Rethinking political judgment: Arendt and existentialism (original) (raw)

Contemporary Political Theory

Mrovlje's book is an insightful contribution to the contemporary debate on political judgment. Through a reading of Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, and Arendt, it offers a view of political judgment as inescapably plural and situated, and therefore recalcitrant to ready-made models of rational deliberation. Turning unabashedly to novels and plays, these authors help us to 'rethink the terms of our engagement with the world' (p. 12) in ways that align with the insights Arendt draws from Kant's aesthetics into political judgment. They get political judgment 'right' by virtue of the sensitivity to concrete, situated existence that literature affords them. Sartre, notwithstanding his literary sensitivity, remains caught in some of these philosophical strictures, but de Beauvoir and-especially-Camus and Arendt, break free of those. In the last two chapters of the book, Mrovlje argues for the potential of this understanding of judgment in tackling two contemporary controversies: over 'dirty hands,' and the one about transitional justice. While Hannah Arendt has enjoyed enormous success in contemporary political theory, the other authors Mrovlje engages have not. It is one of the main contributions of the book to bring them alongside such a widely read thinker to show their distinct contribution to political thought and possibly political judgment. The sensitivity of existentialism for the idiosyncratic, the inexplicable, the tragic, and the irreconcilable as something to be confronted rather than subsumed into grand rational designs, or swept under the rug of universalism, is certainly something that we ought to recover. Living with the loss of the dream of absolute control, and even seeing potential in that loss, is something that critics of modernity have long pointed to as the insecure but promising ground on which to build a less ambitious but more humane world. Arendt was certainly influenced by existentialism, although Mrovlje takes issue with Martin Jay's reading of Arendt's political existentialism as lapsing 'into aestheticized decisionism that refuses to be tamed by socioeconomic concerns or any other instrumental considerations.' (p. 98