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Note to Readers THE ARENDT PROJECT David Luban For the summer workshop Dear colleagues, As many of you know, I have begun work on a book about the moral and legal philosophy of Hannah Arendt, tentatively entitled Arendt After Jerusalem. I’ve completed a draft of the first chapter, which is attached. It’s a lot to read, and I don’t expect you to read it all (although it is not at all technical, and if I did it right it should read easily). Let me give you a quick guide to what follows, to help you decide which bits to read. First, for those who have no time to read any of the chapter, I provide a very brief overview of the central issue the book addresses. The chapter itself deals with a turning point in Arendt’s thinking: the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and Arendt’s famous thesis that Eichmann exemplified “the banality of evil.” It was the Eichmann trial, my book will argue, that got Arendt interested in moral philosophy and moral judgment, and also interested in law, so it is important to see exactly what prompted her to go to Jerusalem, what she took away from the trial, and whether she “got Eichmann right.” The chapter is divided into six sections. §1 sets out the background and basic themes. §2 analyzes what Arendt meant by “banality of evil” and summarizes her evidence that Eichmann embodied it. §3 is my own speculation about why she chose the word “banality,” an aesthetic concept that I connect with the theory of kitsch. This is a section about which I have some doubts; I would love to get your reactions. §§4-6 discuss the vexed question of whether Arendt got Eichmann right, in the face of recent historical scholarship that argues that Eichmann flat-out fooled her. In §4 I ask what turns on this issue, and argue that it would affect at least some of her theoretical conclusions. In §§5 and 6 I address the criticisms. §5 discusses and rebuts three common criticisms that I think are the result of careless reading: that Arendt underestimated Eichmann’s intelligence, that she underestimated his initiative and agency, and that she wrongly bought into his “I was only a petty bureaucrat doing paperwork” defense. I show that all of these are mistaken. Finally, in §6, I tackle what in my view is the most serious challenge to Arendt’s interpretation of Eichmann, Bettina Stangneth’s recent, and authoritatively researched, Eichmann Before Jerusalem. Stangneth believes that Eichmann was far from banal, but rather a rabid Nazi and anti-Semite. I would be especially interested in whether you find §§5 and 6 persuasive. 2 ARENDT AFTER JERUSALEM: THE MAIN ISSUE Read this, or this plus §1, if you don’t have time to read anything else. A character in one of C. S. Lewis’s novels says of the protagonist, “even if the whole universe were crazy and hostile, Ransom was sane and wholesome and honest.” In her final decade, Hannah Arendt strove to understand how some people stay sane and wholesome and honest when their universe turns crazy and hostile. In Arendt’s terminology, this is the problem of moral judgment, and it was the heart of her moral philosophy. I call it the problem of moral compass. Arendt also identified a complementary problem of legal judgment: how should the law judge the crimes of those who fail to stay sane and wholesome and honest, and seemingly lack awareness of the elementary immorality of what their criminal state tells them to do? Arendt After Jerusalem is a study of Arendt’s moral and legal philosophy, and the problems of moral and legal judgment are its main focus. The book is broader than those two problems, though: it will critically examine her moral and legal philosophy as a whole. Perhaps unusually, I want to bring it into conversation with some strands in contemporary Anglophone philosophy that I find particularly salient: important work by Robert Brandom, Stuart Hampshire, and Richard Rorty. The book aims to fill two gaps: first, Arendt’s moral philosophy and legal theory are often neglected in favor of her political and social theory; second, she is almost never treated as a potential contributor to current debates in legal theory or Anglophone philosophy. The moral and legal discussions mesh with each other. Both arise from the central question posed above: How can we judge right and wrong when the standards those around us embrace cannot be trusted? The question grows naturally out of Arendt’s reflections on totalitarianism. When murderous ideologies reign supreme, and the state itself embraces criminality, millions will fall in line with the program—some from conviction, some from fear, some from opportunism, some from thoughtless conformity, and some from the “mere habit of holding fast to something.” In such dark times, it