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Towards an Arendtian Conception of Justice

Yasemin Sari
Department of Philosophy and World Religions, University of Northern
Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA, USA
yasemin.sari@uni.edu

Abstract

This article argues that Arendt’s rich account of the political necessarily involves an
implicit, but never fully worked out, phenomenological articulation of justice in her
work. Arendt’s unique articulation of the role of judgment in political action provides
us with the outline of an Arendtian principle of justice that relieves the tension be-
tween idealist and realist theories of justice. Building on this role of judgment, I aim
to emphasize the phenomenological premise of identifying the conditions for the pos-
sibility of the political in empirico-historical events rooted in her ideas of plurality
and freedom. By showing that, for Arendt, justice is a phenomenon like power and
equality, we can make progress on an implicit account of justice in her work. Taking
seriously Arendt’s articulation of freedom-manifesting and principled political action,
I will show that a principle of justice guides political action based on political judg-
ment that is affectively oriented to the world.

Keywords

affect – Arendt – freedom – judgment – justice – plurality – principle

In a 1953 letter to Karl Jaspers, Arendt talks about her disenchantment with
Marx in light of her realization that he was not interested in freedom or
justice.1 Given the absence of a full-fledged account of justice in her own cor-

1  She states: “I’m preparing my Princeton lectures and a lecture for Harvard. At Princeton I’ll
talk about Marx in the tradition of political philosophy. The more I read Marx, the more I
see that you were right. He’s not interested either in freedom or in justice. (And he’s a ter-
rible pain in the neck in addition.) In spite of that, a good springboard for talking about

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Towards an Arendtian Conception of Justice 217

pus, Arendt’s claim can at first seem puzzling. How can she claim that the
thinker who criticized alienated and unfree labor under the capitalist mode of
production was not interested in justice?2 Perhaps the answer lies in history:
Arendt dismissed Marx’s notion of freedom—a very Kantian one—due to his
attachment to historical materialism, which seems to discount the role of jus-
tice in human affairs. Yet Arendt’s apparent displeasure with Marx’s seeming
lack of interest in expounding an account of justice raises the questions of her
own conception thereof, and of where we can find it in her work? More specifi-
cally, how can we extract a coherent account of justice in Arendt’s work? After
all, she did not endorse a primacy of rights approach as she wrote in a time of
critical disarray (and destruction) of so-called universal human rights.
This article argues that Arendt’s rich account of the political necessarily
involves an implicit phenomenological articulation of justice. Arendt’s con-
tribution to varying liberal, structural, global accounts of justice is evident.
Seyla Benhabib’s work has been influential in taking up Arendt’s conception
of political membership in establishing a normative theory of global justice.3
Benhabib’s work has since become the standard cosmopolitan reading of
Arendt’s work and its normative appeal to a universalist constitutional frame-
work. Similarly, Iris Marion Young offers a critical uptake of Arendt’s articu-
lation of responsibility as distinct from guilt and blame to propose a novel
account of responsibility across borders that further illustrates her account of
structural justice.4 Recently, Serena Parekh has argued that Arendtian insights
can be useful in outlining an account of global justice to respond to the ca-
lamities of what we deem (global) structural injustices such as refugee crises.5
What all these accounts have in common is an Arendtian commitment to a
love of the world and a phenomenology of responsibility, which anchors her
understanding of such a love.
My position differs from these recent neo-Arendtian accounts that have uti-
lized Arendt’s conception of “a right to have rights” as well as her account of
political responsibility bearing upon political membership to put into question

certain general problems.” Found at https://brooklynrail.org/2006/03/express/a-letter-from

-hannah-arendt-to-karl-jaspers, accessed on March 23, 2019.
2  Arendt’s contention is right, albeit she does not offer a reason for her thought. For a discus-
sion on why Marx does not dwell on the question of justice in capitalism, see Allen W. Wood,
“The Marxian Critique of Justice,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring 1972):
244–282.
3  Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004).
4  Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
5  Serena Parekh, Refugees and the Ethics of Forced Displacement (New York: Routledge, 2017).

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the limit and scope of our normative commitments to each other. In the follow-
ing, I hope to address the question of how Arendt offers us a phenomenologi-
cal account of justice that hints at a cosmopolitical framework by endorsing
plurality as the law of the earth. Arendt’s unique articulation of the role of
judgment in political action provides us with the outline of an Arendtian prin-
ciple of justice that relieves the tension between idealist and realist theories of
justice. The present formulation hopes to show the urgency and importance of
articulating not only the wrongs we may encounter in our local communities
(what Hegel would have called ethical communities), but to point to a global
responsibility to address injustices that can only be redeemed through such a
cosmopolitan conscientiousness.
My argument is twofold. First, I wish to emphasize the indispensable role
that reflective and affective judgment plays in an Arendtian articulation of
justice. Second, I want to demonstrate that while Arendt grapples with and
aims to understand and articulate justice most explicitly in the context of the
Eichmann trial, her scattered remarks about justice point to a principle of jus-
tice that has been implicit in her understanding of the creation of political
community as premised upon the conditions of plurality and equality.
The article is divided into three sections. Section 1 deals with the question
of justice by offering a brief survey of political philosophy and its relation to
judgment to trace the phenomenological roots of Arendt’s approach. Section 2
deals with a responsibility for judgment to establish the affective dimension
of such judgment. Finally, section 3 argues that the ontological condition of
plurality that is central to Arendt’s work can give us the normative grounding
of a phenomenological account of justice.

1 Arendt and Justice: a Problem and Phenomenon

That Arendt does not have a full-fledged account of justice is no mystery. Her
interest in the subject matter, however, is not insignificant. Before delving into
her scattered remarks about justice, I want to introduce an important distinc-
tion central to what we may call her phenomenological account of justice. In
“What is Freedom?” belonging to a set of essays (exercises in political thought)
from the 1950s, Arendt states:

Freedom, [moreover], is not only one among the many problems and
phenomena of the political realm properly speaking, such as justice, or
power, or equality; freedom, which only seldom—in times of crisis or
revolution—becomes the direct aim of political action, is actually the

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reason that men live together in political organization at all. Without it,
political life as such would be meaningless. The raison d’être of politics is
freedom, and its field of experience is action.6

