Overview

The vast majority of studies of Hannah Arendt’s thought are concerned with her as a political theorist. This book offers a contribution to rectifying this imbalance by providing a critical engagement with Arendtian ethics. Arendt asserts that the crimes of the Holocaust revealed a shift in ethics and the need for new responses to a new kind of evil. In this new treatment of her work, Arendt’s best-known ethical concepts – the notion of the banality of evil and the link she posits between thoughtlessness and evil, both inspired by her study of Adolf Eichmann – are disassembled and appraised. The concept of the banality of evil captures something tangible about modern evil, yet requires further evaluation in order to assess its implications for understanding contemporary evil, and what it means for traditional, moral philosophical issues such as responsibility, blame and punishment. In addition, this account of Arendt’s ethics reveals two strands of her thought not previously considered: her idea that the condition of ‘living with oneself’ can represent a barrier to evil and her account of the ‘nonparticipants’ who refused to be complicit in the crimes of the Nazi period and their defining moral features. This exploration draws out the most salient aspects of Hannah Arendt’s ethics, provides a critical review of the more philosophically problematic elements, and places Arendt’s work in this area in a broader moral philosophy context, examining the issues in moral philosophy which are raised in her work such as the relevance of intention for moral responsibility and of thinking for good moral conduct, and questions of character, integrity and moral incapacity.

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9781350143890

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Reviews

Arendt's thinking of ethics is at the forefront of our minds today. This is a work deserving of that thinking. Arendt's writings on judgment after the Shoah warrant our deepest reflections, and this book does that and more. It is a must-read for anyone concerned with how to think through our notions of selfhood and about evil today. The amazingly clear book brings you to leading-edge thinking about what ethics means in these times. -- Peter Gratton, Professor of Philosophy, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada Sympathetic but skeptical, rigorous without being arid or inelegant, this careful exposition of the moral philosophy of one of the twentieth century's intellectual giants is both a lesson on Arendt's theory of thinking and an exercise in thinking for ourselves. -- Finn Bowring, Senior Lecturer, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK An excellent read both for specialists and the curious, Deirdre Lauren Mahony's book does a much-needed work of synthesis across a broad range of Arendt's writing, drawing out from beneath the abundance of political-theoretic interpretations of Arendt a cogent and persuasive interpretation a strong individual ethics in the background of Arendt's engagements. Centering the problem of evil as Arendt's ethical lodestone, Mahony succeeds in drafting a map of Arendt's normative terrain that stands out in its novelty and interpretative incisiveness in an otherwise increasingly crowded field. -- Ian N. Storey, Associate Fellow at The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, Bard College, USA

Author Information

Deirdre Lauren Mahony is Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of British and American Studies at the University of Hamburg, Germany.

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