is morally fatal to take our bearings from those around us; we are thrown back on our own moral compass. How do we keep our moral compass true? That is the problem of moral judgment; “judgment” is Arendt’s name for what I have called “moral compass.” Moral judgment is “an independent human faculty, unsupported by law and public opinion, that judges in full spontaneity every deed and intent anew whenever the occasion arises.” The problem lies in understanding how moral judgment so defined is even possible, given that ordinarily we do not judge in full spontaneity and unsupported by public opinion. Just the opposite: from childhood on, we develop judgment through the company and examples of others, and we take our initial bearings from the conventional wisdom of those around us. How is judgment in Arendt’s more demanding sense possible? How are we able to break from conventional wisdom in dark times when, as Arendt liked to say, the chips are down? For Kant, breaking from conventional wisdom—thinking for yourself—is the very definition of enlightenment. Kant attributed the failure to think for yourself to laziness and cowardice. Arendt, living through the collapse of enlightenment in nations not notably lazy or cowardly, diagnosed 3 the failure differently. She offered a paradoxical conjecture: the inability to judge for yourself is connected with the inability to think from the standpoint of others. Her moral philosophy is an effort to make good on that conjecture. As Kant and Wittgenstein argued, judgment is never a matter of mechanical rule application. For then we would need rules about how to apply those rules, and rules about how to apply those, in a vicious infinite regress. Somewhere we must reach bedrock, where the spade turns. That is Wittgenstein’s metaphor; in the imagery Arendt preferred, ultimately we must think and judge “without a bannister.” Our usual name for the bedrock of judgment is common sense. The words themselves suggest that common sense is cultivated in common with others. Arendt wants to know what happens when common sense itself becomes uncommon, and what commonly passes for sense turns out to be unreliable or even criminal. At one point in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt remarks in passing that the assumption that ordinary people can distinguish right from wrong lies at the very foundation of law. She offers no argument for this conclusion, but it is not difficult to see why it might be true. There is no such thing as self-interpreting law, and – as the Kant- Wittgenstein regress argument shows – the law itself cannot say how it should be interpreted, without falling into a vicious regress. The very possibility of law, therefore, rests on shared linguistic and inferential practices that the law presupposes without specifying them. In Anatomy of Law, Lon Fuller calls these shared practices the “implicit morality of law”; he describes them as “shared standards of legal sanity.” They belong to what Arendt calls common sense. What I will call the “Arendt-Fuller thesis” is precisely that law as a form of social ordering cannot exist without shared practices of judgment that cannot themselves be codified within the law. The possibility of shared judgment thus turns out to be important for legal theory as well as moral philosophy. The book will discuss other distinctive Arendtian ideas about law – not all of which I agree with – but the Arendt-Fuller thesis is the one that most directly connects with the central inquiry of most of the book: how does moral compass remain true even in dark times when civilized standards of right and wrong seem to collapse? 4 Chapter One Arendt at Jerusalem §1. Judgment as Moral Compass In May 1960, Israeli agents kidnapped Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and brought him to Jerusalem to stand trial for crimes of the Holocaust. A month later, Hannah Arendt wrote to her friend Mary McCarthy, “I am half toying with the idea to get some magazine to send me to cover the Eichmann trial. Am very tempted. He used to be one of the most intelligent of the lot.”1 Arendt approached William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker. A bit diffidently, Shawn accepted her proposal.2 As Arendt explained to her friend and mentor, the philosopher Karl Jaspers, “I would never be able to forgive myself if I didn’t go and look at this walking disaster face to face in all his bizarre vacuousness.”3 Readers who know nothing else about Arendt are likely to know the name she gave the “bizarre vacuousness” she saw, or thought she saw, when she looked at Eichmann: the banality of evil. As we will see later in this chapter, that phrase prompted grave misunderstandings of Arendt’s views.
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