Here, Arendt makes a distinction between what she understands to be the es-
sence of politics (or the political), and the problems and phenomena pertaining
to politics such as justice, power, and equality. Let’s begin with the essence of
politics, which she understands as freedom. Arendt’s contention that freedom
is the “reason of being” of politics, and what the phenomenological observers
observe in politics—or political action proper—is freedom.7 For her, freedom
exists in action, and not before or after.8 To be sure, political action mani-
fests more than freedom. This performative account of freedom and politics
rest on what she articulates as political principles, a term she borrows from
Montesquieu while expanding his account of the spirit of the laws to allow for
repetition and particularity.9 That the aim of politics is the manifestation of
freedom makes politics an auto-telic activity that is nevertheless not devoid of
normative content.10
Arendt begins with freedom in order to show how justice, power, and equal-
ity can only arise from within this framework of a performative account of
political action. Her emphasis on the importance of freedom has been taken
up and analyzed by countless Arendt scholars, and it has been a point of ex-
citement and at times, perplexity. In the following, I want to focus on, instead,
what she deems the “problems and phenomena” of the political realm “prop-
erly speaking,” i.e., justice, power, and equality, and show the interconnec-
tion between these terms in demonstrating an implicit account of justice in
Arendt’s thought. Instead, I aim to emphasize the phenomenological premise

6   Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?” Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political
Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 146.
7   This is why Arendt will devote much ink and thought to divorcing proper human
freedom—political freedom—from the freedom of the will and identify the focus on the
latter as the “mistake” of the tradition of Western political thought. See Hannah Arendt,
The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998); “Karl Marx and
the Tradition of Western Political Thought,” Social Research: An International Quarterly,
Vol. 69, No. 2 (Summer 2002): 273–319.
8   Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?” Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political
Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 151.
9   Ibid.
10  See Yasemin Sari, “Arendt, Truth, and Epistemic Responsibility,” Arendt Studies, Vol­-
ume 2 (Fall 2018): 149–170; “Arendt and Nancy: Revolution and Democratic Responsibil-
ity,” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, Volume 23, No. 1 (Spring
2019): 235–259.

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of identifying the conditions for the possibility of the political in empirico-

historical events.

1.1 Justice (Gerechtigkeit) and Judgment

Any philosophical account that deals with the human being as a social or po-
litical creature addresses implicitly, or explicitly—the question of justice. To
motivate the question, we can recall Hume’s eloquent articulation of justice
as an artificial virtue, which stems from earthly conditions of scarcity and the
uneven allocation of goods.11 Before Rawls revolutionized the theoretical scene
on this question in his seminal 1971 work A Theory of Justice; Plato had dealt
with this question in his Republic, Hobbes in his Leviathan, and Kant in his
Doctrine of Right, to recall a few decisive accounts of justice in the history of
philosophy.
In this article, I take justice to be a virtue of social systems; the idea of jus-
tice as an individual virtue is set to one side. In particular, what I wish to ac-
complish is to elucidate the intimate connection between justice and political
judgment through Arendt’s articulation of the ontological condition of plural-
ity as the law of the earth. It is evident that political judgment has its place in
ideal theories of justice as can be gleaned from Kant and drawn from Rawls.12
My interest lies elsewhere. Setting up the question in this way, I aim to high-
light the role of reflective and affective judgment in assessing what is just or
otherwise in our very imperfect real world.13
The relationship between justice and judgment has been evident in various
accounts of justice beginning in ancient Greece. There are two dimensions in-
volved: (1) who is to exercise judgment? (2) judgment about what? Traditionally
responses to these questions have been placed along the spectrum between
idealist and realist accounts.
Plato relegates judgment to the philosopher-king or-queen who is disinter-
ested and self-knowing14 and has knowledge of high-level principles—or an
orientation towards the Good—where justice is articulated as an attribute of

11  David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Second Edition, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1978), 477.
12  In Rawls, the question of political judgment is not only instrumental in assessing the prin-
ciples of justice from an original position, but also in the method of reflective equilibrium
he offers. Nevertheless, Rawls’ account is fundamentally different from Arendt’s.
13  To note, my interest is in the role of judgment in questions that contemporary analytic
philosophers would call “non-ideal”: questions about how to respond to unjust, imperfect
states of affairs.
14  For an excellent account of Plato’s political philosophy, see Sheldon Wolin’s Vision and
Politics: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1960).

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the human soul. Plato justifies his account by positing the Good, which the
philosopher can experience by being guided by it in their conduct, and also
seeking to manage human affairs through such guidance. Hobbes places this
authority literally in the head of the sovereign—who is the supreme arbiter of
human affairs—who follows laws of prudence in judging about “real-world pol-
itics” taking account of human relationships. By this, Hobbes aims to differenti-
ate justice as a stable phenomenon from idiosyncratically following the laws of
nature according to our self-interest, which marks the decisive transition from
natural law to positivism, where the formation of the body politics becomes
the “fountain of justice.”15 Such stability emerges only in the covenant, where
everyone gives up their right to all things and submits to a supreme sovereign
to govern the political body. Plato represents the idealist camp, and Hobbes the
realist. Both of these accounts attribute the ability to judge to a particular en-
tity; the philosopher-king or-queen in the former, and the absolute sovereign
in the latter. That these accounts were appealing in the context of their historic
settings is not hard to see.16 But the issue that rises from these accounts is to
dismiss (and intentionally so) the conditions of equality and plurality from
political organization. And this is where the Platonic and Hobbesian accounts
run into problems. So how do we make sense of this? Turning to Kant at this
point may be helpful. For Kant, everyone—who is rational—can exercise
judgment about high-level principles (morality, aesthetics, etc.). Kant’s more
democratic (in contemporary terms) and egalitarian articulation becomes the
motivation for a just society made up of rational and autonomous individuals.
Going back to the two dimensions in the above, Arendt sides with Hobbes on
2 regarding the content of judgment, and with Kant on 1 regarding the judging
agent (or “who the judge can be”).
According to Arendt, the content of judgment is the stuff of politics, or the
events and phenomena that pertain to our common world. She takes her de-
parture from Hobbes in this regard, stressing the importance of relationality
in human affairs, and the result of the omission of the sovereign from such
relationality: the covenant that marks the formation of the body politic in
Hobbes’s account, that is, the submission of rights of all subjects, in Arendt’s
words leaves the sovereign outside of the “relationships between men” in the

15  Thomas Hobbes, Chapter XV, “Of other Lawes of Nature,” Leviathan: Or The Matter, Forme,
& Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2010), 88.
16  A democracy that send Plato’s mentor Socrates to death; and a kingdom in the midst of a
civil war in Hobbes’s case.

