“Common sense” has multiple meanings, some of them familiar and others less so. This chapter pursues the themes of Chapter 6 by disentangling five meanings of common sense and examining how Arendt uses them in her own epistemology. Hers, I argue, is a version of social epistemology, in which the reliability of empirical knowledge turns not only on our own capacities but also on the comparison of our judgments with those of others. Even though Arendt was deeply concerned about skepticism and the collapse of common sense, and occasionally wrote about the philosophical problem of radical skepticism, this chapter argues that she ultimately rejects the problem rather than attempting to solve it.

An animating question in The Human Condition is what makes life meaningful and defeats futility. This chapter reconstructs Arendt’s answer. It explains why she finds the life of contemplation unsatisfactory and why the life of labor and consumption can’t be satisfying on their own terms. Neither can the life devoted to making. The artisan “could be redeemed from his predicament of meaninglessness only through the interrelated faculties of action and speech.” The chapter analyzes Arendt’s concept of action, and then returns to the Case of the Missing Morality. It argues that the very thing that makes action meaningful – that it matters to our peers – means that their moral judgments are defining characteristics of action. Her occasional assertions that action is inherently amoral are therefore a mistake. Her moral judgments about Eichmann caused her to recognize this and turned her to issues of moral judgment and legal accountability.

Appearing at the tail end of this volume, I begin with a brief meditation on the coda. A (musical) ending, the vulgar form of cauda (tail or privy member), figure of our fallen state, the coda may also be a whip or goad to inspiration or even exaltation. Attempting to turn my posterior position to good ends, I have, in the place of an ending, used the chapters here as provocations and inspirations. Recognizing in them a more expansive account of legal performance than my own, I point to how they unbind law and performance from the rigid definitional strictures on which I have relied, how they challenge the boundaries between text and performance, performance and law, law and world, world and fiction (the veritas falsa of theatre and the falsitas verus of law), how they show the methodological Über-Ich (with its rules and dogmas) to be unseated by an ontological Id that scoffs at its laws. That force – like the comedic cauda in the courtroom – answers legal solemnities with impudent laughter and other “minor jurisprudences of refusal,” creating heterotopias, wild zones, rehearsals for alternative futures.

The present volume focuses closely on the constituents of performing law in its transitive and mobile enactments both inside and outside the courthouses where trials are staged. Working with actors, dancers, musicians, and lawyers, Performing Law provides a novel approach to the dramatics of justice, the theatre of veridiction, through analysis of the elements of its manifestation in architectural, artistic, corporeal, choreographic, filmic, and dance modalities of relay of legal action in the public sphere. These include the stage directions that legal doctrine provides to legal actors, the masks worn, the affective spaces created, the phantasms of interior and exterior, desire and terror, resistance and laughter that perform the long neglected media of the auditory and visual transmission of law as a form of life.

Continuing the previous discussion, this chapter discusses Arendt’s view of group identity. She argues for a political or speech-act theory of identity ascriptions. In times of persecution, she explains, it would be an evasion for her to answer “Who are you?” with anything other than “I am a Jew”; in other contexts, that answer would be a pose. This helps explain her well-known dictum, “If you are attacked as a Jew, you must defend yourself as a Jew”: Persecuted groups “can resist only in terms of the identity that is under attack.” Understanding group identity in this way helps explain Arendt’s initial attraction to Zionism, but also her eventual break with the Zionist movement. The danger of this political conception of identity politics is that it seemingly imposes no humanitarian limits on what one can do to resist the persecutor, a danger foreseen by the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt. The chapter formulates Arendt’s answer to Schmitt’s challenge, based on her “idea of humanity.”

Moving beyond the structural antagonism of criminal law, this chapter explores the subject positions of actors in scenarios of sexual harm. If the sex offender emerges as a felon bearing the head of a wolf, the victimized white child emerges as the exemplary figure of vulnerability. While tropes of vulnerability are mobilized to justify paternalistic state coercion, they are also a powerful reminder of humans’ interdependence and mutuality. Thinking with vulnerability as an analytical category focuses attention on the lingering traumatic effects of sexual assault, as well as the severe punitiveness toward sex offenders. Addressing sexual violence does not require draconian penalties; conversely, addressing carceral expansion does not necessitate minimizing sexual violence. Centering vulnerability may allow us to rethink the foundations of our social contract in ways that acknowledge both our precariousness and the sovereign violence that holds us in its thrall.

The word “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin – like Arendt, a refugee from the Nazis. Lemkin was convinced that the destruction of an entire people is a unique crime, over and above the mass destruction of the individuals who make up that people. His reason was that each people makes its own contribution to universal civilization. For Arendt, by contrast, there is no such thing as a universal civilization; what makes genocide unique is its attack on the diversity of peoples, which she calls a crime against the human status. This chapter begins by discussing Lemkin’s career and thought. It criticizes his “civilization” theory, and the critique sets the stage for discussing Arendt’s theory. One philosophical puzzle is that in The Human Condition, Arendt’s concept of plurality refers to the manyness of individuals, not of peoples or other groups. The chapter explains why the diversity of groups as well as individuals matters to Arendt.

This chapter turns to the collapse of moral judgment Arendt saw in the early weeks of the Third Reich, and which she connects to the collapse of common sense and adherence to conspiracy theories in mass societies. The chapter draws on The Origins of Totalitarianism, coupled with contemporary “virtue epistemology” – the study of intellectual virtues and vices and their relation to knowledge. Arendt, I argue, is an exceptionally insightful virtue epistemologist. The chapter analyzes Arendt’s account of how European social conditions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to the collapse of common sense in the face of a barrage of political lies. She warns that “if everyone always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but that no one believes anything at all anymore.” The result is a dangerous mix of gullibility and cynicism, what in the chapter I label culpable credulousness.

Arendt believed that “the idea of humanity” requires all nations to assume responsibility for major crimes of international, rather than purely domestic, concern. Her ideas about international criminal law grew from the Eichmann trial; they appear in Eichmann in Jerusalem and her correspondence with Karl Jaspers about the trial. This chapter provides essential background for her ideas by explaining the “lawyers’ law” concerning state sovereignty, sovereign immunity, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Arendt partly presupposes this background, but she also breaks with it in significant ways. Notably, Arendt breaks from the state-centered orthodoxy when she argues that its concepts don’t apply when a state itself becomes criminal. She also gives the term “crimes against humanity” a substantive meaning (crimes of international concern), which in her view includes genocide as a crime against humanity. In the lawyers’ law, these are distinct crimes with different definitions. The chapter explains what motives the lawyers’ law, to better understand Arendt’s alternatives.