seek meaning in sadism or masochism. Aristotle said that living is something you get good at over time, but if you grow up without love, comfort and security, without friends and relatives who will bring value to your life, then the art of living might be a skill that you never acquire. If your life is terrible enough to create a "raging hatred against one's own existence" then the desire to prove that life indeed has no value by ruining another's can take over. So many — though of course, not all — people that we would consider evil, including Venables, Thompson and the Edlington boys, have grown up in this kind of environment. When criticising the social conditions that exist under capitalism, Eagleton almost classifies evil as a political ill, as something that wouldn't exist in a socialist utopia. 

However, this "almost" is important. He argues that most people who commit horrific acts are actually wicked, rather than evil, because of their social background. Evil, he believes, must go above and beyond purely vicious acts. It does, indeed, have some kind of mystery to it. And so again we're pulled back into the circular argument — one that Eagleton promised to release us from without having to use arguments that involve religion or senseless monsters, but one that his politics does not go far enough to overcome. 

It's unsurprising that On Evil is a confused and somewhat vague book. After all, it is written by a Christian Marxist who must always be attempting to reconcile his Christianity with a political ideology that denounces religion while promoting its own dogmatic creed. It's compelling purely for its subject matter and Eagleton's language and examples are always inventive — until he throws in a bit of Texas-bashing here and there, which is both boring and predictable. His final thoughts on terrorism are extraordinary in their inability to come to some kind of conclusion, Eagleton being so torn between wanting to recognise immoral acts without condemning them: this is symptomatic of the whole book. But most striking is the question that On Evil presents to us, which is the very question that Eagleton wanted to tackle. How does one explain evil without the help of God and Satan, or a few monsters here and there? If we all have a death drive within us, why is it that some of us can't contain it? If it's not only about social background, then what does determine it? 

As a secular person who doesn't want to dismiss all evil acts as those committed by deranged and incomprehensible psychopaths, what am I supposed to believe? We, the readers, have come full circle. Is pure chance the only thing an atheist has to break these cycles of evil?