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creation of a commonwealth.17 This omission allows for political and legal ad-
judication to be deferred to the sovereign who has not subjected to the cov-
enant. In conclusion, Hobbes’s account quite forcefully aims to demonstrate
that while the individual may be bound by the law of nature in foro interno,
justice itself cannot merely emerge from out of this internal resolve. Justice
as a convention is not meant to be found in a state of nature, that is, in a per-
petual possibility of conflict where the equality of human beings stems from
their equal ability to kill. The enforcement of justice can only stem from an
authority that has the ability to punish.
Arendt’s turn to Hobbes retains a certain level of curiosity as she concedes
that Hobbes is the philosopher who was unique in pointing out that politics
inheres in relationships, where such a relationship is formed initially through
each individual’s equal ability to kill the other.18 However, Arendt’s point is
more nuanced. Echoing her critical stance against metaphysics,19 she adum-
brates that “man” is inherently “apolitical” and that politics emerges only in
and through relationships.20 Arendt’s commitment to such a relationality col-
ors most of her thinking of politics and the conditions of the political that in
turn inform her conception of justice that is scattered throughout her work. In
the following, I will trace her use of the term to put forth a coherent account
of justice to clarify the importance of our responsibility for justice that has the
conditions of equality and plurality as its basis. In so doing, I hope to make
plain Arendt’s novel articulation of justice in demonstrating the interconnect-
edness of the activities of thinking, judging, and acting.21

2 The Responsibility of Judgment

Arendt’s thinking can be understood to be a response to the events of her

time, be they political, or scientific in nature. I would like to propose that
the same goes for her thinking of justice. Vincent Lefebve maintains that

17  Hannah Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New
York: Schocken Books, 2005), 99.
18  Ibid., 95.
19  I will not tackle her attitude towards metaphysics in general in this paper but will be
content to say that Arendt’s project of articulating the conditions of human existence
commits her to refuse any type of essentialism about them.
20  Ibid.
21  I am indebted to Peg Birmingham’s 2019 Collegium lectures in helping me lay out the
puzzle more clearly to myself, and to motivate a sense of urgency in why this question
needs to be taken up immediately.

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Arendt’s account of justice was “activated by an actual judicial event, name-

ly the Eichmann Trial,” where surely political judgment played a key role in
Arendt’s work on this trial.22 While I agree with Lefebve in identifying an ac-
count of justice in Arendt’s work on Eichmann, I want to suggest that her re-
flections on totalitarianism from as early as the late 1940s can help us unpack
a normative thread in her understanding of justice that can be articulated as
a founding principle in our political existence together. Justice, in this sense,
is not deduced from a universal human nature, but to echo a point that Peg
Birmingham makes, has to be enacted from our speechless horror at the events
of our contemporary world.23
To this end, in her 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism, we find that for
Arendt, the question of justice was not just a matter of fact, but an animating
(normative) principle of our social and political existence—and one that is
intimately related to what she articulated as equality. Here she offers a succinct
albeit prescient remark on justice as follows:

Equality, in contrast to all that is involved in mere existence, is not given

us, but is the result of human organization insofar as it is guided by the
principle of justice. We are not born equal; we become equal as members
of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually
equal rights. Our political life rests on the assumption that we can pro-
duce equality through organization, because man can act in and change
and build a common world, together with his equals and only with his
equals.24

Three things follow from the first sentence, and I will take them up in order.
First, Arendt differentiates equality from anything that is found in mere exis-
tence, or simply put, nature. This goes against not only the Judeo-Christian tra-
dition, but also the grain of thinkers that have come before her. For example,
the Hobbesian equal ability to kill in a state of nature does not demonstrate

22  Vincent Lefebve, “Justice” in Bloomsbury Companion to Arendt, ed. Peter Gratton and
Yasemin Sari (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming). See also Christoph Menke, “At the
Brink of Law: Hannah Arendt’s Revision of the Judgment of Eichmann,” Social Research:
An International Quarterly, Vol. 81, No. 3 (Fall 2014): 585–611.The countless articles on the
issue of Arendt’s Eichmann and justice cannot be adequately dealt with here. I will in-
stead focus on the importance of political judgment and the role affect plays in it in ar-
ticulating an Arendtian account of justice.
23  Peg Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common
Responsibility (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 105.
24  Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 301, my
emphasis.

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the equality that is the result of human organization. There are two reasons for
this. The constant threat, in such a hypothetical world, to be scared of being
killed at every instant, would make political organization quite impossible. Not
surprisingly, Hobbes agrees. The other point stems from the dismissal of the
condition of plurality that is a necessary condition of the creation of equality
that cannot be reduced to identity or sameness. Plural existence is at the heart
of the human capacity for action rooted in natality. Arendt’s contention then
rules out that equality is anything natural or universal. Yet, she asserts quite
clearly that there is a normative force of such equality in its relation to the
principle of justice. This normative force emerges from our mutual decision to
guarantee each other equal rights that we judge to be apt for our social and
especially political existence. An Arendtian principle of justice requires that
we create such equality in order to be able to create and sustain a shared world
together. It is in this sense that justice as a worldly principle that guides human
organization creates artificial equality which in turn plays a role in creating a
world in which plurality appears as the law of the earth. Equality in this sense
is the equality of having a voice or say in the decision-making processes of our
political existence.25
Second, justice is a worldly principle that inspires action. Justice has to do
with political action (or revolution) that is animated by the principle of justice
to see to recognizing individuals as equal, not only in their rights, but also un-
derlying these rights, their humanity (human dignity).
Third, I contend that there is an affective dimension, namely, worldly affects
that guide such principled action to create equality and manifest justice in
the world. The world-disclosing affects that generate political principles may
range from love to disgust.26 The affective dimension is functional in inciting
the initiative to act.
What does affect have to do with justice? Arendt’s conviction is clear: “Men
do not become just by knowing what is just but by loving justice.”27 In point-
ing to an enduring puzzle about the nature of such terms, she states: “Before

25  See also Yasemin Sari, “Arendt and Artificial Equality: Procedural, Epistemic, and Perfor­
mative,” Bloomsbury Companion to Arendt, ed. Peter Gratton, and Yasemin Sari (London:
Bloomsbury, forthcoming). I will leave aside a discussion of how such equality overlaps
with equality of opportunity.
26  Arendt herself discusses the “love of equality and distinction” that generates “virtue” as a
political principle (Arendt, “Montesquieu and the Tradition,” The Promise of Politics, 68).
I maintain that love of equality or disgust and outrage at misery may evoke a principle of
justice as a politically motivating principle if we keep with her articulation of principles
as not spatially and temporally bounded.
27  Hannah Arendt, “Willing,” Life of The Mind, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch,
1978), 104.

