This is a book about conscience and moral clarity. It asks how some people keep their judgment steadfast even when multitudes around them are swept away by conspiracy theories, moral panics, and murderous ideologies – or, on a smaller scale, by immersion in a corrupt and corrupting workplace culture. It asks about the surprising fragility of common sense, including moral common sense. It asks where morality fits into a meaningful human life.

Beyond this, the book asks about legal accountability for crimes committed when moral judgment fails on a vast and deadly scale. How should the law judge perpetrators who commit crimes against humanity, not out of greed or malice but because their leaders and peers tell them it is the right thing to do, and their larger society seems to agree? Who gets to judge, to condemn, and to punish? On what legal and moral basis? What makes some crimes the concern of all humanity? Who speaks for humanity? These questions lie at the heart of international criminal justice.

Hannah Arendt is the most important philosopher to have addressed all these questions. To some readers this will seem obvious; to others, much less so. Arendt had no legal training and wrote very little on law; and her turn to moral philosophy came only in her final years, mostly in manuscripts published after her death. She never developed her views on either subject in a systematic or rigorous way, and her writing never engages with academic literatures.Footnote ¹ Arendt herself flatly denied that she was a philosopher, “nor do I believe that I have been accepted in the circle of philosophers.” This last point is plainly true among moral philosophers trained in the analytic tradition.Footnote ² Her conclusions are often unusual, and some are untenable.

This book nevertheless proceeds from the conviction that Arendt has light to shed on matters of supreme importance to the moral and legal life of our century. To show this, I reconstruct her main lines of thought from scattered texts and letters. Where Arendt’s arguments are incomplete, I flesh them out; where they are weak, I investigate whether they can be strengthened. Throughout, I highlight their points of contact with the concerns of (broadly) analytic and postanalytic moral philosophers, and with jurists in today’s project of international criminal justice. In some chapters I discuss contemporary events, viewed through an Arendtian lens.

I am not writing principally for Arendt enthusiasts, although I hope they will find the book instructive. My aim is to reach readers who may know little about Arendt beyond her renown as a public intellectual and theorist of totalitarianism – readers who are perhaps skeptical of someone who gets invoked so often as a kind of oracle (a role Arendt would have detested); in short, readers who would like to engage with what she actually argued.

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When she died of a sudden heart attack in 1975, Arendt had just begun a new book, but she got only as far as its title page, found in her typewriter. The title was Judging, and the book would have been the capstone of her three-part The Life of the Mind, after Thinking and Willing.

By “judging,” Arendt means sizing up deeds and courses of action without subsuming them under general rules.Footnote ³ In her view, the ability to judge right and wrong in cloudy circumstances is our core moral power, more important than reasoning about rules and principles, and more important than casuistry or philosophical argument. Good judgment is crucial for actors deliberating in the moment, but it also matters for historians and jurists who judge actors and their deeds after the fact. Arendt’s effort to understand both these powers of judgment, that of the actor and that of the spectator, lies at the heart of her moral philosophy.Footnote ⁴

Seemingly abstract questions about the powers of judgment had special urgency for Arendt. As a young woman, she witnessed the collapse of moral judgment on a monumental scale in the early months of the Third Reich. In a matter of weeks, erstwhile anti-Nazis decided that Hitler wasn’t all that bad. Intellectuals concocted rationalizations for Nazism (“Completely fantastic and interesting and complicated things! Things far beyond the ordinary level!” she recalled bitterlyFootnote ⁵). Stern sentinels of moral rules switched smoothly from Christian or Kantian rules to Nazi rules. They were quick to mold themselves to the new order, and their pliability disgusted her.Footnote ⁶ What she saw up close was “the almost universal breakdown, not of personal responsibility, but of personal judgment in the early stages of the Nazi regime.”Footnote ⁷ It was a step toward total moral collapse in the decade that followed, not only in Germany but throughout occupied Europe. (Arendt herself fled Germany in the late summer of 1933, after an arrest and eight-day police interrogation.) Stalin’s USSR experienced a parallel collapse under the Great Terror, as neighbors denounced neighbors and the Bolshevik faithful treated transparent lies and conspiracy theories as indubitable facts. Never had judgment seemed so fragile; never had it mattered more.

