Table Of ContentRethinking Political Judgement
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Rethinking Political
Judgement
Arendt and Existentialism
Maša Mrovlje
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© Maša Mrovlje, 2019
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The right of Maša Mrovlje to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been
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the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1. Political Judgement in the History of Political Thought
and the Modern Crisis 22
2. Sartre and Beauvoir: The Ambiguity of Political
Judgement and the Challenge of Freedom and
Responsibility 51
3. Camus and Arendt: Confronting the Ambiguity of
Political Judgement and Illuminating the Limits
of the World 81
4. Political Judgement and Narrativity 115
5. Facing Up to the Tragedy of Political Action:
The Problem of Dirty Hands 146
6. Times of Transition: Reconciling with the Tragic
Nature of Political Affairs 183
Conclusion: Reclaiming Wonder at the World of
Political Affairs 218
Bibliography 226
Index 256
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Acknowledgements
This book began its journey as a PhD research project at the Uni-
versity of St Andrews. My doctoral study would not have been
possible without the support of the St Andrews’ School of Interna-
tional Relations and the Slovene Human Resources Development
and Scholarship Fund. I am highly indebted to my colleagues on
the International Political Theory programme for their scholarly
dedication, their intellectual openness and generosity of spirit.
My greatest thanks go to Patrick Hayden, whose illuminating
way of thinking and love for the thinkers addressed in this book
has had a formative infl uence and continues to inspire. For the
opportunity to study with him, for his invaluable guidance, and
his persistent care and encouragement, I am forever grateful.
I also thank Gabriella Slomp, Anthony Lang and Robert Fine for
their attentive reading, important insights and supportive words
at different stages of the project.
The thesis matured into book form during my postdoctoral
research on the Greyzone project at the University of Edinburgh.
I consider myself extremely fortunate to be able to work with
Mihaela Mihai, whose creativity and warmth have been an inex-
tinguishable source of engaging new ideas and contributed signifi -
cantly to building my confi dence as a scholar. For her thoughtful
comments and good counsel, for her care and support through-
out the revision process, I cannot thank her enough. To her, too,
I owe my eternal gratitude. The colleagues at the School of Social
and Political Science have provided a vibrant and welcoming intel-
lectual environment, good companionship and many stimulating
conversations, for which I cordially thank them. The book was
completed with the support of the European Commission, ERC
Starting Grant 637709-GREYZONE.
vi
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Acknowledgements
Jenny Daly, David Lonergan and Camilla Rockwood at Edin-
burgh University Press were exemplars of fi ne editorship and pro-
fessionalism. I am most grateful as well to the four anonymous
reviewers for their careful consideration and valuable suggestions
for improvement.
My very special thanks go to Gisli Vogler for generously reading
the whole manuscript and for his discerning comments. His love
and steadfast support, his comfort and good humour sustained me
when it mattered most.
Many friends have been there for me, offering their understand-
ing, consolation and advice. For their friendship I am especially
grateful to Ana, Nina, Polona and my cousin Luka – it has been
one of their gifts to be able to turn the smaller or bigger tragedies
of life into occasions for trust and laughter.
Finally, I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my parents
and my late grandmothers whose unconditional love, affection
and support elude proper expression in words. They have been
my shelter into which to retreat and an example from which to
begin. Nothing would matter without them. To them, I dedicate
this book.
Parts of Chapter 3 were previously published in ‘Narrating and
Understanding’, in Patrick Hayden (ed.), Hannah Arendt: Key
Concepts, London and New York: Routledge (2014), pp. 66–84.
Segments of Chapter 4 appear in ‘Beyond Nussbaum’s Ethics of
Reading: Camus, Arendt, and the Political Signifi cance of Narrative
Imagination’, The European Legacy 24:2 (2019); published online:
8 November 2018, DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2018.1540514. I thank
the publishers for their permission to reproduce this material.
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Introduction
The [modern] loss of standards [. . .] is a catastrophe in the moral
world only if one assumes that people are actually incapable of judg-
ing things per se, that their faculty of judgement is inadequate for
making original judgements, and that the most we can demand of it
is the correct application of familiar rules derived from already estab-
lished standards.
Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics
How are we to reinvigorate the human capacity for political
judgement as a practical activity capable of confronting the plural
and ambiguous character of our postfoundational world? In the
face of pervasive injustice and suffering that continuously con-
found our moral expectations, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and
seek solace in despair. More often than not, our judgements and
actions seem obliterated under the weight of larger forces and pro-
cesses, to the point of making the most steadfast pursuit of moral
ideals end in disaster. Even though increasingly interconnected
across temporal and spatial boundaries, we hit upon walls of dif-
ference, ideological division and hatred. These quandaries fore-
ground political judgement as a topic of fundamental existential
import, pertaining to the meaning of our lives and our relation-
ship to the world and others. While political judgement has of late
assumed increasing prominence in political theory, the questions
of its concrete, human reality and signifi cance remain obscured
under the preoccupation with proper standards or grounds. It is
now more than fi fty years since another generation of thinkers
awarded these questions the status of utmost philosophical rel-
evance. Responding to their own horizon of betrayed hopes for
universal human emancipation, twentieth-century philosophies of
existence approached the dilemmas of political judgement as they
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