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we raise such questions as What is happiness, what is justice, what is knowl-

edge, and so on, we must have seen happy and unhappy people, witnessed
just and unjust deeds, experienced the desire to know and its fulfillment or
frustration.”28 Justice in this sense is not a pre-given concept, but one that is
created through our encounter with events.
Arendt’s understanding rules out any consequentialist account of justice,
but this is not just a competition amongst principles such as consequential-
ism, egalitarianism, contractarianism, and so on.29 For Arendt, consequential-
ism robs politics from its meaning (that is freedom) and turns it into a mere
instrumental action.30 Such consequentialism may falsely suggest that the re-
lational aspect of human interactions that bring about certain outcomes do
not play a key role in promoting or hindering justice. Simply put, in endorsing
utility to be the normative standard of judgment, consequentialism is not ad-
equate to be a principle to properly measure our simplest of responses to what
we deem to be injustice, that is, suffering/misery. This simple response inheres
in a sense of justice.
How we become aware of a shared sense of justice might have affinities with
contemporary “relational” theories of justice, where some sorts of disutilities
(intentionally undertaken at the hands of humans) are more of a priority than
others. This sense of justice becomes manifest in our responsiveness to the
world, and perhaps, with Arendt, we can say that we have such a responsibility
for judgment. This ability to judge and the content of such judgment is origi-
narily intersubjective; that is, it is always already concerned with others. By
tracing her treatment of the matter in her work, I offer an Arendtian account
of justice that addresses the affective dimension of the spectator’s (and in
turn, the actor’s) sense of justice in conjunction with how we usually measure
justice, namely, in terms of what we owe to each other. The affective dimen-
sion of this judgment prioritizes the responsibility for such judgment rather
than becoming an attempt to universalize the affect (happiness/misery) of the
other that becomes the criteria for the resulting judgment regarding justice.
The judgment is a judgment of responsibility that is forward-looking, in order
to address and correct the unnecessary suffering/misery of affected parties,
which are at times remediable and other times not.

28  Arendt, “Thinking, Life of The Mind, 86–7.

29  To note, Rawls is convincing when he argues that a consequentialist account that judges
an event by way of its consequences (or utility) may easily go against principles of justice
from the standpoint of ideal theory that seeks to account of some sort of equality.
30  For Arendt, such goal-orientedness, albeit a part of any human action, does incorrectly
deem the standard of judgment to be the outcome, rather than the principle that is mani-
fested, and at best approximated in the action itself.

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It is in our encounter with the world (that requires thinking and some pre-
liminary understanding) that we become aware of a shared sense of justice.
This happens in a twofold manner. First, we perceive something we deem to be
unjust, for instance, unnecessary suffering and at times death.31 Such a percep-
tion does not need to be first-hand as in the case of a personal encounter but
can happen through multiple media. Such suffering can present itself also as
misery. Recall Arendt’s example about slum dwelling:

Suppose I look at a specific slum dwelling and I perceive in this particular

building the general notion which it does not exhibit directly, the notion
of poverty and misery. I arrive at this notion by representing to myself
how I would feel if I had to live there, that is, I try to think in the place of
the slum-dweller.32

The notions of poverty and misery become salient in her judgment, as she
states elsewhere, in “representing to myself what I cannot perceive.”33 How
does such representation without perception take place? Her account of judg-
ment, and in this case, enlarged mentality, rules out the usual approaches of
identifying with the other, empathy, and/or counting noses. What is left? What
is it that she can represent but not perceive? The answer is in her response: it
is the place of the other, wherein she represents to herself what it would mean
to be in that place, and what type of affect her environment would have on her
and possible (and actual) others who partake in the community. This is why
the Arendtian story of judgment has more to it: poverty and its accompanying
affect (of misery) are not perceived but can be represented in judgment by way
of the affective dimension of judging. Such affect may not require sharing the
experience (in this instance, slum dwelling), yet demands the ability and need
to represent the affect in order to meet the standard of impartiality in judg-
ments about our common world.
A shared sense of justice would make salient the blatant injustice inscribed
in the social and political fabric of such existence that blights the possibility
of equal agency that the slum dweller can practice in the face of such misery.
This is articulated as an injustice precisely because it affects us as members

31  Here, I will leave aside whether there is a question of blame or guilt on any particular
agent’s part, but instead invite the reader to think of such justice or injustice through
Young’s social connection model as discussed in her Responsibility for Justice.
32  Hannah Arendt, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” Responsibility and Judgment, 140,
my emphasis.
33  Ronald Beiner, “Interpretive Essay,” in Arendt, Kant’s Lectures on Political Philosophy, 107,
note 36.

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of the human community. I contend that such a judgment has to be opera-

tive in what Noëlle McAfee calls “cosmopolitan addresses,” captured in the
image of the body of Alan Kurdi washed ashore on the Turkish coast, or in
the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in the wake of the Arab Spring.34
These images capture suffering that is accompanied by a worldly affect—
anger, outrage—to declare “this is not just!” to note the horror of the absence
of worldly principles such as equality, freedom, and justice.
Second, we share this affective dimension—we are affected by it—that
erupts in the face of such suffering or misery. When we can all (be expected to)
say that something is unjust, we are able to detect our shared sense of justice
that goes unnoticed in ordinary circumstances. This Arendtian insight into our
ability to judge politically matters immensely in articulating how our sense of
justice is implicit in principle(s) of justice.

2.1 A Kantian Revolution

To recall, Kant’s Copernican revolution was revolutionary because in an at-
tempt to save philosophy from rationalism and empiricism alike, it abolished
the object’s metaphysical independence and placed the person (or the mind)
who experiences it in a position as to have objects conform to its mental con-
stitution, rather than attempting to have mental representations conforming
to the external world thereby introducing the problem of correspondence (or
realism/idealism).35
Ultimately, putting forth the faculty of judgment to be operative in human
experience as that which bridges reason and understanding; that the human
can judge—can be a judge—became the cornerstone of the rationality (not
just instrumental) that the human being possessed. In this sense, judgment
played an indispensable role in Kant’s philosophy.36 While Kant does not

34  Noëlle McAfee, “Humanity and the Refugee,” Social Philosophy Today, Vol. 33 (2017):
9–26, 17.
35  For an excellent analysis of Kant’s Copernican revolution, see Yirmayahu Yovel’s Kant’s
Philosophical Revolution: A Short Guide to the Critique of Pure Reason (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2018).
36  To recall, on the one hand, determinate judgment is that by which we recognize, for ex-
ample, the cup in front of us to be fit for holding water. As such, the ability to subsume
a particular given to us in intuition under a universal (concept) is an everyday occur-
rence for a rational agent. On the other hand, reflective judgment allows for the ability to
encounter a particular and create or find a new concept for it which is not given in any
universal fashion. For Kant, such a judgment pertained to taste in the ability to say that
“the rose is beautiful,” while allowing for what he called “subjective validity” that made
the judgment possibly valid for everyone who would experience the rose in particular. The
judgment of beauty for Kant stemmed from the pleasure that accompanied this ability to

