Totalitarianism and justice: Hannah Arendt's and Judith N. Shklar’s political reflections in historical and theoretical perspective

Ashenden, Samantha and Hess, A. (2016) Totalitarianism and justice: Hannah Arendt's and Judith N. Shklar’s political reflections in historical and theoretical perspective. Economy and Society 45 (3), pp. 1-25. ISSN 0308-5147.

Abstract

We locate Arendt’s and Shklar’s writings within what Katznelson has identified as an attempt to create a new language for politics after the cataclysm of the 20th Century and Greif has called the new ‘maieutic’ discourse of ‘re-enlightenment’ in the ‘age of the crisis of man’. More specifically, we compare and contrast two related, but in many ways also differing, ways of thinking about totalitarianism and its legal repercussions. To this end, we examine two sets of studies: Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil and Shklar’s After Utopia – The Decline of Political Faith and Legalism: An Essay on Law, Morals, and Politics. While Totalitarianism and After Utopia discussed totalitarian ideology and its consequences for modern political thought, the Eichmann report and Legalism dealt with the question whether and how justice is possible after the extreme experience of totalitarianism. We argue that the maieutic impulse led Arendt and Shklar to find distinct routes to address a common concern. Our paper ends with a discussion of some of the surplus meaning that was generated by the different maieutic performances of the two thinkers.

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