After the war came questions of accountability – for of course the magnitude of the Nazi crimes was known even before the liberation of the camps made them vivid. Personal judgment may have collapsed in the Third Reich, but personal responsibility never went away, much as the perpetrators wished it would. Arendt insisted on this point, and eventually she came to view criminal courts as champions of individual responsibility against evasions and excuses.Footnote ⁸

From afar Arendt followed the Nuremberg trials, and she was keenly interested in her mentor Karl Jaspers’s celebrated lectures on German guilt, published in 1946. The previous year she published her own powerful essay on “organized guilt,” which strongly hints at the idea of an international criminal law.Footnote ⁹ Hopes for a new international legal order make brief but striking appearances in her first English book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. At the time, though, Arendt had little interest in pursuing legal issues or investigating the role of courts and tribunals. That came later, once she recognized that courts can be institutional embodiments of spectator judgment.Footnote ¹⁰

Through the 1950s Arendt likewise showed no interest in moral philosophy. She seemed at times to despise it. A 1951 diary entry complains about the “ghostly lifelessness of morality and moral thought,” and even near the end of her life she held that invoking moral principles in everyday matters is usually a fraud (a view I reject).Footnote ¹¹ Moral philosophy’s “endless comparisons and rational elucidations” are “really like a game.”Footnote ¹²

Her ambivalence toward morality itself (as distinct from moral philosophy) comes from a deeper source: a worry that people whose highest concern is their own purity will sideline themselves from the messy fight against evil. In another diary entry, she calls Kant’s categorical imperative “the morality of powerlessness,” which abandons “responsibility to the world.”Footnote ¹³ It might be said that she mistrusted morality, but for moral reasons. Notably, The Human Condition (1958), her philosophical masterpiece, catalogues and analyzes half a dozen basic conditions of our active life – but morality is not one of them.

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Eventually, though, Arendt did turn to moral and legal philosophy. It was the trial of Adolf Eichmann for crimes of the Holocaust that prompted her investigations into the nature of moral judgment and the foundations of criminal law. Nearly all her writing on the powers of judgment came in the twelve years after she published Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in 1963 – which itself came twelve years after Origins. In that respect, Eichmann in Jerusalem marked an inflection point in Arendt’s thought – not a break, but an important new direction. For that reason, I begin this book by examining her encounter with the trial, and I return to it at the end.

Today, more than sixty years after his trial, Eichmann is no longer a household name, so perhaps a reminder is in order. Eichmann was an SS lieutenant colonel and self-described “expert” on the “Jewish question.” He oversaw the forced emigration of Austrian and Czech Jews during the period when Nazi policy was ethnic cleansing rather than mass murder. After the policy turned to genocide, Eichmann was the man in charge of transporting Europe’s Jews to death camps, which he did with ruthless efficiency. In 1944, he and his men sent hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in the space of just four months. Although Eichmann was not a “top Nazi” on the organizational chart, he was the highest-ranking Nazi whose sole responsibility was the destruction of the European Jews, and he played an essential role in the murder of millions. After the war Eichmann hid in Germany for a few years and then escaped to Argentina. There he lived and worked under an alias, and hung out with the Nazi ex-pat community and their sympathizers. In 1960 Israeli agents kidnapped him in Buenos Aires and brought him to Jerusalem to stand trial for genocide against the Jewish people as well as for other crimes. The court rejected his superior orders and “I was only a cog in the machine” defenses. Eichmann was convicted in 1961 and executed on June 1, 1962.

