Abstract

Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy is the go-to text for readers interested in Hannah Arendt’s theory of judgment. Arendt’s discussion of Kantian aesthetic judgments of taste is typically associated with her own view. However, readers who find her interpretation idiosyncratic, if not wrongheaded, distinguish the author of the Critique of Judgment from Arendt’s Kant. Rather than debate who got Kant ‘right’, this essay explores what Arendt discovered about judging politically by reading Kant in her own Arendtian way. Judgment was present early in her political thinking, for judgment deals with the particular and ‘the problem of the new’. As such, judgment concerns the realm of human affairs that the Western philosophical tradition has found unworthy of serious study due to its ever-changing and contingent nature. Beholden to the standards set by philosophy, political thought has been unable to make sense of its subject matter, which is action and ‘men in the plural’. Clarifying what it means to judge politically was crucial to Arendt’s lifelong effort to disentangle politics from philosophy and its focus on ‘Man in the singular’.