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offer an explicit account of political judgment, his political thinking has been
mainly categorized by the umbrella term of cosmopolitanism to underscore
the equality of human beings by virtue of being human and possessing dignity.
This is due to Kant’s articulation of the rational nature of the human being,
that is, the capacity for reason as the ability to think for oneself, present in
the human being by way of her humanity, albeit without always being actively
utilized due to laziness and cowardice.37 Nevertheless, for Kant, such capacity
of reason is what allows for a “civil” or “rightful condition” of a just society that
rests on the three a priori principles of freedom, equality, and independence.38
Kant’s account of justice then can be found in his articulation of such a civil
condition acknowledging these principles as the grounding principles of
human organization.39 Arendt spells out the incompleteness of Kant’s ac-
count of political thought in not having shown how political judgment is at
stake in political affairs. Simply put, Arendt advocates that reflective judgment
is operative not only when we encounter things in the world but also events
thereby identifying a political philosophy that started with judgment rather
than right.40
Taking her departure from Kant, for Arendt, judgment thus becomes the
decisive faculty in human affairs, whether it be moral or political. What Arendt
drew from the Kantian enterprise (albeit at times pessimistically) was not that
the human beings couldn’t judge, but that at times the collapse of standards of

judge. Whether this pleasure is analogous to what we feel when we encounter the world in
shock or speechless terror is not within the scope of this paper. I am neither trying to prove
nor disprove the legitimacy of the inspiration that Arendt draws from Kant. (Immanuel
Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer [Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000]); Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982).
37  Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’,” Kant’s Political
Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 54–60.
38  Kant, “On the common saying: ‘This may be true in theory, but it does not apply in prac-
tice’,” in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1970), 61–92.
39  The idealism inherent in Kant’s account is no mystery; and has been productively uti-
lized in Rawls’ subsequent theory of justice taking up the free and rational human being
as the starting point in articulating what a just society should look like. According to
Rawls, then, we judge in the original position what justice should look like if we want to
preserve the liberty and equality of human beings in a given polity. Rawls’s account has
been improved and developed by him and others in the decades following his 1971 publi-
cation. This is not my topic here.
40  Arendt is well aware of Kant’s political writings, yet she maintained that Kant had no
political philosophy, but near the end of his life he had written “strictly political essays”
(Arendt, Lectures, 14).

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judgment (i.e., morality under Nazi regime) made it seem like human beings
didn’t have this ability to begin with. What for Kant was a matter of practical
reason showed itself to be manifestly interwoven with the faculty of judgment,
which was bastardized, for instance, in the case of Eichmann. In sharp contrast
to the requirement of thinking and judging for oneself to be able to see the
universalizability of practical principles (or principles of action), Eichmann
put the “will of the Fuehrer” to be the universal that commands.41 In dismiss-
ing the element of intersubjectivity in judgment, Eichmann was able to com-
mit the worst crime against humanity.
Intersubjectivity is at the heart of Arendt’s articulation of human exis-
tence. In Ronald Beiner’s terms, Kantian reflective judgment contributes to
Arendt’s work as it can protect against the “threat of subjectivization.”42 For
such a threat can result in two extremes: either succumbing to the Hobbesian
impulse and principle of community rooted in self-preservation, or giving in
to the (enlightened) self-interest that grounds the autonomous individual in a
community of free and equal fellows. Both undermine the role of judgment in
leading and preparing for action with others. In attempting to emphasize the
public self—the persona—that speaks and acts in concert with others who can
reveal freedom in a truly political sense, Arendt not only aims to recover such
a public existence of the citizen, but also this relationship between judgment
and action. In Arendt’s terms, the delineating of the limits of reason made it
possible to articulate the activity of knowing as world-building.43 Insofar as
we can share this structure of experiencing, can we build a world together.
How this world can be built and how we decide what it should look like, how
justice can appear in it will then have to take into account what we experi-
ence in common, and how such commonness can only be approached from
a standpoint of plurality. As a result, Arendt was able to claim that the faculty
of judgment was politically relevant in a way that Kant didn’t articulate. For
example, a principle of epistemic responsibility that rested on the judgment
of individuals in Turkey in 2013 led to the Gezi Park protests that further en-
acted the principles of public freedom, and equality, and demonstrated what
we may deem following from this discussion, a shared sense of justice.44 What
was the mark of sociality for Kant—the ability to reflectively judge and create

41  Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books,
20016), 137; “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” Responsibility and Judgment,
ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 17–48, 43.
42  Ronald Beiner, “Rereading Hannah Arendt’s Kant Lectures,” Philosophy & Social Criticism
Vol. 23, No. 1 (January 1997): 21–32, 22.
43  Arendt, “Thinking,” The Life of the Mind, 57.
44  Sari, 2018.

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new concepts—and the ground of our freedom, in this sense not only allows
for free opinion-formation, but also becomes part of a principle of action.

2.2 Judgment: Reflective and Affective

It is true that the ability to subsume particulars under universals for which we
use determinate judgment is a daily occurrence whereby we move around in
the world. I recognize the cup in front of me to be an apt object from which
to drink tea and quench my thirst. For Arendt, this is perhaps not politically
relevant. The strength of her analysis rests on her claim that reflective judg-
ment or “judging anew,” too can happen on a daily basis. To understand such
possibility of judgment, we should investigate the role of responsibility in her
account of political action to see that many daily occurrences in the world are
new occurrences to which we respond at levels of affect, and principle.
It was quite “impossible to be indifferent,” Arendt states, to the events that
took place after the Reichstag Fire in 1933. In relaying her own story of doing
something to Günther Gaus, underlining that she was “no longer innocent,”
Arendt says she helped her friend Karl Blumenfeld in the Zionist organization
and then managed to leave Germany after spending some time in jail. Arendt’s
action shows two sides of responsibility: first, of affective judgment, and sec-
ond, of action that stems from this judgment.
As Arendt emphasizes in this same interview, and states in the prologue to
the Human Condition, she is interested in the activity of understanding, which
to her culminates in thinking and judging (and of course, writing). The abil-
ity to judge, to reconcile the world to one’s understanding, is key to our com-
mon existence in the world, whereby we strive to create freedom and equality
through political action.45
Central to Arendt’s account of politics is, thus, what she deems “political
judgment”—that is, judgment that has the necessary conditions of being re-
flective and impartial, i.e., not self-interested. In the “Introduction into Politics”
Arendt states, and I quote her at length:

The failure of standards in the modern world—the impossibility of judg-

ing anew what has happened and daily happens, on the basis of firm stan-
dards recognized by everyone, and of subsuming those events as cases of
some well-known general principle, as well as the closely linked difficulty
of providing principles of action for what should now happen—has often

45  Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding),” Essays
in Understanding 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New
York: Schocken Books, 1994), 307–327.