His electrifying trial featured testimony by many Holocaust survivors and received worldwide attention. Arendt covered the trial as a journalist for The New Yorker, and she concluded – very controversially – that Eichmann was neither a fanatic nor a sadistic, satanic monster. In her estimation, he was an ordinary man, distinguished only by professional ambition and extreme shallowness.Footnote ¹⁴ In her famous phrase, he represented the banality of evil. I explore the Eichmann case and the accuracy of her diagnosis in Chapters 1 and 2. It is the gateway to the investigations that follow.

Arendt argued that perpetrators like Eichmann pose a fundamental challenge to both law and morality. To put someone on trial demands “that human beings be capable of telling right from wrong even when all they have to guide them is their own judgment.”Footnote ¹⁵ Eichmann, however, was “an average, ‘normal’ person, neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinated nor cynical,” who seemingly lacked that ability.Footnote ¹⁶ He was a mass murderer but personally exceptional only in his shallowness. How can that be? And how can the law condemn someone who committed his crimes “under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong,” because his government and everyone he looked up to assured him that murdering race enemies is right?Footnote ¹⁷ What are the implications for lesser and less obvious forms of evil? The Eichmann trial, she concluded, “touches upon one of the central moral questions of all time, namely upon the nature and function of human judgment.”Footnote ¹⁸ These words, from the closing pages of Eichmann in Jerusalem, were a promissory note. The book itself does not discuss the nature and function of judgment, nor does it offer a theory of evil. Those would come later.

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.”Footnote ¹⁹ One 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 cultivate judgment through the company and examples of others, and we take our bearings from the conventional wisdom of those around us – as Arendt recognized and freely acknowledged.Footnote ²⁰ How is judgment in Arendt’s more demanding sense possible? How are we able to break with 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 blamed the failure to do so on laziness and cowardice.Footnote ²¹ Arendt, living through the collapse of enlightenment in nations neither lazy nor cowardly, diagnosed the failure differently. She offered a paradoxical conjecture: The inability to judge for yourself is somehow connected with the inability to think from the standpoint of others. Her moral philosophy is an effort to make good on that conjecture.

It was her observation of Eichmann that steered her to this insight. The more she pored over his interrogation transcript and trial testimony, the more convinced she became that he was incapable of thinking from the standpoint of others, which in her view is the defining characteristic of both thought and conscience.Footnote ²² Could it be, she wondered, that thinking from the standpoint of others is necessary for sound judgment that reaches moral conclusions without deriving them from public opinion, conventional rules, or laws of reason? Thinking of this kind occurs in the back and forth of inner dialogue. Is there a theoretical connection between dialogical thinking and the powers of judgment? She poses the question in her 1971 lecture “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” and her answer is a tentative yes. Alongside the banality of evil, this thinking–judging connection is central to her moral philosophy. Exploring this connection – and explaining what it has to do with the banality of evil – are the main tasks of Chapters 3, 4, and 5. Arendt herself drew the thinking–judging connection in the settings that preoccupied her: “emergency situations,” “times of crises when, so to speak, we find ourselves with our back against the wall.”Footnote ²³ When common sense collapses on a mass scale, as in the Third Reich and Stalin’s USSR, following the moral rules favored by public opinion is disastrous, and we have nothing to fall back on but our own judgment.

In contrast with the importance she placed on moral judgment in emergencies, Arendt suspected that invoking moral principles in everyday affairs is hypocrisy and fraud – mere moralizing. Apparently, she thought that in daily life conventional morality will settle matters.Footnote ²⁴ I disagree. In Chapter 3, I respond that hard moral dilemmas arise in everyday life as well as in emergencies. The stakes may be lower (but not always), and our backs may not be against the wall. But that hardly obviates the need for moral judgment even in mundane matters, for a simple reason: Conventional morality is less determinate than Arendt seems to suppose – it doesn’t settle hard questions. Recognizing that moral perplexities are everywhere implies that Arendt’s ideas about thought and judgment apply more widely than she herself acknowledged – which, in my view, makes their study especially worthwhile. Arendt’s focus in her moral philosophy, as Deirdre Mahony writes, is “ethics after Auschwitz.”Footnote ²⁵ Mahony is right, but I proceed in the conviction that the philosophy reaches beyond the shadow of Auschwitz. Questions about judgment as a central moral power are obviously not a matter of purely historical interest. They are urgent today, both in public and private life.

