The Failures of Political Judgment: in the philosophies of Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir - Progress Review 3 - Bridget Allan

Their distinct approaches to the dilemmas of political judgment have meant that Hannah Arendt’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s writings about judgment have rarely been brought together. My work compares Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem with Beauvoir’s “An Eye for An Eye,” which respectively judge the historical cases of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Israel (1961) and Robert Brasillach’s trial in France (1945). I identify three failures of political judgment in these reports: the failure of the accused to judge for themselves, the failure of the courts to recognise the character of their crimes, and the failure of Arendt and Beauvoir to appropriately judge Eichmann and Brasillach by arguing for their executions. These failures expose the inconsistencies between Arendt and Beauvoir’s theoretical writings about political judgment and the real judgments they made in their lifetimes.