The Political Theory Workshop presents:
Andreas Hess, University College, Dublin and Samantha Ashenden, Birkbeck College, London: “Totalitarianism and Justice: Hannah Arendt and Judith N. Shklar’s Political Reflections in Historical and Theoretical Perspective.”
We locate Arendt and Shklar’s writings within what Greif (2015) has called the ‘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, even conundrums. To this end, we will take a closer look at two sets of studies: Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (the former released in 1951, the latter in1963) and Shklar’s After Utopia – The Decline of Political Faith and Legalism: An Essay on Law, Morals, and Politics (the first one published in 1957 and the second one in 1964).
While Totalitarianism and After Utopia discuss totalitarian ideology and its consequences for modern political thought, the Eichmann report and Legalism deal with the question whether and how justice is possible after the extreme experience of totalitarianism.