This paper seeks to extend Arendt’s contribution on reflective judgement in the context of the grey zone of complicity in human rights violations through insights from social philosophy.
Arendt emphasised the link between the capacity for judgement and the political evils of her time. Judgement for her is the capacity most at risk during totalitarianism, which proved particularly successful in undermining and replacing the standards of routine moral and political judgement. It is also the capacity that enabled her to reflect and respond to the unprecedented and inconceivable of the Holocaust, and, in doing so, face and come to terms with reality. For this, Arendt adopted Kant’s aesthetic judgement for the political sphere – a controversial move which helped make judgement a central concern of political theory. Her theory has been extended by various scholars including Linda Zerilli, Leslie Thiele, Alessandro Ferrara, and Maria Pia Lara. Its creative, pluralist character and rejection of rational standards in politics now offers an influential alternative to John Rawls’ public reason and Jürgen Habermas’ ideal speech. Arendt’s theory nonetheless remains incomplete and limited by her difficult relationship with the social sciences, which she criticised for failing to judge totalitarianism appropriately. Her theory requires extension also in light of a move towards late modernity from the 1980s onwards.
This paper seeks to extend Arendt’s framework for judging historical injustice through social theory, especially the philosophy of social science, critical realism. While one of its main proponents, Margaret Archer, does not engage with transitional justice, I argue that her research on patterns of reflexive agency through internal conversation provides significant insights on what judgment scholar Albena Azmanova describes as the pre-discursive structuring of political judgement, the dynamics of social reproduction and identity stratification that frame what is judged and how. This enables capturing the influence on agency by patterns of injustice and violence that escapes Arendt’s theory of political judgement, which is focused only on the particular. Archer’s contribution will be framed by considering further central critical realists, especially Alan Norrie and Douglas Porpora, and their engagement with the grey zone surrounding human rights violations.