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It’s useful to set Arendt’s investigation of judgment within the broader context of her work. Her two major pre-Eichmann books, The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, don’t discuss judgment at all, at least not under that label. However, a running theme in Origins is the collapse of common sense – including moral common sense – in the twentieth-century totalitarian movements, whose members rushed to embrace transparent lies and bizarre conspiracy theories, eventually carrying millions of nonmembers in their train. To be unable to distinguish truth from crackpottery is a sign of skewed judgment or something worse: the willful suspension of judgment, what in Chapter 6 I call culpable credulousness – a willingness or even eagerness to be duped. As Arendt put it: “Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”Footnote ²⁶ Culpable credulousness becomes especially dangerous when the conspiracy theories tell you that innocent people are out to harm you and your kind. That makes it easy for toxic leaders to repackage ethnic cleansing and murder as justified self-defense.

It is hardly necessary to point out that conspiracy theories and audacious lies continue to blight our politics today. I devote Chapter 6 to examining the collapse of common sense through the lens of Origins. I set Arendt’s razor-sharp diagnosis side by side with its contemporary manifestations and recent philosophical efforts to analyze them. In Origins, though, Arendt doesn’t theorize about judgment as such, or explore its connection with common sense.

The Human Condition poses a tougher interpretive problem. Not only does the book not discuss judgment; it barely discusses morality. In The Human Condition, Arendt recognizes only two moral precepts: the injunction to keep promises and the injunction to forgive wrongdoing. These, Arendt argues, make human action possible by binding us and releasing us. Beyond these precepts, Arendt downplays not only what Bernard Williams (in a similar skeptical spirit) calls “the peculiar institution” that reduces moral life to a system of obligations and permissions; she also neglects the moral emotions that make us human.Footnote ²⁷ The richer tapestry of moral life barely makes an appearance in the book, and a few passages suggest an amoralist outlook. I call this absence the Case of the Missing Morality. It’s especially jarring because Origins focuses relentlessly on radical evil and its assault on human dignity, and its tone of controlled moral fury is impossible to miss. In contrast, the phrase “radical evil” appears just once in The Human Condition. It is not a theme of the book, and moral fury is absent.

Yet beyond the Case of the Missing Morality, The Human Condition turns out to be rich in ethical content in an older sense. In Chapters 8 and 9, I offer a close reading that unearths an argumentative throughline addressing the question that animates ancient ethics: What is the best life for human beings? Chapter 9 also explains why her neglect of morality leaves Arendt with problems that can’t be solved without the fuller appreciation of moral judgment that she sought in her later works.

Possibly Arendt was already thinking along those lines: Glimmerings of her theory of judgment appear in a few pages of a manuscript written soon after The Human Condition (unpublished in her lifetime).Footnote ²⁸ But it was clearly the Eichmann trial that turned Arendt to moral philosophy, where she elaborated the thinking–judging connection and the banality of evil.

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Unsurprisingly, the Eichmann trial also spurred her thinking about how the law can address atrocity crimes. The epilogue to Eichmann in Jerusalem analyzes key legal issues in some depth. Before then, Arendt wrote very little about law, and nothing about criminal law. To be sure, Origins, composed in the early postwar period, calls for a “new law on earth” to protect human dignity; but it never details what that law would be. Origins also contains a scathing critique of human rights law, and it introduces the fascinating concept of the “right to have rights,” which she believes human rights law ignores at its peril. Her critique and the “right to have rights” remain influential in current debates about statelessness and immigration; but their connection with criminal law and accountability is at best indirect. Still, the connection is there, and I draw it out in the final chapters of this book.

