A Democratic Theory of Judgment

Abstract

The third volume of Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind was never written. As Arendt's editor, Mary McCarthy, observed, "After her death, a sheet of paper was found in her typewriter, blank except for the heading 'Judging' and two epigraphs. Some time between the Saturday of fi nishing 'Willing' [the second volume of the aforementioned work] and the Thursday of her death, she must have sat down to confront the fi nal section." Fond of quoting McCarthy, commentators have turned the missing volume on judging into an enigma of spectral proportions. What would Arendt have written had she lived long enough to fi nish her tripartite work? How would the volume on judging have fi t with the rest of her oeuvre? What kinds of problems would that volume have addressed and perhaps solved? Although we cannot know what Arendt would have written, we might refl ect on the role that judging plays in her extant political theory and, more important for this book, what role it might play in contemporary democratic and feminist political theory. In her strikingly original view, the capacity to judge should be expected from each and every citizen. Although Arendt turned to Homeric impartiality, to Aristotelian phronesis, and to Kantian enlarged thinking, it is not Homer or Aristotle or for that matter Immanuel Kant to whom we can attribute her novel account of judgment. Rather, it is Hannah Arendt herself who fi rst discovers judgment as a political capacity of ordinary democratic citizens, not elites with special knowledge or abilities. This discovery is at least equal to

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