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been described as a nihilism inherent in our age, as a devaluation of val-

ues, a sort of twilight of gods, a catastrophe in the world’s moral order. All
such interpretation tacitly assume that human beings can be expected to
render judgment only if they possess standards, that the faculty of judg-
ment is thus nothing more than the ability to assign individual cases to
their correct and proper places within the general principles which are
applicable to them and about which everyone is in agreement.46

That human beings merely judge when there are principles or rules available
to them is of course far from the truth. Even in the cases of practical judg-
ment in the deontic sense, we have to judge particular cases to be able to as-
sess whether a principle can be followed or not.47 Arendt’s suspicion does not
lend itself to a lacuna in normative principles or virtues to enact, but rather
points to the absence of a responsibility that I have highlighted as part of our
encounters in the world from which we draw the matters of thought. In addi-
tion, Arendt offers a response to this same problem posed by such failure of
standards in her essay entitled “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship”:

[For] only if we assume that there exists a human faculty which enables
us to judge rationally without being carried away by either emotion of
self-interest, and which at the same time functions spontaneously, that is
to say, is not bound by standards and rules under which particular cases
are simply subsumed, but on the contrary, produces its own principles by
virtue of the judging activity itself; only under this assumption can we risk
ourselves on this very slippery moral ground with some hope of finding
a firm footing.48

The hope of grounding our judgments in turn gives us hope about action.
The ability to create principles by way of the judging activity itself is not only
testimony to Arendt’s adoption of Kant’s account of reflective judgment but
also to the extension of such faculty to political phenomena. This extension
becomes crucial for the task at hand—to articulate an Arendtian conception
of justice—that the seeming absence of reflective judgment, or in her words
“the impossibility of judging anew,” cannot be solely blamed on the “failure of

46  Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 103.

47  See Onora O’Neill, “Principles, Practical Judgments, and Institutions,” Bounds of Justice
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 50–64.
48  Arendt, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” in Responsibility and Judgment, 27,
my emphasis.

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standards in the modern world.” Positing such impossibility would incorrectly

suggest that human beings are incapable of creating and sustaining new stan-
dards, thus endorsing nihilism. Arendt holds onto the faculty of judgment that
accompanies our everyday experiences, thereby attributing responsibility—
distinct from guilt—to our ability to respond to the world. Articulated thus,
enlarged mentality is a freedom-manifesting, world-disclosing phenomenon.
That judgment is in Arendt the essence of the political has been articulated
by many scholars advocating on the one hand the moral dimension of such
judgment and its agonistic dimension on the other.49 The common thread—
the beginning point—of the different accounts offered in the literature re-
volves around the ontological conditions of natality, plurality, and narrativity
that accompany human action.
On the one hand, the emphasis of the moral dimension of political judg-
ment addresses the question of irresponsible immoralism. As early as 1988,
Benhabib addresses Arendt’s lack of explicit engagement with moral consid-
erations in connection to political judgment to demonstrate the moral under-
pinnings (or normative standards) that her account requires in order to stand
on its own. Benhabib’s careful analysis puts forth judgment as a moral faculty
that enables one to “tell right from wrong.” Her project, which she understands
as a “phenomenology of moral judgment,” aims to show how moral judgment
operates as “communicative interaction” that becomes relevant in assessing
morally relevant situations, identifying morally correct actions, and interpret-
ing the intentions and maxims of the moral agent.50 In advocating the moral
nature of judgment in Arendt’s account, Benhabib fills a lacuna to show that
Arendt’s thought does not lead to an irresponsible immoralism.
On the other hand, the emphasis on the agonal dimension pertains to
the particular case of Eichmann. Lida Maxwell’s careful reading of Arendt’s
Eichmann challenges the juridical articulation of Arendt’s account in favor of
an agonal account of law, which emphasizes the ability to contest/dissent. In
showing how contestation of law is at the root of law, Maxwell fills a gap in

49  Seyla Benhabib “Judgment and the Moral Foundations of Politics in Arendt’s Thought,”
Political Theory Vol. 16, No. 1 (1988): 29–51; Leora Bilsky, “When Actor and Spectator Meet
in the Courtroom: Reflections on Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Judgment,” History &
Memory: Studies in Representations of the Past, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Fall-Winter 1996): 137–73; Lida
Maxwell, “Toward an Agonistic Understanding of Law: Law and Politics in Hannah Arendt’s
Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 11, No. 1 (February 2012): 88–
108; Dianna Taylor, “Hannah Arendt on Judgement: Thinking for Politics,” International
Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol. 10, No. 2 (January 2002): 151–69. For a recent account
on the role of judgment in democratic politics, see Linda Zerilli, A Democratic Theory of
Judgment (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016).
50  Benhabib, “Judgment and the Moral Foundations of Politics in Arendt’s Thought,” 36.

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Towards an Arendtian Conception of Justice 233

the literature. I suggest, in turn, that the juridical and agonal readings both
rest upon what Arendt understood to be the law of the earth, namely, plu-
rality. While Bilsky articulates that plurality is one of the criteria “capable of
distinguishing between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ reflective judgment”51
alongside natality and narrativity; I suggest that plurality has a twofold role in
judgment: (1) the fact of plurality is what enables (condition of possibility) of
political judgment, and (2) the condition of plurality becomes the normative
standard to guide judgment.
What I have discussed so far aimed to bring into focus an Arendtian ar-
ticulation of responsibility, which she understands to be properly political
in responding to the world in public, which resides in the ability to judge,
on the one hand, and the ability to act, on the other. In her essay “Collective
Responsibility,” Arendt argues that such responsibility is grounded in the fact
of political membership in a community.52 That this membership is political
suggests a boundary of a (nation-)state, which has been utilized to motivate
different arguments in the literature. I contend, however, the intersubjectiv-
ity of this responsibility cannot be artificially circumscribed in a given polity.
It is true that Arendt understands political action to be spatially bound, but
responsibility that comes into effect first and foremost in judgment does not
need to be limited as such.
In her posthumously published 2011 work Responsibility for Justice, Young
explicates a succinct analysis of Arendt’s distinction between the concepts of
guilt and responsibility, in arguing that the latter for her was of a political na-
ture, albeit not based on membership of a political community alone.53 Young
says it eloquently:

Because we dwell on the stage of history, and not simply in our houses,
we cannot avoid the imperative to have a relationship with actions and
events performed by institutions of our society, often in our name, and
with our passive and active support. The imperative of political respon-
sibility consists in watching these institutions, monitoring their effects

51  Leora Bilksy, “When Actor and Spectator Meet in the Courtroom: Reflections on Hannah
Arendt’s concept of judgment,” in Judgment, Imagination, and Politics, ed. Ronald Beiner,
and Jennifer Nedelsky (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 270; Transformative Justice
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004): 13, quoted in Maxwell, “Towards an
Agonistic Understanding of Law,” 95.
52  Hannah Arendt, “Collective Responsibility,” Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn
(New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 147–158.
53  Young, “Guilt versus Responsibility,” Responsibility for Justice (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2013), 75–93.

