Review Essay
Arendt, democracy, and judgment Julen Etxabe Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, 00014 Helsinki, Finland.
Arendt’s Judgment: Freedom, Responsibility, Citizenship Jonathan Peter Schwartz University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2016 + 259 pp., ISBN: 9780812248142 A Democratic Theory of Judgment Linda M. G. Zerilli University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2016 + 380 pp., ISBN: 9780226397849 Contemporary Political Theory (2018) 17, S171–S180. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296017-0127-x; published online 22 June 2017
At the time of Hannah Arendt’s death in 1976, a single sheet of paper with the title ‘‘Judging’’ and two epigraphs was found in her typewriter. ‘‘Judging’’ was to be the third and concluding installment to The Life of the Mind, of which Arendt had already written the first two volumes, ‘‘Thinking’’ and ‘‘Willing.’’ While Arendt never lived to complete it, scholars agree that Judging may have provided not only the missing link between the two, but also one of her most original contributions to political theory (Beiner, 1992; Beiner and Nedelsky, 2001; Ferrara, 2008). Two recent books reassess Arendt’s theory of judgment in relation to our modern predicament: Jonathan Schwartz seeks to retrace judgment in the Arendtian oeuvre; Linda Zerilli aims to develop an Arendtian theory of democratic judgment. Despite their similarities, the two books differ considerably in aim and approach. I will begin with the reconstructive efforts of Schwartz and then move on to Zerilli, offering a few comments addressed to each (and both). In Arendt’s Judgment, Jonathan Schwartz undertakes the challenge of reconstructing Arendt’s theory of judgment in connection to her foremost intellectual project, namely reestablishing political judgment in a world from which it had been evacuated (p. 5). This entails a double task: firstly, Schwartz must explain how the world arose as ‘‘a problem’’ for Arendt; secondly, he has to reconstruct Arendt’s views on judgment to match the predicament. As to the first, Arendt emerges as an 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave.com/journals
Vol. 17, S3, S171–S180