Chapter 10 explores Arendt’s human rights critique and her conception of human dignity. She rejects the view that human dignity is an inherent property of individual human beings; rather, it is a status we confer on others by recognizing them as our fellows. Arendt calls this stance the “idea of humanity,” and making it a reality – what I call the project of constructing humanity – is the task of the “new law on earth.” Implicit in her reflections is a view of state sovereignty that brings her close to modern formulations that go under the label “sovereignty as responsibility” (as distinct from sovereignty as unfettered control over people and territory). On this conception, sovereigns must shoulder cross-border responsibilities, in an age where mass devastation has become an all-too-real practical threat that no state can manage on its own.

Among those cross-border responsibilities is bringing to justice perpetrators of crimes against humanity – the core mission of international criminal law, and the topic of the book’s final chapters.

For Arendt, “crimes against humanity” is more than a legal label for a specific class of atrocity crimes. Rather, it signifies that the crimes concern all of humanity. She focuses especially on the crimes of the Third Reich, because its entire policy was criminal to the core; and, she argues, orthodox international law is incapable of grasping that a state itself can be criminal. But her ideas readily extend to noncriminal states and nonstate actors who commit core international crimes. Chapter 12 looks closely at Arendt’s theory of genocide, contrasting it with the thought of Raphael Lemkin, the lawyer and activist who coined the word “genocide” and helped create the Convention Against Genocide. In law, acts of genocide are crimes committed against individuals because of their identity groups, with the intention to destroy those groups. Chapter 13 explores Arendt’s complex theory of group identity and identity politics, a theory I find attractive, although it is fraught with paradoxes and dangers.

In Chapters 14 and 15, I turn to Arendt’s legal analysis of the Eichmann trial, where she formulates several of her most important ideas about criminal accountability for “banal” evildoers. She wrote thirty years before the advent of modern international criminal law in the 1990s, and these final chapters investigate how her ideas stand up in the light of three decades’ practical experience.

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Here’s a more detailed roadmap. The book consists of five linked but overlapping parts, which explore the themes of judgment, conscience, and accountability from different angles.

Part I (Chapters 1 and 2), “Adolf Eichmann and the Banality of Evil,” focuses on Eichmann’s trial and Arendt’s diagnosis of him. Chapter 1 explains the banality-of-evil thesis and examines the evidence that led Arendt to it. I also set out one of my own theses: that her interest was not only the banal evildoers but also the “righteous few” who keep their moral judgment intact in the face of coercive social pressure, and in whom she found hope for the world. Chapter 2 examines the chief criticisms by historians who think Arendt got Eichmann terribly wrong, and defends her diagnosis of Eichmann. Readers uninterested in the historical question may wish to read only the first and last sections of this chapter: The former sets out the historical issue and my conclusion, while the latter explains Arendt’s turn to the moral psychology of judgment.

Part II (Chapters 3–5), “The Moral Philosophy,” examines Arendt’s unorthodox use of Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment to model moral judgment. Chapter 3 also addresses Arendt’s suspicion that appeals to moral principles in everyday matters are usually fraudulent, and it explains why conventional morality itself requires good judgment that can’t be reduced to rules – an argument I develop by analogy with common law reasoning.

Chapter 4 introduces and analyzes the thinking–judging connection and what she calls the “Socratic” moral propositions: that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, and that the cost of wrongdoing is being out of tune with yourself. Chapter 5 continues that analysis. It discusses the workings of conscience, sets out Arendt’s post-Eichmann analysis of the banality of evil, and concludes by examining Eichmann’s prison memoir, Götzen (“Idols”), to see whether her thoughtlessness theory stands up against his protest that he did carry on “a dialogue with my inner ‘I’ – which also could be called conscience.”Footnote ²⁹ (My conclusion: It stands up very well indeed.)