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to make sure that they are not grossly harmful, and maintaining orga-
nized public spaces where such watching and monitoring can occur
and citizens can speak publicly and support one another in their efforts
to prevent suffering. To the extent that we fail in this, we fail in our re-
sponsibility, even though we have committed no crime and should not
be blamed.54

Young contends that such a political “responsibility falls on members of a so-

ciety by virtue of the fact that they are aware moral agents who ought not to
be indifferent to the fate of others and the danger that states and other orga-
nized institutions often pose to some people.”55 She notes further that “one
has the responsibility always now, in relation to current events and in relation
to their future consequences. We are in a condition of having such political
responsibility, and the fact of having it implies an imperative to take politi-
cal responsibility.”56 Young is careful to articulate the interpersonal nature of
responsibility. As such, she aims to signal the forward-looking dimension of
political responsibility to further strengthen her account of responsibility for
justice not only in our own societies, but also across borders.
Nevertheless, what seems to be missing from her account is the role of judg-
ment as itself constitutive of such responsibility for justice. It is in this sense
that my account fills a normative lacuna identified in her work by spelling out
the ontology, i.e., the plurality of existence, and space from which the notion
of responsibility emerges.
Arendt’s own thinking was always oriented towards taking responsibility.
The question, however, that remains open regards action-guidance in the nor-
mative sense. What is at stake in an Arendtian account of reflective and affec-
tive judgment is to help articulate a principle of justice based on a shared sense
of justice. In so doing, there may emerge an “imperative” of political respon-
sibility in order to address the question of equality and power anew—and to
respond to injustices (individual or structural) that we encounter in the world.
Justice as based on reflective and affective judgment is a principle of action
that guides the creation of equality that allows for the acknowledgement of
plurality as a norm of world-creation.

54  Ibid., 88.

55  Ibid., 92.
56  Ibid.

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3 Principles of Action

Prima facie, Arendt’s account of the vita activa seems sufficiently disjointed
from her account of the vita contemplativa.57 A closer look at her account of
political action as the freedom-manifesting initiative of a political agent, how-
ever, brings into focus the component of judgment that accompanies (or that
prepares) the agent for action: the component of affect that qualifies judg-
ment. This reading goes against the grain of an articulation of the Arendtian
judge merely as the historian looking back on historical events, thereby bring-
ing into focus the elemental importance of judgment in our everyday lives that
may (and sometimes ought to) inspire political action. As we know, for Arendt,
principles are what inspire action and save it from its arbitrariness:

The absolute from which the beginning is to derive its own validity and
which must save it, as it were, from its inherent arbitrariness is the prin-
ciple which, together with it, makes its appearance in the world. The way
the beginner starts whatever he intends to do lays down the law of action
for those who have joined him in order to partake in the enterprise and
bring about its accomplishment. As such, the principle inspires the deeds
that are to follow and remains apparent as long as the action lasts.58

It would be sloppy if not outright wrong to suggest that there is no delibera-

tion that accompanies such an inspiration to act. While the inspiration to act
may not be articulated solely in cognitive terms, the element of deliberation
cannot be easily ruled out from action itself. For whatever principle action
manifests, for instance, equality, the deliberative dimension of such inspira-
tion is marked by a principle of epistemic responsibility that underscores the
acknowledgment of facts of the world. This acknowledgment is necessary in
the free opinion-formation which underlie our decision regarding how we can
reorganize (or create) a world that not only respects but also fulfills the condi-
tion of human plurality.59 The condition of plurality together with the princi-
ple of equality provide the normative ground for political action in its capacity
to create a political space and political community at once.60

57  Arendt herself also identifies the problem of approaching vita activa purely from the
standpoint of vita contemplativa and acknowledges the need for correction. See Hannah
Arendt, “Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt,” Thinking Without a Banister, ed. Jerome
Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2018), 443–475, 446.
58  Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 205.
59  Sari, 2018.
60  See also Sari, 2019.

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Here, I wish to further emphasize that responsibility is what marks, or bet-

ter, demonstrates our “love of the world” in making public what Birmingham
understands as the “archaic event of natality.”61 Birmingham articulates the af-
fective dimension of political principles to demonstrate the link between the
ontological condition of natality and affect, which brings together the “indi-
vidual and citizen.”62 For Birmingham, the “affective dimension” of principles of
action is “not reducible to psychological emotion but belong[s] to the princi-
ple of action itself.”63 This statement needs further qualification. How does the
affect belong to the principle itself? Birmingham has an eloquent response:
principles orient us affectively.64 Hence, there is an accompanying affect that
informs political principles that guide action, but do not determine it.
More recently, Birmingham has argued that what allows for the creation
of sensus communis is the “worldly, affective sense” of judging spectators.65
In her account of the “banality of evil,” she elucidates the legitimacy of the
concept that Arendt possessed, showing the sensuous element of judgment
that stems from a “shock” or “terror” in being grasped by reality. To be clear,
Birmingham does not equate such a sensus communis with a “redemptive com-
munis,” and suggests, “there is instead only the imperative of retaining a fierce
sense of reality, of judging from a common and enlarged sense of inhabiting
the earth and the world, animated by shame and horror, outrage, lamenta-
tion, and the improbable joy and earthly praise emerging from the passionate
engagement with the world and the common sense of the real that it carries
with it.”66 Bringing together Birmingham’s articulation of political affect in
Arendt and Young’s analysis of responsibility towards correcting structural in-
justices, what I want to suggest is that we cannot have a sense of justice unless
we are affectively oriented to the world to be able to respond with shock or
horror or anger that makes salient our judgment of injustice to promote or
move us with a principle of justice to change the world.
My point is simple. In Arendt, we can find a unique way of thinking about
justice: one that involves a unique role for judgment, a role that differs from

61  Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights, 12.

