Hannah Arendt's Death Sentences

In her Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Hannah Arendt expresses her agreement with the final verdict of the Eichmann trial, namely, that Eichmann should be condemned to death, but she quarrels with the reasoning put forward at the trial and distrusted the theatricality of the trial itself.¹ She thinks the trial should have focused on the acts that he committed, acts that included the making of a genocidal policy. Like the legal scholar Yosal Rogat before her, she does not think that the history of antisemitism or even the specificity of antisemitism in Germany could be tried.² She objects to Eichmann's treatment as a scapegoat; she criticizes some of the ways that Israel used the trial to establish and legitimate its own legal authority and national aspirations. She thinks the trials failed to understand the man and his deeds. The man was either made to stand for all of Nazism and for every Nazi or he was considered the ultimate pathological individual. It seemed not to matter to the prosecutors that these two interpretations were basically in conflict. She thinks that the trial necessitated a critique of the idea of collective guilt but also a broader reflection on the historically specific challenges of moral responsibility under dictatorship. Indeed, she faults Eichmann for his failure to be critical of positive law, that is, his failure to take distance from the requirements that law and policy imposed on him; in other words, she faults him for his obedience, his lack of critical distance, or his failure to think. But more than this, she faults him as well for failing to realize that thinking implicates the subject in a sociality or plurality that cannot be divided or destroyed through genocidal aims. In her view, no thinking being can plot or commit genocide. Of course, thinking beings can have such thoughts, formulate and implement genocidal policy, as Eichmann clearly did, but such calculations cannot properly be called thinking, in her view. How, we might ask, does thinking implicate each "I" as part of a "we" such that to destroy some part of the plurality of human life is to destroy not only one's self, understood as linked essentially to that plurality, but to destroy the very conditions of thinking itself? Many questions abound: is thinking to be understood as a psychological process—indeed, as something that can be properly described—or is thinking in Arendt's sense always an exercise of judgment of some kind, and so implicated in a normative practice? If the "I" who thinks is part of a "we" and if the "I" who thinks is committed to sustaining that "we," how do we understand the relation between "I" and "we" and what specific implications does thinking imply for the norms that govern politics and, especially, the critical relation to positive law?

One rhetorical feature of her book on Eichmann is that she is, time and again, breaking out into quarrel with the man himself. For the most part, she reports on the trial and the man in the third person, but there are moments in which she addresses him directly, not in the trial but in her text. One such moment is when Eichmann claims that in implementing the final solution he was acting from obedience and that he had derived this particular moral precept from his reading of Kant.

We can imagine how doubly scandalous such a moment was for Arendt. It was surely bad enough that he formulated and executed orders for the final solution, but to say, as he did, that his whole life, including his obedience to Nazi authority, was lived according to Kantian precepts was too much. He invokes "duty" in an effort to explain his own version of Kantianism. Arendt writes, "This was outrageous, on the face of it, and also incomprehensible, since Kant's moral philosophy is so closely bound up with man's faculty of judgment, which rules out blind obedience" (136). Eichmann contradicts himself as he explains his Kantian commitments. On the one hand, he clarifies, "I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of...