Responsibility and Judgment Book

Last night, after taking time to read the Mueller Report over the weekend, my memory recalled the last essay Hannah Arendt ever wrote. As we consider how this nation responds to the abomination in the White House, how the world no longer looks to the U.S. for support, Arendt's final words resonate more than ever.

Original Review

Home to Roost, the final essay of this collection, reflecting on the decades preceding the U.S. bicentennial and written shortly before her death, is among the best of her works. It provides relevant lessons for today. For example, she regrets that "Madison Avenue tactics under the name of public relations have been permitted to invade our political life." And as an example, she notes that "the terrible truth" revealed by the Pentagon Papers that rather than "particular tangible interests" the Vietnam War's "only permanent goal had become image [as a superpower] itself…" From there she considers the Watergate era and the cumulative effects on the collective American psyche of various political disasters. In considering President Ford's amnesty of Nixon, she compares them to the Adenauer administration's whitewashing of the crimes of Nazi officials and Khrushchev's replacement of Stalin. Her sarcastic conclusion: "not amnesty but amnesia will heal all our wounds." One cannot help but wonder how harshly she might have judged President Obama's similar approaches in both the Iraq War and the financial crisis of 2008. She concludes memorably: "When the facts come home to roost, let us try at least to make them welcome. Let us try not to escape into some utopias'images, theories, or sheer follies. It was the greatness of this Republic to give due account for the sake of freedom to the best in men and to the worst."

The eight essays, which are divided under the themes of responsibility and judgment were written late in Arendt's life. The strength of the essays get progressively better as the book goes along. If I were to reread it, I would start with the last essay and work my way back. I would give 5 stars to the final essay, 4 to the others in the final section, and 2 to the first two-thirds of the book.

The last third of the book, the judgment essays, are much more readable. Arendt considers issues as varied as school integration in Little Rock, Rolf Hochhuth's play Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy) about the silence of Pope Pius XII about the Holocaust, the German Auschwitz trials of the 1960s and the aforementioned one anticipating the U.S. bicentennial.

The responsibility essays, which take up the first two-thirds of the book, are heavy on philosophy and generally focused in Arendt's much misunderstood theme of "the banality of evil" that came out of her writings on the Eichmann trial. Arendt fiercely objected to being classified as a philosopher; she considered herself a political theorist. This comes through in the muddled theses of these writings as they meander a bit with repetitive themes.