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by Hannah Arendt
Each of the books that Hannah Arendt published in her lifetime was unique, and to this day each continues to provoke fresh thought and interpretations.
This was never more true than for Eichmann in Jerusalem, her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she first used the phrase "the banality of evil." Her consternation over how a man who was neither a monster nor a demon could nevertheless be an agent of the most extreme evil evoked derision, outrage, and misunderstanding. The firestorm of controversy prompted Arendt to readdress fundamental questions and concerns about the nature of evil and the making of moral choices. Responsibility and Judgment gathers together unpublished writings from the last decade of Arendt's life, as she struggled to explicate the meaning of Eichmann in Jerusalem.
At the heart of this book is a profound ethical investigation, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy"; in it Arendt confronts the inadequacy of traditional moral "truths" as standards to judge what we are capable of doing, and she examines anew our ability to distinguish good from evil and right from wrong. We see how Arendt comes to understand that alongside the radical evil she had addressed in earlier analyses of totalitarianism, there exists a more pernicious evil, independent of political ideology, whose execution is limitless when the perpetrator feels no remorse and can forget his acts as soon as they are committed.
Responsibility and Judgment is an essential work for understanding Arendt's conception of morality; it is also an indispensable investigation into some of the most troubling and important issues of our time.
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"With Eichmann in Jerusalem Hannah Arendt wrote the 20th century's most important - and controversial - work on the problem of evil, and the least understood. The publication of Responsibility and Judgment is thus a particularly welcome event. For readers who know Arendt, the autobiographical reflections or the discussions of personal responsibility under dictatorship will be of great interest in understanding the background of Eichmann in Jerusalem or The Life of the Mind. For readers who don't, essays such as "Auschwitz on Trial" will provide a superb introduction to her views - and a chance to probe, without hearsay or slander, one of the great thinkers of our time." ―Susan Neiman, author of Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Modern Philosophy
This information about Responsibility and Judgment was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1906, fled to Paris in 1933, and came to the United States after the outbreak of World War II. She was the editorial director of Schocken Books from 1946 to 1948. She taught at Berkeley, Princeton, the University of Chicago, and The New School for Social Research. Among her other books are The Human Condition, On Revolution, and Life of the Mind. Arendt died in 1975.
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