Part III (Chapters 6 and 7), “Common Sense and Moral Breakdown,” turns to The Origins of Totalitarianism to analyze conspiracy theorizing and assaults on truth – with present-day examples very much in mind. Perhaps most importantly, I explain how the collapse of common sense in factual matters undermines moral common sense and the ability to judge right and wrong. I examine Arendt’s epistemology of common sense and interweave it with contemporary philosophers’ efforts to understand conspiracy theorizing and people’s remarkable willingness to believe the unbelievable.

Chapter 7 digs deeper into the concept of common sense and disentangles strands of its intellectual history that Arendt draws on in her epistemology. One danger of conspiracy theorizing is a corrosive skepticism about factual truth itself, and Arendt was especially acute in diagnosing this danger. Skepticism is a traditional philosophical problem as well as a practical political problem, and Arendt occasionally tackled it philosophically. I argue that Arendt proposed a prototype of what today goes by the label “social epistemology,” but that in the end she joined the ranks of anti-philosophers who reject the skeptic’s question rather than answering it.

Part IV (Chapters 8 and 9), “Arendt before Jerusalem: Ethics in The Human Condition,” tackles the Case of the Missing Morality through a close reading of The Human Condition’s core chapters, reconstructing her argument in a systematic way. On my reading, the chapters examine the capacity of different forms of human activity to make life meaningful, with Arendt’s conclusion that only the life of action can overcome the futility inherent in other ways of life. Somewhat misleadingly, Arendt labels this the “Greek solution,” which has led critics to accuse her of “Hellenic nostalgia” or even “polis envy”; I show that the accusation misunderstands her point. The real problem with her argument is that it leaves little room for morality, which seems to her like an external constraint on action that threatens to rob it of its capacity to give meaning.Footnote ³⁰ This, I show, is a mistake, because morality is far more than a fetter on action. I argue that gaps in her account require the turn to moral philosophy in her final decade.

Part V (Chapters 10–15), “Arendt and International Law,” unfolds and explores eight fundamental ideas. First, that defending human dignity in our crisis-ridden world requires a “new law on earth” based on a reconfigured conception of state sovereignty. Second, that human rights law is useless unless it guarantees the right to belong to a political community that will protect your rights. Third, that “the idea of humanity, when purged of all sentimentality, has the very serious consequence that in one form or another men must assume responsibility for all crimes committed by men and that all nations share the onus of evil committed by all others” – the root idea of international criminal law.Footnote ³¹ Fourth, that criminal courts are institutional embodiments of spectator judgment, and their chief mission is portioning out responsibility among perpetrators who dodge it with their “I was only a cog in the machine” defenses. Fifth, that what makes genocide the paradigm of crimes that concern all humanity is its attack on the diversity that defines the “human status.” Sixth, that group-based identity must be understood politically and not metaphysically. Seventh, that orthodox international law has a fatal blind spot when a state itself is criminal. In the end, the book circles back to where it began: the case of Eichmann and the banality of evil. It proposes that the thoughtless refusal to judge can itself be a ground of culpability supporting criminal conviction – the eighth fundamental idea growing from Arendt’s engagement with spectator judgment embodied in criminal law. I examine these ideas on their own, but also in relation to the institutions of contemporary international criminal justice, as they developed from the 1990s until now.

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Readers familiar with Arendt’s authorship will notice omissions from this book, which does not aim to be a comprehensive study of her thought. Most obviously, I focus on her moral and legal theory and say little about her writing about freedom, constitutionalism, revolution and the “social question,” power and violence, Marxism, antisemitism, imperialism, the structure of totalitarian regimes, the nature of politics, or Jewish affairs – in short, the political ideas for which Arendt is best known. This is a deliberate choice, and perhaps a risky one, because it bets that the themes I explore can live on their own outside her broader political theory. Her historical studies of the will (in Willing) are tangential to my themes, and I pass over them as well. And, although Chapter 7 discusses Arendt’s epistemology, I decided – a bit reluctantly – to omit a follow-up chapter on The Human Condition’s interpretation of Descartes and the scientific revolution.