62  As I have suggested in a previous work: “[This] affective dimension that grounds the per-
formative aspect of citizenship—i.e., partaking in the common world—must make sense
of the role that factual truths play in the exchange of opinions in deliberative democracy”
(Sari, “Arendt, Truth, and Epistemic Responsibility,” 164).
63  Ibid., 13.
64  Ibid., 14.
65  Peg Birmingham, “Common Sense and Sensus Communis: The Worldly, Affective Sense of
Judging Spectators” in Bloomsbury Companion to Arendt, ed. Peter Gratton, and Yasemin
Sari (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
66  Ibid.

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most historical political philosophy, as well as contemporary Rawlsian ac-

counts. Extracting this account of justice from Arendt allows for the correction
of the criticisms of her work stemming from a so-called strict divide between
the social and the political à la Hanna Pitkin, as well as the question about
her realism or quasi-idealism (or transcendentalism). Our experiences in the
world become the anchor for our judgments that for Arendt follows from the
activity of thinking.67
To be sure, my account does not deny that there may be a moral dimen-
sion to judgment in the political realm, but rather suggests that such a moral
grounding is not sufficient to motivate political action, hence providing us with
urgent reasons to act in the world not only in identifying the wrongs but in
correcting the injustices. The transition from the identification of injustice to
action in Arendtian terms takes place in the triangular relation between think-
ing, judging, and acting. Thinking prepares the agent for judging and judging
(which is an act) prepares her for collective political action.

3.1 Plurality as the Law of the Earth

So how do these activities all hang together? In the Life of the Mind, Arendt
states that “plurality is the law of the earth.”68 This statement needs clarifi-
cation. As stated previously in her own account of political action found in
The Human Condition, Arendt understands plurality to be both a fact of exis-
tence, that “men, and not man [sic], inhabit the world,”69 and also a condition
of political action, underscoring the relational aspect of political action that
de-emphasizes the relationship between sovereignty and action, which she be-
lieves is the mark of the mistaken substitution of action with production. This
twofold articulation of plurality shows that Arendt’s account is not devoid of
normative commitments.
Let me clarify. If plurality is a fact of existence, then its validity depends on
its acknowledgment through institutional and political practices that respect
(and protect & fulfill) that plurality. This is one reason why Arendt can on the
one hand deem Adolf Eichmann’s punishment apt, because he did want to do
away with such plurality, and hence is not fit to appear in a world that is plu-
ral. While on the other hand, she can justify (legitimate) the civilly disobedi-
ent citizen—the true citizen who does not obey70—to be the symbol of such

67  Arendt, Life of the Mind; Thinking Without a Banister.

68  Arendt, “Thinking,” Life of the Mind, 19.
69  See also Arendt, Life of the Mind, 19.
70  Cf. Arendt, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” in Responsibility and Judgment;
“Civil Disobedience” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch,
1972): 49–102.

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238 Sari

protection of plurality, which creates the ground for justice. The laws that do
implicitly or explicitly go against this plurality (what Rawls would have iden-
tified as the common status of equality of each citizen) can be breached to
provide a check on democracy. Civil disobedience that addresses an injustice
can only happen when there is such recognition of injustices that are eluci-
dated by political judgments accompanied by various affects such as rage, dis-
appointment, anger, and perhaps disgust. It wasn’t so long ago when Martin
Luther King showed the importance of such judgment in his civilly disobe-
dient action in what would have been deemed a “nearly just” society from a
Rawlsian perspective.71
The question of the relationship between justice and law, the distinction be-
tween just and unjust laws, and whether one must obey unjust laws has been
central to political philosophy. An Arendtian account of justice that focuses
on the role of judgment can also begin to address the relationship between
justice and law as it arises in the question of how we can promote and enforce
transnational laws about global injustices.
To be sure, insofar as Arendt understands the public realm as the “potential
space of appearance,”72 we cannot underestimate this shared context of to-
getherness upon which law rests.73 For Arendt, law is spatial. Against the grain
of understanding law as rules and precepts, she states:

We are so accustomed to understanding law and justice in terms of the

Ten Commandments, as precepts and prohibitions whose sole purpose is
to demand obedience, that we easily forget the spatial character of law.

71  See Rawls’ argument that civil disobedience can be justified only in a “nearly just” so-
ciety [Rawls, “The Role of Civil Disobedience,” A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1999), 336].
72  Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998):
200.
73  As Arendt states in “Law and Power”: “Power can be divided—between the branch-
es of government as well as between federated states and between state and federal
governments—because it is not one instrument to be applied to one goal. Its origins lie in
the multiple capacities of men for action; these actions no end as long as the body politic
is alive; their immediate purposes are prescribed by the ever-changing circumstances of
human and political life, which by themselves and because they occur within defined
communities or given civilizations constitute a realm of public affairs arising between
citizens as individuals, binding together or separating them as shared or conflicting inter-
ests. Interests in this context have connotation of material needs or greeds, but constitute
quite literally the interesse, that which is between men. This in-between, common to all
and therefore of concern to each, is the space in which political life takes place” (Hannah
Arendt, “The Great Tradition I: Law and Power,” Social Research: An International
Quarterly Vol. 74, No. 3 (2017): 713–726).

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Towards an Arendtian Conception of Justice 239

All laws first create a space in which they are valid, and this space is the
world in which we can move about in freedom. What lies outside this
space is without law and, even more precisely, without world; as far as
human community is concerned, it is a desert.74

It is true that to understand the whole world as a “space of appearance” would

be against Arendt’s own argument. However, if imagination is to accompany
our judgments to be able to represent a plurality of perspectives, then perhaps
the whole world becomes a stage to judge, a platform that requires a response
from the human being insofar as she is a judging & acting being located in
relation to others—a relation that far surpasses the partiality that we wish to
attribute as the scope of our responsibility. This can be most forcefully seen in
the experience of civil disobedience where either the codified law or the adju-
dicatory practices in the world fail to acknowledge the conditions of equality
and plurality that are necessary for world-creation. It is against such injustice
that threatens the creation and maintenance of a political space that civil dis-
obedience becomes a measure of resistance. Moreover, I have argued that for
recent revolutionary movements, we can also identify a principle of “demo-
cratic responsibility” that is at work in the creation of a demos.
A responsibility for judgment is vital to understanding how our sense of
justice has to be informed by worldly events rooted in facts about the world
that brings about reflective and affective judgment. Our responsibility to un-
derstand and to make a possible world-creating concerted action in response
to global calamities allows for the proper acknowledgment of plurality as the
law of the earth. This neo-Arendtian articulation of justice that emphasizes an
egalitarian capacity and responsibility to judge is crucial to understanding our
role in issues of justice and that can help us delineate the duties and obliga-
tions that befall us as co-habitants of earth, and which require us to participate
in the recognition of everyone’s right to belong to this plurality.

74  Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 189–190.

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