Overview

This book is about conscience and moral clarity. It asks how some people keep their judgment steadfast even when many around them are swept away by conspiracy theories, moral panics, and murderous ideologies-or, on a smaller scale, by immersion in a corrupt and corrupting workplace culture. It asks about the surprising fragility of common sense, including moral common sense, and it asks where morality fits into a meaningful human life. Beyond this, the book asks about legal accountability for crimes committed when moral judgment fails on a vast and deadly scale. Hannah Arendt addressed all these questions in a profound and original way. Drawing on her published works, letters, diaries, and notes, David Luban offers clear accounts of Arendt's contributions to moral philosophy and international law, showing how her ideas about judgment and accountability remain crucially important to the moral and legal life of our century.

Full Product Details

Author:   David Luban (Georgetown University, Washington DC)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
ISBN:  

9781009647465

ISBN 10:   1009647466
Pages:   300
Publication Date:   14 May 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available, will be POD  
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon it's release. This is a print on demand item which is still yet to be released.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Hannah Arendt, the philosopher of judgment; Part I. Adolf Eichmann and the Banality of Evil: 1. Arendt in Jerusalem; 2. Did Arendt get Eichmann wrong?; Part II. The Moral Philosophy: 3. Judgment in dark times; 4. The Socratic moral propositions: thinking and judging; 5. Conscience and the banality of evil; Part III. Common Sense and Moral Breakdown: 6. The flight from common sense; 7. Common sense and plurality; Part IV. Arendt Before Jerusalem: Ethics in The Human Condition: 8. The curious case of the missing morality; 9. The problem of futility in The Human Condition: Part V. Arendt and International Law: 10. Statelessness, human rights, and humanity; 11. The idea of international criminal law; 12. The crime against the human status: Lemkin and Arendt; 13. The promise and peril of identity as politics; 14. Doing justice; 15. Thoughtlessness as culpability; Conclusion: taking stock.

Reviews

'At this perilous moment in our history, David Luban has delivered a work of exceptional importance.  On one level, the book offers an astute and judicious study of Hannah Arendt's moral philosophy, brilliantly illuminating an overlooked dimension of the great thinker's oeuvre. But more distinctively, Luban proves the equal of Arendt, expounding a novel contribution to international legal theory and offering an indispensable guide to preserving our moral bearing and capacity for reasoned judgment in the darkest of times.' Lawrence Douglas, Amherst College 'Powers of Judgment compellingly shows how Arendt's reflections on evil, conscience, common sense, responsibility and judgment can contribute to contemporary debates in moral philosophy and legal theory. David Luban's exemplary clarity and admirable erudition, combined with his humane care for our fractured world, are evident on every page of this magisterial book.' Kei Hiruta, Waseda University 'For decades, David Luban has been the most important moral philosopher working on legal issues of professional responsibility and legal accountability. Hannah Arendt has been his most important interlocutor.  In The Powers of Judgment, Luban brings Arendt alive as he interrogates, elaborates, and critiques her work. This is philosophy as it should be-never merely an exposition, but a dialogue between Luban and Arendt. Through that dialogue, he solves many of the puzzles that have troubled Arendt scholars. Most important, Luban brings Arendt into the 21st century. He begins and ends with Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem; in between, we get a powerfully illuminating inquiry into the most compelling issues of our day: moral judgment, conscience, evil, guilt, common sense, genocide, and international law.' Paul Kahn, Yale Law School 'There are two reasons to read this fine book. One is the illumination that David Luban provides about an important, but elusive, thinker, Hannah Arendt. The other is the illumination gained from engaging with the ideas of Luban himself, our deepest student of the 'professional responsibility' of lawyers. Both are concerned with the absolutely vital topic of what it means to think for oneself-and to judge others-with regard to the dilemmas created by tolerating or being complicit in what one realizes is political evil, and both should be attended to.' Sanford Levinson, University of Texas Law School and Department of Government

Author Information

David Luban is Distinguished Professor at Georgetown University Law Center. He is the author of Lawyers and Justice: An Ethical Study (1988), Legal Modernism (1994), Legal Ethics and Human Dignity (Cambridge, 2007), and Torture, Power, and Law (Cambridge, 2014).

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Countries Available

All regions