Perhaps more surprising is my neglect of the so-called Eichmann controversy. The book was perceived – wrongly – as an attack on the trial and on Israel. As Amos Elon recalls, “Leftists and rightists, young and old, university professors, novelists, columnists, rabbis, Jewish functionaries of all kinds in America, in Israel, and in Europe, Americans, Israelis, and Germans – all were offended by Eichmann in Jerusalem.”Footnote ³² While I address some of the substantive issues that enraged Arendt’s critics, the controversy itself was not mainly about substance; as she complained bitterly, it was about a book she hadn’t written. It was political more than philosophical, and thus outside the scope and aims of this book.

A final omission concerns Arendt’s intellectual roots. She once wrote: “If I can be said to ‘have come from anywhere,’ it is from the tradition of German philosophy.”Footnote ³³ Although I analyze Arendt’s creative use of Kant’s aesthetics in her moral theory, I say little else about that tradition, and especially about her intellectual debts to Martin Heidegger. Others have written amply and illuminatingly about Arendt and Heidegger.Footnote ³⁴ Instead, I highlight her affinities with analytically trained philosophers I admire, both her contemporaries and mine. Admittedly this is an odd choice, because Arendt was almost comically prejudiced against analytic and ordinary language philosophy, about which it is fair to say she knew little and cared less.Footnote ³⁵ Yet it shouldn’t be surprising that the affinities are there – especially with moral philosophers who lived through the same dark decades that she did, and their students of my own generation. One of my hopes in writing this book is to bring these thought trains into conversation with each other.

Readers will find many textual footnotes throughout this book. Some provide proof texts or additional evidence for assertions in the main text; others contain important asides that connect with the text. They will be of interest to some readers, but the book can be read without them.

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A personal note about why I wrote this book. I’ve devoted my career to teaching and studying professional ethics and law. Both subjects are remote from Arendt’s interests and sensibility, yet the questions central to my work come straight out of Eichmann in Jerusalem and “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” which I first read fifty years ago. To borrow a phrase from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: They hit me where I live.

What becomes of moral responsibility in bureaucratic or organizational settings, where knowledge is fragmented, peer group pressure is powerful, and the individual sense of agency is weak because duties are divided (the so-called problem of many hands)?Footnote ³⁶ How can we understand people who do evil thoughtlessly rather than with an evil heart? How can we hold them accountable for doing what everyone in their organization approves? What secret strength keeps some people’s moral judgment intact when those around them fail? These are Arendtian questions, but they are mine as well, and my own writing turns to her again and again.

Over the years, though, points of disagreement and doubt surfaced, some minor but others basic. I found myself arguing with Arendt, in both senses of “with”; I came to think of her as half my Virgil and half my sparring partner. A decade ago, I decided it was time to sort out in a systematic way what I’ve always found inspiring in Arendt and where I think she erred. That mission dictates the nature of the book: part close reading and reconstruction; part critique and fact checking; part friendly amendment; and part my own take on Arendt’s topics, especially those that remain urgent today. How much my own take is suffused with Arendt’s is for others to judge.

I heard Arendt lecture only once, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. I hadn’t read her work, and I barely knew who she was other than “some famous person.” She stood alone on the bare stage of Mandel Hall, in a cyclone of cigarette smoke, and read something about evil, and Socrates, and the death of metaphysics. The lecture went way over my head; I had no idea what she was talking about. Years later, I read “Thinking and Moral Considerations” and thought it was one of her finest essays. It dawned on me that it was the same lecture that I had found so baffling. These two memories, of incomprehension and illumination, stuck with me as I wrote this book. The first reminded me that Arendt is a hard philosopher; it made me determined to unwind her winding arguments and make them as clear as I could. The second reassured me that the effort is worth it.